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Dead Bandit (Quindi, 2025)

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This third album from the duo of James Schimpl and Ellis Swan features some of their most sublime work to date, as it feels like the soundtrack to a desolate & dreamlike roadtrip across an America where it is eternally 3am. Stylistically, it sounds like Dead Bandit have distilled the best bits of cinematic post-rock, noir jazz, dub, shoegaze, and surf guitar into an elegantly bleary and oft-gorgeous series of late-night mood pieces. In keeping with that theme, the album’s arc mirrors that of an overnight drive, as the vibe gradually moves from haunted and impressionistic evocations of lonely highways and lurid neon lights towards the faint light of a bruised & beautiful sunrise.

Characteristically, I tend to find the darker pieces more alluring, but even the lesser pieces meander along in a pleasant fashion before unleashing some kind of wonderfully hallucinatory guitar trick or other inspired motif (i.e. the wounded, blearily howling solo in “Up To Your Waist” or the heaving & shuddering flanged ambiance of “Amer Picon”). The strongest piece is arguably “Glass,” as its slow, sensuous bass throb and vibrato-soaked guitar make it a lock as my go-to choice if I ever find myself DJing a strip club in Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, the bass-driven “Pink” features both a killer hollow-sounding guitar motif and a propulsive groove that feels like a depressive take on “Billie Jean.” On the more ambient side, the rippling, feedback-soaked dreamscape of “Milk” is yet another sublime stunner. If the album has a weakness, it is only that it sometimes feels more like a collection of great moments than a collection of great songs, but it is damn near impossible to imagine any room for improvement when Dead Bandit strike a perfect balance of dubby, bass-heavy grooves and shoegaze-damaged guitar wizardry. 

Listen here.

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Nový Svět, “DeGenerazione” (Quindi, 2024)

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The enigmatic, inscrutable, and defunct Austrian duo of Jürgen Weber and Lili Novy/Frl. Tost has long been a subject of fascination for me, as I have had a bunch of their albums for years and enjoyed them, yet knew virtually nothing about them at all. In fact, I still would find it incredibly challenging to even answer a simple question like “what does Nový Svět sound like?” as their elusive discography continually blurs the lines between industrial, folk, cabaret, improv, collage, and whatever other esoteric influences they decided to assimilate for a given album. Amusingly, they also had a quixotic tendency to record albums in languages other than their native German, as evidenced by this newly released album from the vaults, which was originally intended to complete a “Spanish trilogy” back in 2007. In characteristically contrarian and mystifying fashion, it was shelved for being “too Spanish” and a synth album (Todas Las Últimas Cosas) was released instead. If this were any other band, I would drive myself crazy wondering why they would allow such an mesmerizing and wonderfully weird album to languish unheard, but baffling choices were basically the norm for Nový Svět. In any case, this album rules and I am thrilled to finally get to hear it.

Aside from rudimentary and potentially dubious details like “Nový Svět were originally Vienna-based and formed in 1997,” most of my knowledge of the band’s history amusingly comes from a 1999 Russian interview in which the hapless interviewer kept asking an obviously disinterested Weber about how Futurism shaped the project’s vision. Given that Weber glibly dismissed a few prominent Futurists as embarrassing weirdos and dandies in the interview, it is probably safe to say that they were not a terribly big influence, but he did seem to know a hell of a lot about the European avant-garde despite attributing the band’s origins largely to alcohol and having a bunch of instruments lying around. Based on what little I know, it seems that the project’s shapeshifting vision was more likely shaped by an interest in traditional music and instrumentation colliding with a fondness for tape loops and samplers, but Nový Svět also seemed to be shaped quite a bit by their immediate surroundings and a host of non-musical influences (theater, Buddhism, hedonism, folklore, Cage, Pasolini, Esperanto, Art Brut, etc.)..

