It’s summertime, and all across the world people are getting out into the sun, spending quality time with the warm weather brought by insurgent climate catastrophe. Which means it’s also time for us here at the Indieheads Podcast to (very belatedly) celebrate our favorite albums from the last few months, with some usual wildcards sprinkled around!
WILDCARD: The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen (1993)
When the Afghan Whigs signed to Elektra Records in 1992 after a much-publicized bidding war, it was reported that one of the clauses in their new contract was that Elektra would foot the bill for a feature film written and directed by Whigs frontman Greg Dulli, who was an amateur filmmaker in his youth. The movie never materialized, but Dulli would soon produce a cinematic masterpiece in a different medium altogether. Gentlemen, “shot on location” at Ardent Studios in Memphis, was the band’s major label debut; more eyes and ears would be on them than ever before. With that in mind, Dulli’s cry for “your attention, please” on the album’s hellacious title track feels almost like a wink to the crowd. But Gentlemen’s visceral, widescreen treatment of a toxic relationship doesn’t need any extra bells or whistles. Between the razor-sharp band (Steven Earle’s indispensable drumming makes him first among these equals; this would unfortunately be his last album with the group) and Dulli’s wracked howl, the Whigs become the center of the universe for the next 50 minutes every time you hit play. Dulli drew on a mélange of influences while writing Gentlemen — the Jackson 5, the Twin Peaks theme song, Leo Austell, and, above all, Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart — and channeled all of it into his persona on this record, a self-pitying, manipulative human wasteland with “a dick for a brain,” constantly justifying and contradicting every decision he makes. And he embodies him with an unnerving amount of conviction: when he sings “I’m really slobbering now” on “Fountain and Fairfax,” you can practically see the drool dripping from his lips.
More of a song cycle than a proper concept album, Gentlemen follows our narrator through a very dark night of the soul as his relationship dangles by a thread. He dodges uncomfortable conversations, deceives his partner and himself, staggers around looking for sex, relapses into substance abuse, tries to piece the mess together. “I think I’m scared of girls, maybe,” he says on “What Jail Is Like,” sounding perilously close to a breakthrough, before tacking on: “But I’m not afraid of you.” It’s harrowing stuff, and when Dulli cedes the mic to Marcy Mays, it becomes almost too much to bear. Her astonishing reading of “My Curse,” a song that Dulli felt was too personal for him to sing, throws the hypermasculine posturing and self-loathing of everything that came before into sharp, devastating relief. “There’s blood on my teeth when I bite my tongue to speak,” she sings, walking a narrow line between incrimination and need, desire and revulsion, and providing a necessary counterpoint to Dulli’s black-hearted perspective. That “My Curse” is chased by a pair of songs — the resigned “Now You Know” and a wounded cover of Tyrone Davis’s “I Keep Coming Back” — that bring the album right back to where it began casts a bleak pallor on what we just heard: the events of Gentlemen have happened before, and by all available evidence, they’ll happen again. Almost thirty years removed from its release, you can hear echoes of the Whigs and Gentlemen everywhere: fellow Ohioans the National certainly learned a thing or two from the way Whigs songs can swing from elegance to corrosion, even borrowing the chorus from Congregation’s “Miles Iz Ded” for their own “Slipping Husband,” and it’s not hard to trace Hamilton Leithauser’s vocal stylings back to Dulli’s. But there’s almost nothing else that walks the walk like Gentlemen, that unapologetically wears the black hat and leaves so much of its own blood on the floor of the recording studio. And maybe that’s for the best. But to this day, this album has a sinister charm that can seduce a listener, even as it warns them all the while that it’ll lead nowhere good. — Zach
Gospel - The Loser
What on earth was going through people’s brains when they were pushing forward the common sense genre names? Prog rock? Skramz??? In the context of their own scene spaces, sure, you can argue for their relevancy to the sound itself, but divorced from these spaces, it makes my life a lot more difficult when it comes to recommending these things. So you can imagine the nightmarish scenario I find myself in trying to sell the average person on The Loser, a record which combines classical keyboard-led prog rock influence with a harder hitting aughts-era screamo sensibility. Gospel’s first album since 2005 lands with the exact running start necessary to bridge the gap from their first beloved release, and from there it doesn’t leave room to breathe for even a second. The grooves here twist themselves into knots, teeter on the edge of incoherence, and then rush in for the kill at their precise timings. It’s equal parts Gaucho-era Steely Dan and Meshuggah, all built perfectly for Adam Dooling’s death throe yelps and the occasional flourish of a good “maaaaaaaaaaaaan” at the end of any given line. It’s baffling, beautiful, brutal all the same, the kind of worthy comeback that few other bands have managed to pull from this kind of long absence up to now. It’s impossible to really describe it in a way that sounds as appealing on paper as it is just hearing and understanding its stylistic impulses, but it’s a worthwhile investment if you’re in the zone of sickos like me who’ll turn out for a good noisey time. Ignore the stupid genre tags and just trust me.
