It’s kind of amazing that it took me so long to see Weird Al and his band in concert. The level of musicianship on display was jaw-dropping. I lost count of how many styles and genres they played, and Yankovic’s ability to remember so many complex lyrics was stunning.
“They play like their hair is on fire.” is how my friend described this set from Frankie and the Witch Fingers, which blew the minds of everyone at the LevitationFrance festival that night. People were absolutely bonkers by the end of it.
Easily the best sound quality I heard all year, especially in such a large open-air venue, this stop on Elton John’s farewell was humid, but still an amazing performance that cover classic hits and newer tracks. The set was impressive, as was John’s energy as he revved up the crowd the entire time.
Speaking of farewell tours, this one from Midnight Oil was a barn-burner. The place was packed, which only gave the band more energy to unleash in what would be their final Chicago performance. They raged harder against every machine than most bands half their age.
A powerful performance on all levels, plus those of us who bought VIP tickets got to attend their sound check and meet Failure before the main show. It was like two concerts in one from one of my favorite bands whose music can be life-changing. I don’t use that term lightly. Getting to tell them face-to-face how “Another Space Song” has become even more meaningful to me since my wife’s death was an honor I’ll never forget.
I’ve already started seeing bands this year (Dry Cleaning), so 2023 is off to a good start. Who are you excited to see this year?
Here we are at the top five albums I reviewed in 2022. It was a great year for music, and these are what stood out for me among all the good stuff out there.
As I’ve mentioned before, 2022 was a great year for electronic music, and this EP from Jacques Greene topped my list of that kind of music. It mixes house, drum and bass, ambient, and a bit of synth wave into a luscious brew.
This reissue of classic gospel funk tracks by The Staples Jr. Singers is stunning. The amount of groove and friskiness in these songs is almost overwhelming. The instrumentation and harmonizing are outstanding, and there’s enough soul for two churches.
This is the best post-punk album I heard all year. Everything on it is razor sharp: the wit, the guitar angles, the grooves, the drum sounds, and the slightly snarled tongue-in-cheek vocals.
The Black Angels‘ new album was a great return for them. It explores the stress of modern times through walls of distorted guitars, reverb-laden vocals, powerful drums, and mind-warping sound. The Black Angels have yet to put out a bad record, but this one somehow set the bar even higher for psych-bands to follow.
#1: A Place to Bury Strangers – See Through You
A Place to Bury Strangers came back with a new lineup and some of Oliver Ackermann‘s most revealing lyrics about the end of friendships, loneliness, grief, over-reliance on technology, and the overall anxiety everyone’s been feeling since 2019. Ackermann put it all out there and walloped us with more honesty and distortion that you can almost stand.
It’s time for the top ten live shows I saw in 2022. These shows were mind-bending in multiple ways.
#10: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Levitation Austin / Stubb’s – October 29th
This was the second of two sold-out shows from KGATLW at Stubb’s. The line to get into this show stretched for almost three blocks. The crowd was fired up and the prolific psych-rock Aussies played everything from thrash metal to electro. It’s amazing that they can keep so many different types of songs in their heads.
It’s always good to see APTBS. Their shows are like endurance workouts that push you into a runner’s high. This was the first time I saw them with the new lineup and they seemed even louder than they’d ever been. The Empty Bottle could barely contain them.
#8: Moon Duo – Levitation Austin / Feels So Good Records – October 30th
This was the loveliest show of the year, and the most hypnotizing. Playing in their “Lightship” projection box stage, Moon Duo would become lost in the light show that beamed from behind them, onto the screen around them, and into the audience. I’m not joking when I tell you it was trance-inducing. You had to be careful not to zone out and fall onto the floor.
I’ve never seen Osees put on a bad show, and this one, albeit a shorter set than normal, was another solid performance. It was the second of their four-night residency at Austin’s Hotel Vegas, and the crowd was the perfect size – not so big you couldn’t stretch your arms, and not so small that you felt bad for the band. The weather was also about perfect. All you needed was a light coat, a hat, and a drink and you were ready for the mosh pit.
This was the best set of the entire Levitation Austin festival last year. It was also the last show of Slift’s U.S. tour, and they unloaded everything they had left in the tank, and then borrowed from the audience’s tank, and then somehow still had enough to leave orbit. I was surprised Elysium was still standing afterwards. It spoiled us a bit for the rest of the weekend, because no one could top it.
Up next, the best five shows I saw last year, which include some legends.