In keeping with that theme, this album probably felt too Spanish primarily because the duo had returned home to their native Vienna shortly after finishing the recordings. Unsurprisingly, very little else can be said about the album with any certainty, but DeGenerazione is purportedly centered around “dream and sleep and (waking up in) nightmares” and Weber is the sole person credited for the words and music. Aside from that, all I can say is that someone named Tristan handled the mixing and that the recordings surfaced online awhile back after being rescued from decaying masters. There are a couple of other names credited on the album (ZaZa and Sara), but it is impossible to say who was truly involved or what they did, as the album seems to be primarily crafted from the minimal palette of Weber’s voice, a bunch of samples, a couple guitars, an accordion, and some bells, chimes, and pieces of metal. To be sure, there are a decent number of “Spanish” touches strewn throughout the album, such as the looping minor key guitar motif in “Raja” or the mutant Latin groove in “Lo Que Tu 1,” but Weber’s Spanish-language vocals are the sole consistently Spanish thread on the album. Given that my own grasp of Spanish is embarrassing at best, I cannot throw stones at Weber’s own questionable mastery of the language, but he certainly manages to make it sound expressive, sultry, poetic, and beautiful anyway.

I am hesitant to describe these songs as sketchlike, as a lot of attention clearly went into how everything ultimately sounded, but a lot of songs are only a minute or two long and damn near every piece is a vamp centered upon a single rhythm or melodic hook. That suits the material quite beautifully and seems to fit Weber’s personality as well, as he doesn’t seem like someone who would be remotely interested in adhering to songcraft conventions. That said, he does seem to have an impressive intuition for crafting compelling and memorable songs from spontaneous inspirations and also has the good sense not to overstay his welcome or needlessly dilute a good idea with unnecessary clutter.

Notably, these recording sessions seemed to be an especially fertile period for those good ideas as well, as every single song is inspired in some way and my notes are packed with colorful phrases like “Jimmy Durante fronts The Electric Mayhem,” “someone is strangling a balloon animal,” and “a lysergic march of cartoon ducks” (those are all compliments, by the way). In general, however, the longer, more substantial pieces tend to feature many of the album’s strongest moments, such as the dramatic acoustic strumming in “Ciudacanta,” the manic insanity of “Rexistencia,” and the sensuous and surreal psychedelic crescendo of “Tierra.” That said, I loved a lot of the shorter pieces too, especially the sultry noir jazz of “Al Fuego” and the clattering, backwards weirdness of “Suenos, Anos, Despues.”

While I certainly expected to dig this album, I was still very pleasantly surprised by how thoroughly it exceeded my expectations. For one, I didn’t even know that this album existed until Quindi stepped up to finally give it a proper release. Secondly, it was extremely heartening to discover that there was someone out there interested in resurrecting such a unique and obscure project at all. In fact, the release of DeGenerazione was even accompanied by a second surprise, as Quindi also just released a new solo Jürgen Weber album under his Jota Solo guise. The biggest surprise of all, however, is that DeGenerazione is a legitimately excellent Nový Svět album, which is not usually the case for shelved albums from the vaults. For the curious, this is as good an entry point as any and has the added bonus of actually being readily available (digitally, at least). Notably, the vinyl editions for both DeGenerazione and Jota Solo’s Nessuno sold out faster than I could write about them, which hopefully bodes well for the prospect of future Nový Svět reissues. Hell, maybe the Nový Svět renaissance is already fully underway, as yet another album from this same era (Desde Infiernos De Flores) was quietly reissued on Brannten Schnüre’s Quirlschlängle imprint back in 2022. Sadly, I was not fast enough to grab that one, but I will be damned if I let the next one slip by me.

Listen here.