— Rose
WILDCARD: Hollow Comet - Exhibition EP
As I became more obsessed with Strange Ranger’s No Light in Heaven (my album of the year last year), I really wanted to explore the roots of how this project came to be as it can barely be heard on their previous two records that largely devoted themselves to emo revival canon or twinkly, Pavement-esque indie rock. Listening to Hollow Comet, the solo project of Strange Ranger’s Isaac Eiger, it’s interesting to hear how No Light in Heaven’s more electronic, dance-inspired songs came about as Eiger challenges himself to write songs in a new way. The clear highlight, in my opinion, of his 2020 EP Exhibition is “Train at Dark”, a pulsating track featuring Philly musician Goodbye Horses. Like a breakbeat-infused version of King Krule’s “Slush Puppy” off his 2017 album The OOZ, both songs operated in those in-between hours I talk about below with Harp. But while “Slush Puppy” sounds like walking down some cold, empty streets of a big city while terrible thoughts slosh around in your head, “Train at Dark” puts you in the middle of an illegal warehouse rave, while terrible thoughts slosh around in your head. As Goodbye Horses’ pitched down vocals repeat the lines “I did it baby / I did it again” over and over again and those bad thoughts keep sloshing around, you desperately wish to eject from this time in your life. But unfortunately, you, like me, might be cursed with an innate sense of self-reflection. An innate sense with really terrible timing, but really, is there ever a good time?
— Matty
Grace Ives - Janky Star
Not to be the one continually bemoaning the state of pop music, but things are certainly dour right now. Even the artists who seem like they’re trying to have fun are giving off deeply depressing energy (not to mention the nightmarish zombie tunes currently just floating around the chart’s top line for months on end). So naturally, when a pop record at least makes the effort to try and enjoy itself, I’m going to gravitate towards it. Grace Ives’ latest, while not the one-to-one successor to LONER I’ve been looking for since 2018, is perhaps the closest effort any pop musician has made to capturing a similar spirit of fatalistic whimsy that is, simply put, my kinda thing. The record has just enough flourish in itself to stand above being a mere bedroom pop set of recordings, with especially stellar synth tones glossing over tunes such as “Lazy Day” and “Win Win”, and granular splashes of dance music influences throughout allowing it a nice percussive punch. Its quick runtime has made it easy for me to run back and really enjoy these fine elements taken in through the whole, a nice micro-work which somehow doesn’t feel slight. Most importantly, it’s fun. If nobody else can meet that standard, we should at least be glad Grace Ives has made an attempt to match it. — Rose
Kristine Leschper - The Opening, Or Closing, Of A Door
Mothers’ final album, Render Another Ugly Method, was a difficult album to say the least. While the singles may have tricked you into thinking you were diving into a sludgy, occasionally mathy, post-punk record, you were treated to droning, brooding songs that served as personal vignettes of front-woman Kristine Leschper’s life, dealing with gender, religion and relationship traumas. If Render Another Ugly Method is the sound of disassociation, Leschper’s solo debut The Opening, Or Closing, Of A Door is the sound of finding your way back to your body and mind. The darkness of Leschper’s previous records as Mothers still lurk in the background, but they feel much more in the rear-view as the sparkling, baroque soundscapes Leschper builds on her new album are ones of hope. While the weight of the world still holds a heavy place in Leschper’s mind, it feels less like an anvil, and more like a weighted blanket, drifting off to the dream world she’s concocted on this LP. — Matty
MJ Lenderman - Boat Songs
After nearly five months in the wilderness, the terminally online, Sickos™ everywhere, and fans of the band Wednesday in general rejoiced when MJ Lenderman released Boat Songs, which our very own WillForThrill anointed “the College Football Twitter album of the year.” From the moment Lenderman sings, disbelief audible, “Jordan wanted to sign with Adidas, for shoes” on the opening “Hangover Game,” it should be clear that this album is going to be a bit of a romp. Boat Songs exists in a world where not one, but two ballads can be named after theme parks, and a friend’s sighting of Dan Marino at a Harris Teeter in Bumfuck, South Carolina can feel like an event of cosmic significance. The record’s prevailing ethos can be summed up in “You Are Every Girl to Me,” where the purity of the narrator’s love is as simple and immutable as the earth being round and Jackass being funny. In a sense, the feeling of listening to Boat Songs is the same feeling you get from watching this video, only stretched out for 33 minutes and 40 seconds. And if you’re only in it for the bits, the album is happy to oblige you, something that’s certainly helped by Lenderman’s knack for melody and structure. On that metric alone, Boat Songs is one of the most simply enjoyable albums of the year thus far.