Proving once again that “power trio” isn’t just a descriptive handle from the distant past, but a louder-than-God 21st Century reality, New York’s Skull Practitioners release their first full-length album, Negative Stars, for In the Red Records on January 20th. The album is the second release for Los Angeles-based In the Red by the trio — guitarist Jason Victor, bassist Kenneth Levine, and drummer Alex Baker, following the band’s acclaimed EP, Death Buy, issued in 2019.
Previously, Victor had established himself as the dazzling co-lead guitarist for Steve Wynn and the Miracle Three -when Wynn revived his ‘80s L.A. Paisley Underground consortium The Dream Syndicate in 2017, Victor took the guitar chair previously occupied by Karl Precoda and PaulCutler. Levine was playing in DBCR, a three-piece unit. “We wanted to go to a five-piece, and needed a drummer and another guitar player,” he says. “We put an ad out on Craigslist and met Jason and Alex that way. Alex was just two weeks into living in New York. We played together for a while, and then it just sort of dissolved. Jason, Alex, and I actually had more of a shared, common musical perspective, and the three of us decided, ‘Let’s stick together with just us three.’”
Skull Practitioners recorded a limited cassette-only debut, st1, which they self-released in 2014. The four-song collection, on which Baker was the lone band member to take a vocal, marked the start of a long hunt for the right voice. “We kept looking for a new singer, and that person never came,” says Victor. “None of us wanted to sing at all. After a while, we had been together as a three-piece for so long that we had our thing, and it became difficult for someone to fit into it. So we pulled a Genesis! The best thing about it is that now all three of us will sing, and that takes the pressure off just one of us.” Levine adds, “Whoever writes, sings. It’s their expression, so they should say what they have to say.”
On Negative Stars, Levine performs “Dedication” and “What Now,” and Victor sings “Exit Wounds,” “Leap,” “Intruder,” and “Ventilation.” The album’s expansive instrumental tracks are “Fire Drill” and Skull Practitioners’ longtime club highlight “Nelson D,” which first appeared on st1 in a live version. You can hear a multitude of influences coming off each other in Skull Practitioners’ music, ranging from TheGun Club to Sonic Youth to Joy Division, Black Flag, and beyond. Each player brings something uniquely his own to the mix.
“Black Flag was huge for me,” says Victor. “There is that element of improv, and of aggression, that I was attracted to in that band. With our band, there’s definitely an aggressive angle there, and absolutely an improvisational one. We’re all willing to give everyone the space for contributing ideas. This band really does function as a democracy, which is nice.” Levine adds, “All of us were into different things, and there’s some kind of overlap and we kind of influence each other, and there’s stuff that we turn each other on to.”
Everything on Negative Stars coheres so seamlessly, but like with so many others, its recording was hampered, and protracted, by the COVID-19 pandemic.“The main album session was a few years ago,” Baker says. “That was when we went into the studio for a couple of days with our friend, engineer Ted Young, and we tracked the bulk of the album there. We recorded the instrumental parts first, then started vocal tracking in January of 2021. It took us so long to decide that all the instruments were done at that point. The vocals were actually done at our practice space. We just set up the mics and did that ourselves.”
Levine adds, “The record was in mid-flight, and then the pandemic hit, so we were just sitting around for six months or a year, and we said, ‘Well, we may never finish this.’ So we wound up literally sitting in a room with masks on during most of the vocal tracking. If we’d waited to go into a real studio, it would have come out even later. Alex did all the engineering on that, and we’re very appreciative of all his engineering prowess.”
With their album finally complete and the pandemic lifting, Skull Practitioners have begun to take to the stage more regularly: they have opened shows for Lydia Lunch, Hammered Hulls, Live Skull, and In the Red label mates the Wolfmanhattan Project (Kid Congo Powers, Mick Collins, and Bob Bert). They plan to get on the road in the near future.
Says Levine, “I think the band is represented at its best in a live setting. That’s where we’re in our element. Playing live, we’re out for blood.” Victor adds, “With the live thing, we just want to destroy, in the nicest, most friendly way — we’re nice people. Someone said about us, ‘These guys look like a bunch of accountants.’ People don’t really know what to expect before they hear us. I think they’re all a little surprised, maybe, and we like having that element of surprise — ‘We’re gonna blow your minds a little.’”
Austin band Holy Water share the first single single today from their forthcoming self-titled debut album via Metal Injection. Hear and share “Waterest Him With Tears” HERE. (Direct Bandcamp)
Heavy music is experiencing a renaissance of innovation and creativity, while most of contemporary music genres have stagnated in recent years.
Case in point: Holy Water, a powerful new step merging heavy doom guitars, stoic experimentalists like Caspar Brötzmann Massaker and Khanate mixed with early 80s proto-industrial sounds like Psychic TV and The Leather Nun, metalgaze melodies and hints of Wovenhand’s gothic folk. Yes, that’s a wide range of styles, but it shows just how deftly Holy Water, the nom-de-tune of vocalist/guitarist Jasper den Hartigh cuts its own sonic space.