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Dead Bandit, “Memory Thirteen” (Quindi, 2024)

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This is the second album from the instrumental duo of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl and the first Dead Bandit album to follow Swan’s killer 2022 solo album 3am. Happily, Memory Thirteen returns to the hypnagogic “witching hour” vibes of 3am, but it also marks a very compelling creative leap forward into fresh stylistic terrain. To my ears, that blearily dreamlike terrain is best described as “what if Boduf Songs scored a gig as the house band at a strip club in the Donnie Darko universe?” Needless to say, that is a very tricky and hyper-specific niche to fill, yet Dead Bandit consistently find new ways to combine hushed and haunted late-night melancholy with neon-soaked sensuousness, deadpan cool, and dreampop shimmer.

The opening “Two Clocks” introduces most of the elements central to the duo’s current vision: understated guitar melodies, well-timed flickers of human warmth, submerged and distressed-sounding textures, and slow-motion, head-nodding beats. It is a fine way to start an album, but it feels more like a setting of the stage than a legitimate album highlight (even if it undergoes a gorgeously dreamlike transformation around the halfway point). The first unambiguous highlight follows soon after, however, as “Blackbird” feels like a window into a narcotic and carnivalesque cabaret of eerie melody, throbbing bass, lysergically smeared textures, and simmering, seething intensity.

Ironically, the following “Circus” feels considerably more like a dirge that lands somewhere between surf-damaged rockabilly twang and a suicide note, but a closer listen reveals a host of subtly psychotropic touches to savor. Those quiet glimpses of sublime beauty are a bit of a recurring theme throughout the album, as even the weaker songs tend to be elevated by at least one unexpected (and oft partially submerged) flash of inspiration. The stronger songs benefit from that tendency as well, as illustrated by the jangling guitar figure that appears around the halfway mark in “Blackbird” or the overlapping arpeggio motif that emerges from the feedback cloud in “Peel Me An Orange.”

That said, Swan and Schimpl save their most brilliant work for the album’s second half, as the one-two punch of “Somewhere to Wait” and “Revelstroke” is the heart of the album for me. On “Somewhere to Wait,” Dead Bandit sound like the best fucking surf band in Twin Peaks, as a shuffling and seductive groove provides the backdrop for a twangy, woozy guitar melody while quivering afterimages linger like a ghostly haze. “Revelstroke,” on the other hand, takes a very different path, as a warmly flickering dream-drone haze blossoms into absolute heaven once the acoustic guitars come in. I also love the less substantial album closer “Across the Road,” as it is probably the most achingly beautiful two-minute coda of shimmering and smoldering guitar noise that I could possibly hope for.

That said, there is probably a moment lurking within every single one of these pieces that I absolutely love and the difference between a great piece and a very good piece is merely that the great pieces extend that moment for their entire duration. Beyond that, I genuinely cannot praise the duo’s execution enough, as Swan and Schimpl seem to have almost supernaturally unerring intuitions for texture, nuance, and mood through Memory Thirteen‘s entirety and they manage to pull it off without a single wasted note or descent into morose navel-gazing. That said, there is certainly a depressive mood here that may be a bit oppressive for some, but depressive moods are the water that I swim in and Dead Bandit do a hell of a job of balancing those more brooding tendencies with a carnal, flesh-and-blood undercurrent and brief flashes of wounded beauty akin to a spectacular sunset of fiery orange mingled with bruised purple. This is an absolutely perfect late-night album for lovelorn and/or dissolute insomniacs.

Listen here.

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Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, “Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean” (Soft Abuse/Quindi, 2023)

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I have not encountered Dan Colussi’s work before this album, but the Turin-born artist is a bit of a lifer, as he has been steadily releasing music and touring for the last 20 years with various Canadian bands “of varying degrees of obscurity.” His solo project, Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, first surfaced back in 2020 with the acclaimed Desire cassette. This latest release is his second for Soft Abuse (and his first for Quindi) and it is something of a bold creative leap forward, as returning collaborator/producer Sandro Perri has steered the project into a more synthpop direction with the addition of synths, drum machines, and other electronic touches.

