Hello everyone! This is *checks calendar* a rather stunning six months late. At this point I’m just rolling with it — but the nice thing is that these are songs that have now long slipped off the discovery queue for Bandcamp or Spotify. So I’m actually quite happy to bring them to people a few months later. (Is that an excuse? Maybe. Am I also right? Could be!)
I am one song sort this time round, but I’m trying to worry less about that sort of thing. We’re already in the worst timeline. What’s doing nine instead of ten songs going to do?
- We Lost The Sea — A Dance With Death
Post-rock instrumental outfit We Lost The Sea hail from Sydney, Australia and have had a number of hits, most notably the album Departure Songs; they are, however, new to me and this particular song has embedded itself into my brain with remarkable persistence. This is one of two singles from album A Single Flower, which released July 2nd!
The song is a powerful 10 minutes and 22 seconds. If you’re a post-rock aficionado, that’s only slightly on the long end of standard (looking at you, Godspeed) but if you’re wandering in from the R&B or punk world, you might be a little intimidated by that — but even for a post-rock song this is a shockingly dynamic piece. It’s dark, moody, but above all driving — it’s never standing too still in one place, making less a wall of sound and more a river.
Check out the full album on Bandcamp here!
2. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Deadstick
This is another band that I think I should have run into before now; they’re apparently quite well known in alt circles, but I guess the question is which alt circles! Anyway, this is the most cheerful up-tempo song about a plane crash I’ve ever heard and part of me is clutching my pearls a little and the rest of me is having too much of a good time to worry. Deadstick was one of the early-release singles from the Phantom Island album which released earlier this month, and while I haven’t had the chance to listen to the rest of the album, this is a hell of a single.
As for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, they’re — another Australian band? Good god, what are y’all doing to your musicians over there? Australia seems to be the home of modern independent Alt Rock in all of its shapes and I’m jealous, frankly. (Except I’m trans and being trans in Australia is… well, it’s not great anywhere right now, but I’m keeping my ass in Canada.) These guys have been around since 2010, which is already a considerable pedigree for a band with this high energy, but they have — I’m fucking sorry, what? 28 albums? Also they have something called the Gizzverse for their concept albums and I’ll be right back y’all I need to listen to all of these albums in order and be incredibly autistic about it now.
The Phantom Island album can be enjoyed over here!
3. Powerplant – Chasing Cars
Here’s some good old crunchy lo-fi punk on the other end of the spectrum — Powerplant is from the UK, and this song sounds like it’s straight out of the 80s Batcave. The lyrics are evocative of the era too, particularly “I wanted love / Found my way to hell / At the depth of the wishing well” which is sticking in my brain like a hypodermic needle.
Powerplant started off as a solo project by Theo Zhykharyev (vocals), but he’s now joined by Cam Pickering (synth), Karim Newble (bass), and Lloyd Clipston (drums). Check out their work here!
4. Messa – Void Meridian
Not gonna lie — this whole damn album is fucking gold. Picking one track out of this was a little like pulling teeth, but I’m going with the opening track which has such an immediately captivating intro, and gorgeous vocals that remind me of Anneke van Giersbergen (The Gathering) or Cristina Scabbia (Lacuna Coil). Sara Bianchin is the vocalist of Messa, and her haunting voice is absolutely perfect for the kind of ambient doom metal that Messa is creating. This song (and album, really) also has pitch-perfect production and instrumentation. So many otherwise good metal albums are held back by poor mixing or the unfortunate barriers of good equipment just being expensive, but it’s nice to be able to just… sink into a song.
Messa has been around since 2014, and the rest of the band includes guitarist Alberto Piccolo, bassist Marco Zanin, and drummer Rocco Toald. This is their fourth album, and definitely takes cues from Black Sabbath and later symphonic/gothic metal greats, but it’s all their own. Give ‘Void Meridian’ a listen if you’re into this type of music — or even if you’re not! It’s not a screaming type of song if that puts you off, and you may just be surprised.
Listen to The Spin on Bandcamp here!
5. Deerhoof – Sparrow Sparrow
…Has Deerhoof really been around for over 30 years? The fuck? I remember first running into Deerhoof as a mention in Questionable Content, which is where I first got into indie music/culture. I have a lot of fond memories of poring through the comic archives for mentions of bands I’d never heard of before, and diving into their discographies with an eagerness I hadn’t felt for music before. With that in mind, this release is particularly exciting, because Deerhoof is fucking weird and always has been. A quartet of US and Japanese musicians, Bandcamp describes their music better than I possibly could as “some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor.”
Sparrow Sparrow also feels like a call-back to the first song I ever heard from them, the equally-bizarre Panda Panda (which is from 2003. God. I’m old. Leave me alone.) Sparrow Sparrow has more lyrics, though, and it’s just as much a musing on the state of the environment and the creatures that live on the earth with us as anything else, instead of the Dadaist repetition of the latter song. It takes a particular type of musical ear to appreciate Deerhoof, but if you have it, you’ll fuckin love this song.
Listen to Noble and Godlike In Ruin on Bandcamp here!