Jasper den Hartigh was previously a member of critically praised New Orleans post-punk band Heat Dust, which released a handful of recordings on The Flenser label and toured with Thou and The Body.
Holy Water’s 11-song eponymous album was self-recorded in 2021, at home and at den Hartigh’s Austin rehearsal space. Help on drums came from Andrew Stevens, guitar from Neckbolt’s Ben Krause, and vocals from den Hartigh’s wife, Sarah Contey.
“The album came after an extensive creativity exercise I did called Compost-Turn,” den Hartigh explains. “In which I put out 7 releases from friends and myself as physical bookmarks. When it came time to work on a self-titled solo project, this helped the songs appear rapidly. This album was my attempt at making a pop-record, while trusting my gut, using lessons learned over the course of my entire musical life. From being in punk bands, to playing slowcore, to ambient noise, and heavy metal. The songs all have references to Dutch fairy tales but also contain more personal writing.”
Holy Water will be available on cassette and digital on February 3rd, 2023, LP to follow in summer. Cassette preorders via Primal Architecture, digital via Bandcamp and LP via Time Release.
Failure, the Los Angeles trio of Ken Andrews, Greg Edwards and Kellii Scott, have announced their first ever streaming concert film: “We Are Hallucinations.”
The concert film features a set list that spans the band’s six albums and captures the magic of Failure’s live performance.
The one-time only event debuts on Dec. 15 at 12:00 pm pacific/3:00 pm eastern/8:00 pm UK/9:00 pm EU, and remains available through Dec.18. Viewers have three full days from the time of purchase to watch the film at any time, and as often, as they would like. Tickets as well as a limited-edition commemorative poster, newly released vinyl variants for each of the band’s six albums, as well as various merch items, are available now via linktr.ee/failureband.
“This film is comprised of performances from our Summer 2022 Wild Type Droid tour of North America,” explains Greg Edwards. “It’s crazy that we have never made a concert film before, but I think this will really stand as a definitive document of the dynamic between the three of us on stage and the connection we have with our fans.”
Last month, Weeping Icon returned after a nearly three year absence to announce their Ocelli EP (out this Friday on Fire Talk). The EP was announced with a single called “Pigs, Shit & Trash“, their first new music since the 2019 release of their thrilling self-titled debut, which generated considerable excitement, earning praise from outlets like FADER, Stereogum, FLOOD, BrooklynVegan and Revolver, who made comparison to Sonic Youth while describing the track as “so sick“.
Today, Weeping Icon are sharing a second track from the three track EP ahead of its Friday release, a single entitled “Two Ways.”
“‘Two Ways’ is about people who want to appear virtuous in their public facing personality, but live a contradictory shadow life in which they do whatever they please, no matter how harmful their actions are to others,” explains Sara Fantry. “It’s told through the voice of a man named Todd (yes, that’s his real name!) who I encountered a few years back. He used a harmful term towards a woman he was angry with, then accepted a long explanatory talk from me, appeared to reflect, enthusiastically told me he’d appreciated me taking the time to educate him and agreed to change his behavior, and then immediately found that same woman and started calling her harmful sexist names without a moment between. I was truly in shock at how comfortable he was with his personality being stratified into two layers – the outward-facing kind, modern man, looking to learn from the necessarily rapid changes in society – and the sinister, selfish sadist beneath who believes in his own entitlement to act with impunity.”
“The video we made (directed by Rafeal Joson & Mike Andretti, all editing and effects by MikeVideopunk) explores the stratified personality of the daytime talkshow host, who wants to appear kind, empathetic and sincere to his viewers, while goading his guests into salacious fights for his own profit, regardless of the personal and public damage done to those guests. With some humor in there, we hope to hold a conversation around the shadow of nefarious intent that lurks below so many supposedly ethical personalities in our world.”
To mark the release of the EP the band will be playing at Alphaville this Friday, November 18th. Tickets can be purchased here.
This year’s lineup for Levitation was stacked. Osees playing all four nights, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizardplaying twice, Slift coming in from France, The Jesus and Mary Chain coming in from the UK? Sign me up.
Day One (Thursday) started, as usual with a stop at Pelon’s for some Tex-Mex and then over to Stubb’s for the first three-band set we’d see over the weekend. Opening the festival for us were the post-punk trio Automatic, who had only improved since we’d seen them at Levitation France four months earlier. They also had some of the best sound mixing of the entire weekend.