Notably, Colussi is an artist who makes no secret of his influences (Robert Wyatt, Lou Reed, Annette Peacock, etc.), but the main one definitely seems to be Leonard Cohen and this album amusingly mirrors Cohen’s own stylistic evolution from his acoustic beginnings into the kitschier, more jazz-influenced work of his later years. I cannot say that I was entirely thrilled by that move in Cohen’s case, but Cohen did not have Sandro Perri in his corner: the louche “yacht rock” charm of these arrangements is frequently the perfect counterbalance to Colussi’s wonderful literary melancholy.

The album opens with “Lightning On A Sunny Day,” which is the centerpiece and beating heart of the album for a whole host of reasons. For one, it is simply the most perfect iteration of Colussi’s current vision, which is notable because he has previously described his style as “poetic jazz rock.” Those three words generally do not inspire much enthusiasm in me (quite the opposite, actually), but “Lightning” is pure synthpop nirvana, as it features a charmingly bouncy groove, strong hooks, and some lovely vocal harmonies from guest Jessica Delisle. There is still some jazz and poetry to be found, however, as the spaces between verses are nicely filled with sax licks from Alex Hamlyn and Colussi remains a sneakily unconventional and moving lyricist. Notably, the album’s second major highlight is also “Lightning On A Sunny Day,” as the album closes with a slower, more sensuous alternate version crafted by Perri. The melodies and lyrics remain the same, but the transformation is otherwise quite a dramatic one, as Perri adds some very cool tweaks to the original arrangement (flutes, dreampop guitars, some subtly killer psych touches) and the slower pace places a greater emphasis on bittersweet poetry of Colussi’s words (“a wish made in a dream dissolves just as it arrives”). In short, both versions of that piece are sophisticated art-pop perfection.

The album’s other seven pieces depart from that winning formula with varying degrees of success. To my ears, the strongest of the remainder is probably “Misfit Streams,” which feels like a sexy slowed-down soul groove filtered through the kitsch of yacht rock (plenty of fretless bass and stilted funkiness). It is admittedly quite a challenge to articulate why it works, but Colussi and Perri work some counterintuitive miracles in their execution and the piece’s wonky charm prevails despite the moodier drama of the chorus and the surreal bleakness of lines like “The jet plane aches to be an explosion; circling the abyss, the satellite orbits the lips of a black hole’s kiss.” I was especially charmed by the dragging chug of the slow-motion disco groove in the chorus. That ’80s Cohen “lounge jazz on a Casio” vibe is revisited once more with “Clerk of Oblivion,” but the remaining songs explore some other curious and eccentric directions. To my ears, the most successful of those other veins is the one where it sounds like Colussi went back in time to borrow the softly swinging backing band from prime Van Morrison, such as “The Flowers” and “The Movie of Your Life” (flutes, strings, and electric piano abound).

Amusingly, my appreciation of this album has gone through several distinct stages over the last few weeks. My initial impression was that this was a generally enjoyable album bookended by two stone-cold hits, but the casually soulful charm of Colussi’s lyrics and deadpan, half-spoken singing has grown on me quite a bit since. Lately, I have reached a third phase in which I still only love a few songs, but find myself continually struck by great lines and cool arrangement touches that I had previously failed to fully appreciate (“The Movie of Your Life” is an especially big winner in that regard lately). Notably, Soft Abuse’s description of one song includes the phrase “breaking wave of dubby, decaying grandeur” and that unintentionally hits upon the crux of this album’s appeal for me: Colussi comes across like a great writer who abandoned fame and fortune to live alone in a van by the beach and now just spends his time drinking scotch and writing haikus about sunsets. Or perhaps like a Nick Drake that never died and instead flourished as a Michael McDonald-esque purveyor of blue-eyed soul. Either way, it is an unexpectedly wonderful niche when it works. Ultimately, this still feels like a bit of a transitional album to me, but it is a transition in the right direction and Colussi is one hell of a compelling guy when he finds the optimal backdrop for his songs.

Listen here.

