Q's Compilations
Vol #133 – August to
September 2020
Happy Autumn everyone… I hope everyone is keeping well despite continued difficult times. The music for this mix has been finished for a couple of weeks but here I am with a couple of days left in the month to finish off the notes, so this will probably be brief.
01) Bloody Your Hands – Checked Out: Sunday Scaries was released on the 28th of August and it’s a perfect dose of 90s-alt/punk along the lines of Superchunk and hey, I hear a little Blink-182 in here too… “When will I figure this shit out?”
02) The Dirty Nil – Done With Drugs: I loved this Canadian trio’s album Master Volume from 2018 and they’ve been releasing a bunch of singles since, including this tune that came out in June. Two back-to-back pop-punk to open this mix, huh…
03) Garcia People’s – Feel So Great: This tune opens the band’s Natural Facts record that was released in March 2019, and they released another record last year (One Step Behind) and have a new one (Nightcap at Wits’ End) coming out in October, so they’re on quite a run! Anyway, I’d been meaning to buy this album for 18 months and was going to get the vinyl on one of the bandcamp Fridays until I found it for $9 and couldn’t pass it up.
04) Vuelveteloca – Calor: There weren’t any Chilean psyche bands on the last mix so we’re fixing that this time around with a hat-trick of acts, starting with Vuelveteloca, who just released their sixth record, Contra (which at six tracks and under 30 minutes could be a little more EP-esque truth be told), it’s as strong as anything the band have released, with their signature grooves to the fore.
05) The Cruel Visions – Nadie: Pablo Giadach of The Ganjas made a collection of demos between 2015-17 and decided to release them as The Cruel Visions, it should appeal to fans of treble-heavy 80s indie bands like The Sound or Modern English, it’s a really nice collection of tunes and I’d love BYM Records to press this to vinyl at some point…
06) Flower – Lost Horizon: Some bands have taken the current shit-show to make some new music for the first time in decades, thirty years in the case of New York cult-underground act Flower, who put out None Is (But Once Was) in July. It’s a surprising album in the sense that they’ve kind of reinvented themselves as a jangle-indie band, almost sounding like Teenage Fanclub at times. This song opens the record, with the latter-half of the song sounding more like their old selves.
07) Christelle Bofale – Origami Dreams: I went a little trigger happy on the first bandcamp Friday and bought things that I’d forgotten about until I sorted my purchases by date and went through them all again. I was pleasantly surprised to come back to this EP, Swim Team, by this Austin-based artist, the five tracks have a dreamy quality to them.
08) Thurston Moore – Siren: Thurston’s latest album, By the Fire, just came out and though I haven’t listened to it yet, which I need to rectify. It’s fair to say that this 12-minute tune has more than a hint of his old band.
09) Valium Aggelein – The Clouds Will Drop Ladders: At the start of the year I was trying to make an effort to buy less physical stuff, including vinyl, and I haven’t done a very good job of it. And I’m just going to copy Numero’s re-issue blurb to explain why I couldn’t help myself on this one: Just as Duster’s landmark debut album Stratosphere was making its first orbit, Clay Parton, Dove Amber, and Jason Albertini tracked a largely improvised companion capsule under their Valium Aggelein alter ego. An ode to ’70s Kosmische, Hier Kommt Der Schwartze Mond is a skeletal space nap for the prozac generation.
10) Special Cases – Ex Oasis: After Vuelveteloca and The Cruel Visions, we complete our Chilean hat-trick with Special Cases, who released their third album, Album Name, on the 21st of August. The band features former Follakzoid bassist Juan Pablo Rodriguez and should appeal to anyone who leans more to the repetitive space/krautrock of the earlier Follakzoid material.
11) Sweeping Promises – Hunger for a Way Out: This is the title-track to Sweeping Promises debut album. The Boston band have seemingly nailed danceable post-punk from the off. The ten-track album is finished in under thirty minutes but sometimes you have to leave them wanting more.
12) Three – Swann Street: I know my Dischord bands pretty well, but Three had skipped my attention for the most part (I did have a song of theirs on the 20 Years of Dischord boxset but it’s hard to be distinct on a 60-plus-boxset), but Numero did an “early emo 1985-1995” playlist recently which had some amazing stuff on, and this tune jumped out. I’ll have to get Dark Days Coming at some point.
13)
Futurebirds – Rodeo: A friend sent me this song a few weeks ago, first of all,
please send me songs to listen to for any reason! The funny thing about getting
this song was that I’d just watched an episode of House Hunters a couple of
days before, and singer/songwriter Thomas Johnson was the guy house hunting in
Athens, Georgia, so the timing was great. Turns out I haven’t been able to get
this song out of my head either. The band released a record this year called Teamwork,
though this tune appears on 2015’s Hotel Parties. “and goddamn how I
miss my friends”
14) Girl Friday – Public Bodies: LA-quartet Girl Friday released their debut, Androgynous Mary, in August on Sub Pop. The record is a bit over the place but that’s meant in a good way, songs
15) L.A. Witch – Fire Starter: Play With Fire, the trio’s second album, came out in August and while it still has that great desert-soaked-reverb that made the debut so great, there’s less reliance on it and a greater confidence in the songwriting.
16) Mark Lanegan – Ketamine: Mark Lanegan has been on a hot-streak lately, releasing albums in 2017, 18, 19 and this year’s Straight Songs of Sorrow. I could probably listen to him sing the Yellow Pages and find it deeply satisfying.
17)
Mikal Cronin – Guardian Well (Switched On Version): I got pretty excited when
Mikal Cronin announced he was releasing a synth-reworking of his last record, Seeker,
as a record-store-day release on vinyl called Switched On Seeker. I wish
more artists would do stuff like this, not that it can just be bashed out…
Keep being safe!
As Always, Peace and Love - Q
Spotify playlist:
