Welcome back to Genrefvckery from Anachronist Panic! After a longer break than hoped, once again — I’ve wound up with two book projects in various stages happening at once, which means, alas, music journalism takes a back seat. Luckily I’ve been keeping my lists even if I haven’t been able to publish them.
Without any further ado, let’s get back into it!
1. Mateo Chiarella Viale – Luna Mantra
My background as a musician — such as it is, since I haven’t played in years — is in folk music. Folk music has a bit of a curious curse on it in that a lot of recorded folk never seems to be as good as the real stuff. Some of that is, I’m sure, listener’s bias; but it means that the richness of Viale’s work is a wonderful change from thin, wispy recordings that don’t reach the heights of traditional live music.
A decent portion of that is attributable to advances in recording technology and the production on the album itself. But plenty of it is Viale’s voice and playing itself. Very few people have charisma that translates to a recording so fluidly, and I’m actually shocked not to be able to find much on the English internet about him. In Peru, however, Mateo Chiarella Viale has quite the career both as a musician and musicologist, and as a theatre director. So it’s just luck that I happened to stumble over his work over on the Anglophone side of things. (Seriously, he’s got a voice like velvet. Gorgeous.)
2. Front Flip – Some Years For You, Some Years For Me
There’s a very particular style to indie/lo-fi garage rock that can be hit-or-miss for me; it’s hard to put my finger on, but it’s a willingness to be sincere and experimental, an awareness that you aren’t bringing slick production values or refined and trained vocals and that’s part of the appeal. Front Flip, in that respect, feels straight out of the late 90s/early 2000s with their lyrics about heartbreak and hurt, plaintive vocals that would fit in well on a Broken Social Scene release, and guitars that lean into the buzz of their own amps. It’s a lovely debut EP from a quartet of fresh musicians (based in St. Louis, Missouri), very in debt to Cavetown and BSS without completely cribbing from either. That said, I look forward to seeing them develop a little further in their own direction.
3. deux furieuses – Human Animals EP
Deux Furieuses are a girl punk duo playing guitar and drums and based out of London, and truthfully, I don’t know if I needed to look up any of that — Human Animals is such a distinctively Britpunk EP, straight out of the Batcave only with modern production values. (Somewhere, Siouxsie is crying with pride.) The throughline from ASF and the Banshees to these two is clear and evident, but that’s not to say that they’re only a throwback sound either. There’s a driving quality to the guitar/drum combo that shows off the influence of 90s riotgrrl and 00s indie rock as well. Out of the three songs, my favorite is definitely End of An Era; the vocals are so powerful, floating up above the driving instrumentals, that I ended up listening to this one a few times on repeat.
4. Sunshine and Cyanide by Garretson and Gorodetsky
I have a soft spot for music that aspires to weirdness rather than coming by it simply as a byproduct, and anything labeled as a cross between arthouse punk and jazz is already gonna be up my alley. Even so, this album took me a few tries to get into. Sax, harmonica, syncopated bass and guitar all bounce of what sounds like the inside of a very small studio, creating a strangely claustrophobic feeling only made stronger by the carefully calculated harmonies and dissonance of Garretson & Gorodetsky’s vocals. It takes a lot of work to balance atonal sounds without them becoming unbearable, especially outside of harsh noise where volume and saturation are filling in a lot of the space; but G&G walks a tightrope with them. (This exercise in contrasts is visible in the lyrics of their first song “Blue Hibiscus”. “Sunshine and cyanide/on my windowpane/Blue Hibiscus growing/In the summer snow.”) On top of it is the fact that the riffs are all fairly laid-back and low tempo, but it’s that very fact that makes them kind of anxiety-inducing as well. It’s all brought together by the strange and sweet vocals of Weba Garretson, who puts an incredible sense of urgency into lyrics that are sometimes serious and sometimes quirky.