Automatic
A lot of people loved Automatic’s set. We saw plenty of people carrying new Automatic tote bags and wearing new band shirts afterwards. Up next was Detroit’s Protomartyr delivering a powerful set of urgent post-punk. Afterwards, they announced a surprise show at the 13th Floor bar down the street the following night.
Protomartyr
The Stubb’s show ended with shoegaze giants The Jesus and Mary Chain, who, despite having problems with a distortion pedal, put on a good set of classics and new material to a loving crowd who thought they sounded great without the faulty pedal.
The Jesus and Mary Chain
That didn’t end our night, however. We walked over to Elysium for the sold-out show featuring Slift – the cosmic metal band from Toulouse, France. Anticipation was high for the set, and they did not disappoint. The raw power coming from them in the small venue was almost overpowering at some points. They were drenched with sweat by the end of the first song, as was most of the audience. It was the end of their U.S. tour and their first time in Austin, so they poured out all the gas in the tank they had left for the crowd. Theirs was the best set of the night.
Slift
It was a great way to open what would be a fun four days. Up next would be a return to Hotel Vegas for the first time in years, the sexiest set of the weekend, and a band I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see live.
Buffalo Daughter‘s 2021 album, We Are the Times, is a good time capsule of what was happening in the band’s lives, and all our lives, in the middle of a pandemic. The band declared that we had had adapt to the times we were in or be stuck in them forever.
“Music is the vitamin to live under. Too much pressure in quarantine,” they say at the beginning of the album on “Music.” Synth-bloops and heavy electro-bass pep us up for the times to come. In fact, “Times” is the next track, and it’s bumping dance track about adapting to circumstances beyond your control – so why worry about them? They state the obvious on “Global Warming Kills Us All,” and they state it with robotic voices, possibly to emulate our eventual A.I. overlords that take over the planet to save it from us.
“Life is long, life is short. I’m not sure what time we’re in. Should I stay, or should I go?” Whatever you do, “Don’t Punk Out,” they warn on this cool post-punk jam with sharp guitars and bright synths. “Loop” lands somewhere between electro and industrial. “ET (Densha)” brings in dubstep bass, but plays it slow to create a sense of dread and danger. On “Jazz,” they encourage us to open our hearts and minds in these weird times. People might need us as much as we need them. The album ends with the quirky “Everything Valley,” which encourages us to hold onto hope
It’s another good album from Buffalo Daughter that, like a lot of their stuff, is hard to classify, but that’s okay. It’s meant to lift your spirits a bit, so let it.
Written over the course of two years of turmoil, during which, among other things, she experienced the deaths of her father and of a friend, and the end of a relationship, Ruth Radelet‘s The Other Side EP has her emerging from shadows cast by bright southern California suns and the weight of grief to step forward into whatever the next moment will bring.
“Stranger” is a love letter / confession to Los Angeles, and how, according to Radelet’s liner notes, “…[it’s] about the feeling of always being on the outside looking in, of the city never fully opening its doors for me.” It brings to mind lonely midnight drives through brightly lit places jammed with people that still feel empty and hollow. Radelet’s lovely, haunting voice is perfect for a track like this, as are the soft, melancholy string instruments throughout it.
“Sometimes” is about the death of Radelet’s friend, and how she wishes she could go back in time, have a proper send-off for her or just wish the day away altogether. I’ve been there, Ms. Radelet. I’m still there in some ways. I hope this song doesn’t affect you, as that probably means you haven’t yet experienced a serious loss, but you’ll come back to this song when you need it.
“Is it easy to start over?” Radelet asks on “Crimes” – a song about how achieving success sometimes causes you to forget who you were before you were a success – and how sometimes that life was better and easier. It shimmers with synths and shoegaze guitar around Radelet’s hypnotizing vocals.
“Be Careful” is a song about treading carefully when it comes to finding new love after loss. The electro-percussion and bass in it almost sound backwards, like the rhythms propelling the song forward are taking two steps forward and one step back…much like Radelet in her lyrics (“I’m afraid of your touch. I might need you too much. What will it cost? Have I already lost?”).
The closer, “Youth,” is about Radelet looking back on her life after she meets a lover younger than her. She’s envious over how life hasn’t yet jaded him, and wonders about that time in her life. This is a bit difficult for me to fathom, as Radelet seems ageless in every photo I’ve seen of her or when I saw her live with her former band, The Chromatics. She’s susceptible to the same nostalgia and regret as all of us are, however, and her vocals are a soft ode to simpler times.
It’s a lovely EP from one of the loveliest voices in music for the last couple decades. It sticks with you after it’s done and one that you’ll float back to whenever you need it.