But before you chant “DUDES ROCK” and move along, take a closer look and you’ll notice that there’s some real discontent lying just underneath all the jokes. Yes, old WWE matches and basketball games were projected onto the walls of the studio while Lenderman recorded, and yes, the first song on the album is about Michael Jordan getting wasted before an NBA Finals matchup (to which Lenderman responds, “I like drinking too!”). But the other MJ’s goal is to produce songs where his characters “chase fulfillment and happiness,” and they sometimes fall short in the attempt. “Tastes Just Like It Costs” is a gnarled rocker straight from the Neil Young/Crazy Horse playbook, one where Lenderman starts by calling out a stupid hat his partner is wearing and only gets nastier from there. The melancholy “Under Control” is about a situation that’s anything but, letting him lock into a vintage tear-in-your-beer country pose. And then there’s “TLC Cage Match,” which is a song that feels beamed in from an alternate universe where Jason Molina was really into the Monday Night Wars. “All our heroes now are dead,” Lenderman sighs, the finality of it landing like a steel chair across the back. This quality of his was hinted at earlier this year on Wednesday’s tremendous cover of Drive-By Truckers’ “Women Without Whiskey,” and it provides necessary texture to Boat Songs, giving what may seem on its face to be an uncomplicated collection of songs the wistful beauty of a late summer sunset.
— Zach
PENDANT - Harp
When I listen to Harp, the new album from PENDANT, I feel like I’m transported to a certain time period. Not a year, or an era, but literal specific time in the day. The in-between hours I call them, when you’re deep into dusk but nowhere near dawn. If you’re awake during this time, there’s really only two things happening: you’re either deep into thought about everything that has and will ever happen to you, partying, or some combination of the two. As a recent LA transplant, I’ve been going out a lot more than I did before, even pre-pandemic. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the past nine months during this time, and Harp was the perfect album for me as I entered this new era of my life. So whether I’m sitting in regret, or relief, for making it through to this next part of my life, or I’m simply just feeling like a crazy ass white boy, Harp is an album that feels like it was specifically made for me and me only, and truly those are the most special kinds of records you can find. In an era of mass consumption, when you find that one record that cuts through the noise and speaks to you, you’ll never want to let it go. — Matty
WILDCARD: Stereolab - Cobra & Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night (1999)
It just kicks in. While Dots & Loops telegraphed the eventual shift of Stereolab from their initial bubblegum motorik sound into a new frontier of ILM (intelligent lounge music), Cobra & Phases Group finally takes the plunge head-first. Signing on Chicago experimental stalwart Jim O’Rourke to co-produce with John McEntire, the band’s stylistic left turn was originally heralded with marked disappointment, a response which feels all the more baffling when you consider: This album had songs. Whereas previous Stereolab releases could stick a melody in your head simply by running it through over and over, this one finds the band challenging themselves to become the most melodically focused version of themselves, bringing highlight after highlight even whilst engaging in a dozen detours along the way. There’s pieces that feel inspired by the obvious aesthete pop forebears the band has always looked to, but there’s also nods to minimalist electronic music, girl group melodicism, and of course, drone music. This record asks the listener to imagine everything Stereolab could be, the grand final moment of the band’s place as a futurist possibility for pop before the critical nonacceptance dominating their later years took hold. The thing just goes.