5. The Recreant – The Code is V… Outlive The Code
Last year, Transgressive released the incredible track ‘Remember Us To Death‘, which introduced me to them (if it looks familiar, I covered it in my 2025 roundup post!). The Recreant is a side project of Transgressive’s lead guitarist Alicia Cordisco, teaming up with fellow thrasher Ruby Rockatansky, producing this incredible, furious, trans rage album. I fucking love seeing trans girls make metal music, especially as a ‘fuck you’ to the idea of being safe and acceptable; and of course, the only place you’ll find it is Bandcamp. Nor does The Recreant pull any punches. For those who don’t understand the title of the album, ‘V-Coding’ is a reference to the prison rape of trans women; so right from the beginning, Cordisco and Rockatansky know exactly what they’re about.
The album also kicks off in fine form. I don’t know exactly where the opening clip comes from, only that I’ve seen it in GIF and meme form before. “The officer points to my floorboard on the driver’s side and says, That’s crystal methamphetamine right there, I said, that’s glaze from a Krispy Kreme glaze donut I ate two days ago, and I haven’t vacuumed the car yet!” It leads directly into some of the heaviest thrash I’ve heard in a while, reveling in a thick guitar soundscape for a while before the vocals of ‘Voice of Dissent’ kick in.
The one downside of this album for me is purely a personal thing — I like thrash metal a lot but I can find it repetitive at times, and I wish I had the genre taste required to appreciate these songs a bit more as individual pieces. That said, I thoroughly applaud Cordisco and Rockatansky for making their phenomenal lyrics available directly on Bandcamp (a bar so few people actually pass…) which means that I can appreciate every song in its parts even when one or another doesn’t do it for me in the whole.
The standout songs for me are, of course, the opener ‘Voice of Dissent’, and ‘V. Coded’ which gives us the title of the album through its brutal lyrics. Runner-up is the penultimate track ‘G.I.R.L.’ which shows some more of Rockatansky’s range outside of pure guttural — I’m a man who loves contrasts. This is a fantastic and timely album, and a must-have for thrash/death lovers.
6. Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Laughter in Summer
We’ve had some angry thrash metal from trans girls; now for something from the other side of the spectrum but still steeped in trans history. I ran across this album purely by accident — which is the case for many of my discoveries, but all the more touching for this one. I played a track or two and fell in love, and only then read more about it and found out that Beverly Glenn-Copeland is a name I should know. An important voice in Canadian Black queer music, Glenn-Copeland came out as trans in the 90s, by way of informing people that he’d been living as a man privately for decades. He and his wife Elizabeth have been making folk music together since the 2007, and it’s that which makes this record so touching — for while I’m new to their partnership, this record is a celebration of their life together. in 2024, Beverly Glenn-Copeland was diagnosed with dementia, and this album is their last together, a love letter to each other in the sunset of their life.
Yeah, I’m really emotional about it. Even if the music isn’t your style, it’s a tremendous story, and if you like folk, gospel or blues, you’re bound to enjoy at least one song on here — it’s music with the calm and measured spirit of Quaker spirituals even with no explicit religious component, gorgeous piano backing, and harmonized vocals in the driver’s seat all the way. (Interesting note on the religious influence: Glenn-Copeland apparently has been Buddhist for 50 years. I can see the underpinnings of it lyrically, but maybe that’s just me.)
Instrumental concept albums are always fascinating to me — I can’t say whether they’re hit-or-miss, because they’re always big leaps of faith in the first place. They don’t function without their liner notes, and one has to work in emotion more than detail; enough has to be left in the hands of your listener’s imagination to make it worth it. Whether Kasriel has risen to the challenge is something I’ll have to answer in full once I’ve listened to the whole saga — for Reverie is the third chapter (of four so far) in the story of a fallen angel traveling back into the light. However, Reverie is a very important chapter in it; in that Kasriel, an angel doomed to solitude for centuries before undertaking this journey, has finally entered into a different world, one of peace and rest. In doing so, he’s revisiting cherished, precious memories of the one he loved a long time ago. That’s all you really need to know to appreciate the music at work here.