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Ellis Swan, “3am” (Quindi, 2022)

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This Chicago-based singer-songwriter is a bit of an enigma to me, as details about his discography are quite slim. As far as I can tell, however, 3am is his second solo album, which is noteworthy given that it has been 8 long years since Swan’s similarly excellent debut (I’ll Be Around) surfaced. What he was up to during that hiatus is mostly unknown to me (aside from “drawing the night in around his private, unnerving vigil,” of course), but one thing I do know is that he formed a duo with James Schimpl called Dead Bandit that released their debut on Quindi last year (the same label behind this album). In any case, 3am is one hell of an aptly titled album, as it very much has the feel of a hushed, late-night confessional via four-track. The overall aesthetic calls to mind the “desolate outsider folk” blurring of an insomniac Elliott Smith or Zelienople with the homespun intimacy of early Iron and Wine, yet the pervasive mood of late night sadness is beautifully balanced with cool production tricks and shades of more lively and eclectic influences like Suicide and Charlie Megira.

The album’s description insightfully notes that Swan’s aesthetic plays “on the natural distortion and delirium which occurs at the farthest end of the night,” which is an excellent way to explain how this album differs dramatically from ostensibly similar artists exploring the “after late night television pain” vein such as Russian Tsarlag or Matt Christensen. Swan has some darkness to exorcise, to be sure (check out “Hospice”), but 3am feels more like a batch of poignant and hook-filled gems that were handed off to the night itself for a “late night delirium” production overhaul. Obviously, that is not what actually happened, which makes Swan a bit of a visionary production-wise: he uses the same roughly instrumentation as everyone else, but those instruments are inevitably veiled in hiss, buried deep in the mix, or distorted by their lo-fi recording process (Swan apparently “drags the music through layer upon layer of tape fuzz” as part of his process).

Significantly, he goes the opposite route with his vocals, as they sound close mic’d in a way where it feels like Swan is whispering directly into my ear. Rather than hiding himself in a fog of reverb and hiss, he expertly wields murk to weave a haunted and hallucinatory backdrop for his stark, emotionally direct songs. The album’s lead single “Puppeteers Tears” is an especially fine illustration of Swan’s inspired strain of ghostly Americana, as it feels like something from The Creek Drank the Cradle eerily enhanced with a haunting whistle loop, a buried organ motif, and a primitive drum machine groove.

As far as singles go, “Puppeteers Tears” was a strong choice, but the same could have been said for at least half of the remaining songs as well. The bleak subject matter of “Hospice” presumably excluded it from contention for the honor, but it is a similarly stellar piece, as Swan’s hushed and rhythmic half-sung/half-spoken vocals are backed by a smoldering groove featuring jangling jingle bells and a wobbly synth hook. Elsewhere, the darkly sensual “Swing” sounds like the best song Suicide never wrote, while the title piece sounds like a blearily hallucinatory minimal wave classic. “It Could Always Be Worse” is another skeletal would-be pop masterpiece, as it feels like an early synth pop hit that has been completely drained of blood. The remainder of the album is quite strong as well, if a little less substantial (there are several instrumentals and brief interludes). There is also an unexpectedly tender surprise in the form of “She’s My Sweet Summer Storm,” which somehow manages to feel like a sincere love song without dispelling the uneasy “fever dream” spell of the album.

In fact, just about everything Swan attempted turns out wonderfully on 3am, as he manages to effortlessly evoke the ghosts of roughly five different artists I love without ever creeping into derivative “pastiche” territory. Hopefully it will not take another eight years for Swan’s next solo album, but quietly releasing an album or two like 3am would be enough to make him a cult hero in a sane and just world. If this album had been released in 1983 (or even 1993), I suspect collectors would be happily dropping hundreds of dollars for an original copy. Sadly, Swan probably missed his window for achieving indie immortality, but 3am is a hell of a lot better than many highly sought-after bedroom masterpieces that came before it.

Listen here.