— Rose
S.G. Goodman - Teeth Marks
There’s clearly been a lot on S.G. Goodman’s mind since her debut album, Old Time Feeling, came out in 2020. In interviews she’s given about Teeth Marks, her sophomore bow, she’s discussed the opioid epidemic and alcoholism, late capitalism and generational trauma, combating stereotypes of the South, and her own experiences of trying to find love as a queer woman in small-town Kentucky. All of these influences and more can be heard on Teeth Marks, but to her immense credit, Goodman never lets the album get lost in the woods. It’s a tremendous work of synthesis, a fusion of ideas, both musical and topical, that turns into something all Goodman’s own. The arresting title track, Goodman told the Bitter Southerner, is about “the way we leave marks on each other, and empathy or the lack thereof,” something which could double as a mission statement for the album as a whole. Goodman can sing about a woman on one song and the South on another and come to the shattering conclusion that neither will love her back, but she refuses to give up on either. It’s little wonder artists such as Jason Isbell and John Moreland have taken notice of her — Teeth Marks is proof she’s cut from a similar cloth.
Throughout Teeth Marks, Goodman swings big and connects damn-near every time. The forlorn “Teeth Marks” is chased with a rousing number called “All My Love Is Coming Back to Me,” a switch that feels like going from night to day. “Work Until I Die” is a stomping Southern punk song that quotes both Bob Dylan and, more surprisingly, Alabama’s chart-topper “Song of the South.” And at the heart of the record is a devastating pair of songs about the opioid crisis. “If You Were Someone I Loved” is directed to an addict whose crushing power hinges on that first word: if. Its partner, the mournful “You Were Someone I Loved,” is delivered entirely a cappella, with Goodman’s endlessly-expressive voice granting her subject the empathy in death that the former song’s narrator withheld in life. Produced by Goodman herself, Teeth Marks is crisp and clear, letting every note shine through and every word land with the force she intends it to. She knows how best to present herself, and the album is thus a showcase of her skill as writer, producer, singer, everything. But Goodman saves her most awe-inspiring trick for last. Old Time Feeling opens with a song called “Space and Time,” which Goodman admits was written deep in the throes of suicidal depression. “Keeper of the Time,” Teeth Marks’ closing track, functions as an answer. As she told Stereogum, “Keeper” deals with “your experience of gathering the marks left behind, from love or not, you’re going to be the one holding it all…what you do with that or what you choose not to do with that. But it’s important for all of us to realize we’re the embodiment.” It’s that message that courses through Teeth Marks like the blood in your veins, and that’s what makes it such an astonishing album.
— Zach
Tomberlin - i don’t know who needs to hear this
As my favorite non-Ethel Cain album of 2022 so far, I could easily unveil an equally long manifesto new album from Tomberlin, i don’t know who needs to hear this, but why would I bother wasting time and energy doing so when the album’s closing track sums up the entire musical thesis of the album:
“I don't know who needs to hear this
Sometimes it's good to sing your feelings
Especially when you don't know
The next line or how it goes”
Much like Fiona Apple’s crucially beloved 2020 Fetch The Bolt Cutters, i don’t know who needs to hear this is an album where the details have clearly been worried over and perfected to an exacting degree and yet paradoxically the whole album feels like it is unfurling completely organically — like every word that comes out of her mouth is being thought of in that very moment. There are moments where lines land with a thud intentionally, avoiding an obvious or easy rhyme to instead say the more unvarnished and direct statement possible. — Jackie