6. Smoky Song – Nezhiletz
Back to the darker end of things, here’s a fantastic dark-ambient piece from Nezhiletz, alter ego of musician Igor Zhukov from Sleetgrout. A little bit witch-house, a little bit lo-fi, definitely perfect for Hallowe’en season. (I definitely didn’t fall out of doing my round-ups again. Shhh. It’s still May. Don’t worry about it.)
Zhukov is surprisingly hard to find information on — although maybe not that surprising given the grassroots nature of the project. He’s from Eastern Europe, and uses Cyrillic as a variation of his handle (НЕЖИЛЕЦ) but beyond that, his Instagram (found here) is a lot of excellently cryptic posts about releases. I’m into it, honestly — and as much as I like going and looking for information about artists, I have full respect for those who play it close to the chest, especially for a project as odd and uncanny as this one.
Nezhiletz’s work is released through skyQode — check it out here! (Especially since the only Youtube version is that teaser — come listen to the full version!)
7. Ash Soan and Ariel Posen – GOTTA START SOMEWHERE
I love blues music. The blues are the framework for so many of our modern genres — everything from rock to punk to metal, to the R&B that’s changed the face of pop music. (There’s a whole other conversation to have, of course, about the gentrification of blues by white musicians — but that’s a complicated, macro issue.)
Nevertheless, this track from drummer Ash Soan and guitarist Ariel Posen is blues with the distortion alllll the way up where it should be. We’re talking grimy, funky, leave-your-head-buzzing drive and freestyling so smooth that one track blends beautifully into the next while still having very distinct rhythms and feelings. I’ve chosen GOTTA START SOMEWHERE as my favourite, but this whole album is amazing to listen to. Every track is short, and comes off as a recorded jam session in the best way — I’m sitting on my bed grooving to it and I woke up this morning exhausted.
Listen to the whole album here!
8. Fotoform – Grief Is A Garden
Shoegaze is one of those genres I didn’t realize I liked until someone explained it to me and I realized I listened to a lot of it. (It’s probably a candidate for one of the most non-indicative genre labels ever; I thought it was Dashboard Confessional bashful emo-boy stuff.) Anyway, after getting into shoegaze through Tiny Deaths and Deserta, I’ve been aching for some more, and Fotoform’s blend of shoegaze and Cocteau-Twins-style dream-pop is absolutely hitting the mark. “Grief is a Garden” is a song where I don’t even want to look up the lyrics — the emotion of the track carries me along anyway, sad and wistful and a little bit lonely even amongst all of its harmonic noise.
Of course, I did look them up, because I’m running a column here, not a vibe sesh. (Rich from the man who runs away from deadlines like he’s Deadpool on April Fool’s.) They’re attached to the single release of Grief Is A Garden, rather than the album, and they’re just as gorgeous as the music would have you believe. “Waves keep crashing/Unforeseen/Losing someone/Is never what it seems/I’ve been searching/All my life/Grief is a garden/Forever in bloom/Deep inside” Listen, I’m a sucker for songs about grief, so I’m gonna be chewing on these like mourning-flavoured bubblegum for a while.
Fotoform is based in Seattle, Washington, and is made up of Kim House (vocals, bass, synth, guitar) and Geoff Cox (guitar). Listen to the whole album here!
9. Ministry – Just Like You (Squirrelly Version)
Okay, so I’m breaking some of my own rules here. A bunch of them, actually. Usually, Ministry would be too big a name for me to put on here, and a remaster generally wouldn’t merit an entry. I rarely even do remixes!
However.
It’s my column. I can be biased. And more seriously – there are remasters, and then there are remasters. It feels like every band and their dog has been remastering or rerecording 20th and 30th anniversary versions lately, and it’s very nice and all, but especially as someone with hearing aids I can rarely hear a huge difference. (And of course there’s the odd remaster that absolutely destroys the quality.) Not so with Ministry. The original Twitch album, released 1986, came in the early days of synth and industrial music. The sounds are excellent, but a bit distant; the effect is almost as if looking through glass. Here’s the original “Just Like You” for contrast. It’s an incredibly influential album, even if unrecognized by some in the industrial scene — but it does show its age. And it’s incredible how much I didn’t even notice until Ministry, that little fucker, released the “Squirrelly Version”. (Look, I don’t know. Ask him. He probably won’t give you a straight answer.)
And HOLY SHIT. It’s like listening to a new song, even though everything is still where it’s supposed to be. It’s the difference between watching Terminator and getting run over by one of Skynet’s bulldozers. It’s excellent, it’s crisp, and as one of those Ministry fanboys who likes Twitch more than anything else, it’s like a present just for me! So, obviously, I’m going to make everybody else listen to it. What else is having a blog for?
That’s all for now, folks! If you want to get my columns early and help put some money in my pocket, I have a SubscribeStar over here. (It’s like Patreon, but less scummy.) You can also check me out on Bluesky at fivers_dream, Instagram under elliott_dunstan, or just chilling at a drag bar near you. (That’s a lie. I have zero chill.)
Elliott Dunstan 