The way Kasriel is crafting these emotions — well, in short, it’s incredible. Dungeon synth is a genre I’ve touched on before, as is neoclassical. Rarely do these two really fuse. “Medievalcore” is its own thing once again — and yet, Reverie is tagged as, I kid you not, “medieval neoclassical darkwave” and it’s earned every single one of those monikers. (I wonder if there’s anything else in that tag.) It’s more structured than ambient music generally tends to be, but is still aimed at creating a soundscape for you to sink into — and the melodies being used drift in and out of the atmosphere like overheard minstrels or half-remembered tunes. It’s a little like what I imagine the soundtrack to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene would be.
This is excellent work, and I’m definitely going to be listening to the whole saga at some point. It’s also nice to listen to instrumental music that knows exactly what it is and has no aspirations to include lyrics — in fact it’d feel silly if there were any lyrics. On top of all of this, Kasriel (the artist, not the angel, although perhaps they’re one and the same) is based in Argentina — so they’re working from further afield than many musicians you’ll naturally come across.
I may be a metalhead/punk, but dreampop does something to me. (Maybe it’s just cope. Maybe I’m just a dreampop guy at heart.) Jokes aside, I think the first track of Cholly’s Octopode would grab the attention of a lot of people. ‘Fungus’ is a spacetrip of a song with no lyrics supplied (there are only lyrics given for one song, actually, which makes me think it’s on purpose) which feels a little like floating on a waterbed. I keep meaning to listen to this album while high — I feel like it’ll be amazing.
Cholly is another new artist for me (they usually are) so I’m quite pleased to find out she’s been around for a while — her initial singles were back in 2020, so this isn’t any sort of fluke but an artist who’s been perfecting her craft for a while. If I have any complaints about this album, they’re incredibly autistic-brained ones… mostly that ‘Octopode’, meaning ‘eight-legged’, only has five songs. Come on, Cholly!
Another installment of anarcho-punk, these Texas punks have a lot to say and they’re stuffing as much as possible into their lyrics. I say that as a good thing. I particularly enjoy the contrast of their half-spoken vocals against their incredibly engaging melodic instrumentals, especially in first track ‘The Shooter’, but the instrumentals on all three tracks are incredible fun. When you can identify a song by the first few bars, then you know it’s something special.
That said, I have a complaint to lodge, and it’s my usual one with some extra sprinkles. If several places are waxing lyrical about the lyrics of a song, it’d be nice if I could read them! “The Shooter” is about the myth of the ‘good guy with a gun’, which I have to take on faith because the lyrics are apparently not available anywhere. It’s a ripping good song. I just wish I could read the lyrics! Still, the title of “Why Are These Men Still Alive?” isn’t exactly subtle.
10. On Solitude – Hiroshi Ebina
Another ambient addition to the list, Ebina is an ambient composer who also photographs minimalist landscapes — which doesn’t surprise me after listening to On Solitude a few times. Strangely for ambient, there are two songs with vocals on this album. Most ambient music is purely instrumental, but ‘The Village in the Sky’ features Hinako Omori with ethereal, dreamlike vocals opening up the album. (Hinako Omori lists The Knife as an influence. I’m not shocked.) From there, the album moves into minimalist ambient music that draws clear influence from Ebina’s other other occupation as a performer of Japanese ritual music. Surprisingly, all the songs on this album are short, another departure from ambient as a genre; some ambient songs can be hours long, but it shows a constraint I appreciate. The whole album is less than an hour long, showing some dreampop sensibilities reining in what might otherwise be expansive ambitions. ‘How To Belong To Yourself’ veers into house/techno territory, although not far, and the last track ‘A Silent Room’ brings back vocals, this time from marucoporoporo.
One thing I really enjoy about this album is that while I wouldn’t say it’s for children — that invariably feels like an insult when it comes to music, unless you’re Raffi — it’s the kind of music I’d feel comfortable putting on for kids just as much as adults. It’s not because of any sense of it being ‘appropriate’ or anything so milquetoast. I just know several children, especially those dealing with emotions they don’t have the words to express yet, who would really enjoy how this album makes them feel. (I was also, admittedly, a weird kid; but weird kids deserve things.)
That’s all for now! I’m finally working on catching up on these, so keep your eyes peeled for… looks at date. Uh, March, April and May. Oops. Look, a lot’s been happening. The fall of democracy makes procrastination really easy.
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