Bless, BlessDZ Tapes
I want to hang out in this band’s teenage wasteland. The buoyant, fist-raising riffs belong on a Raspberries album. The pouty vocals of Luke Reddick belong in a John Waters movie. The filtered, high-pitched background vox of bassist Danny Saperstein are too angelic for this world. This seven-inch makes me want to shotgun a Tecate and hop into a ball pit.
RiYL: Royal Trux, Howling Hex, the driving-around scenes in a Richard Linklater film.
A new release from the Etxe Records stable, on which vocalist Kris Kagei demonstrates how her wiry, gut-tugging vocals can mesmerize no matter what mode her band is in: sludge-y metal, grunge-y skater-rock throwbacks, noodly bedroom pop. When she outright wails, it’s with a purpose, intoning like Elizabeth Fraser over the droning, trumpet-flecked raga of “Dance in Bad Form” until it releases all of its tension into a crunchy, Balkan-pop coda.
RiYL: Any heavy band short of metal you enjoyed in the early ’90s. Singers like Chan Marshall, Scout Niblett, Patti Smith.
Sea and Sun is the lushest and most focused full-length from Teething Veils, the Etxe Records chamber-pop outfit of singer and multi-instrumentalist Greg Svitil, viola player Hannah Burris, and whichever string players, reedists, brass sections, and accordionists they can cram into the studio (in this case, Inner Ear) on a given day. These little songs—sepia-toned yet searching, eccentric yet melodically inclined—add up to something that feels like its own pocket universe, sometimes wistful, sometimes the kind of menacing only achieved via a late-career Tom Waits death rattle.
RiYL: Leonard Cohen (the dark later stuff), Tindersticks (the gorgeous early stuff), Conor Oberst’s vocals without Conor Oberst’s tics.
An ambient/experimental tape that feels plucked from David Lynch’s brain, both sonically and thematically. Scheible built his soundscape—lumbering and pretty, ominous and occasionally cathartic—around a cassette he found in a Northern Virginia thrift store of a women leaving messages for her romantic companion. “Good morning, my love, it’s Saturday morning at 11:25. The date is the 28th of October—no, darling, it’s the 28th of April. I’m not well.” Diane, I’m not sure even Twin Peaks achieved that level of weird pathos.
RiYL: Mysteries in the woods, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, Nadine, the gnawing curiosity lurking in mankind’s souls.