While Soft Sounds might be slightly inactive for the rest of the year, we’re still here to bring y’all our Q3 Favorites! If you’ve seen one of our pieces, you know the gist as various members of the team will recant their two favorite albums of the quarter + a wildcard pick. So from myself, Rose, Zach, Ethan, Lily, and Jackie, let’s take a look at what we were loving from these past three months.
Halsey - If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power (Capitol, August 27th, 2021)
Since they first came onto the scene in the mid-2010s, Halsey quickly established themselves as one of the most compelling pop stars of their era, for better or worse. For every great track like “You should be sad” or “Closer”, there was an equally bad song like “Him & I” or “New Americana.” There was always potential in Halsey’s music, but they just had trouble putting it all together, until now. If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power isn’t just the best Halsey album, it’s one of the best albums a mainstream pop star has presented in quite some time.
While the main narrative thread for this album has been Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross producing the album and helping co-write all of its tracks, I do think Halsey’s contributions have been lost in the discussion here, as they’ve fully stepped up as a writer and performer here, as it helps that the usual melodrama that surrounds Halsey has been grounded around a strong concept of impending motherhood & and a few extra years of adulthood. Their performances throughout, especially on tracks like “Easier than Lying” or “1121” are breathtaking and fully compelling. But the standout on the album is “You asked for this”, as guest Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio goes absolutely nutty on the guitar, the drums sound so fucking nasty and the hook is just…. gah it’s all so fucking good. Halsey, Trent and Atticus are an incredible trio, and I hope this isn’t the last time we hear from them. —Matty
Wednesday - Twin Plagues (Orindal, August 13th, 2021)
There’s an attitude that can affect you when you’ve lived in the South (or in my case, the Carolinas) your entire life. As you watch most of the people you grew up with start to move away for more ideal cityscapes, still waiting on your own out or stubbornly choosing to stay in place, you dwell on memories of the place. They may not even be necessarily good ones but you latch onto them because they’re yours. These items of cultural and psychological detritus tend to cling into your mind, ever accumulating like the miles-long patches of construction that seem to keep extending through I-85. You’re over it with this place but yet, your mind keeps coming back to these things. Wednesday’s music seems perfectly built for this kind of personal reckoning of memory, fully replaying the details again and again with fuzzed-out harmonies that dissolve into amp noise.
Their newest record, Twin Plagues, finds a middle ground between the ever-shifting sonic landscapes of shoegaze and the world-weariness of the best country records, finding the understanding that the best aspect of either genre is a pristine bed of sound to just curl up into. It’s a record I return to over and over again just trying to catch a little hit of the feelings I notice in every minute of it that I feel right at home with, and above all it’s just catchy. I constantly want to loop it back to catch the littlest details, be it the moment when “Cody’s Only” bursts into an immense sing-along, or the neat little background harmonies weaved into “Gary’s”, every bit of it feels lived in. It’s all artifacts of nostalgia and memory, melted together in the summer heat: a family photo from Tokyo, a Dallas Cowboys-themed funeral urn, that one Beach Boys song about the California girls, your warm breath on the mirror, your warm breath on the mirror, your warm breath on the —Rose
Injury Reserve - By the Time I Get to Phoenix (Self-Released, September 15th, 2021)
Let’s compare modes of presentation. For both of their full-length albums (we’re not discussing mixtapes here even if all of those are great too!) Injury Reserve decided to put up a brief little bit of flourish in terms of how they presented the YouTube streams for their full album, but there’s a very striking difference in tone between the two of them. Their self-titled debut is brought to you with a fun little image, whole rows of fans lined up hearing it and reacting for the first time, the trio excitedly posted in the back seeing the results of the long-term effort they’d made in front of them. You could even see Ritchie grinning, sitting in the background, mouthing along to every word. In comparison, there’s their follow-up, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, presented maybe the only way it could be. Disorientation, blinding strobes, and just the two remaining band-members flailing around in unknown space. In their previous efforts, Injury Reserve mostly came off as a rap group that tended to edge into stranger territory cautiously, with songs like “ttktv” or “GTFU” feeling almost alien among some of the more traditional rap fare in their catalog. This wasn’t so much a slight against them as a note that their potential for something even greater was always there.
With Phoenix, they finally take the brave leap into the territory they’d been half-stepping with all along. The songs on this album contain all the essential hallmarks of what you expect from a rap song, but they don’t seem to belong in remotely the same universe as even most of the songs on their previous full-length. The closest you even get is “Footwork in a Forest Fire”, a song that makes the description “stressful” an understatement with its clattering drum loops and an absolutely frantic performance from the group’s late Stepa J. Groggs. It’s the moments where the album further loses its center that it becomes genuinely uncomfortable to listen to, the sound of a group processing some of the most stressful emotions imaginable over a platform of sounds that give you absolutely no anchor to hold onto. There’s climate collapse, grief of losing friends, a litany of feelings all demarcated by absolute uncertainty. It’s nothing short of a miracle that all of this manages to even land well in the first place, let alone feel as cohesive of an experience that it does. It’s a remarkable work that finally lands the group in the place they seemed to always be heading towards, something as far out from a normal presentation as possible. —Rose
WILDCARD: R.E.M. - New Adventures in Hi-fi (September 8th, 1996, Warner Bros. Records)
The five hour cut of Wim Wenders’ Until The End of the World projects the planet we live on as a landscape of dream logic. It’s constantly moving through one environment to the next, with all of them feeling as out of place as the last. All that matters until the movie’s final hour or so is forward momentum, moving from one part of this intangible landscape to another, taking as much or as little time as it needs in one place. To look into the (surprisingly stacked!) list of names on the film’s soundtrack for parallels, it’s best to consider R.E.M., specifically the R.E.M. of the mid to late 90s. After over a decade of putting in a relentless work ethic and making rock records that could consistently redefine what was doable with a simple four-piece band of jangle pop players, they finally settled for a brief moment to make music that felt almost unmoored from reality, resulting in their twin masterpieces Automatic for the People and Monster. It was music built specifically for the moment that still felt vital.
But of course, they had to end up back on the road again sometime. Always focused on forward momentum, always touring to a new audience somewhere. These were the conditions that built New Adventures in Hi-Fi, a record that even now, 25 years later, still has a different air to it than any other R.E.M. release before or after. Consider the circumstances here: The last album with Bill Berry helming the drums, (Some [Not me!] would also posit it’s their last great one too!) a record where ten out of fourteen tracks are recorded on different stages and green rooms across America, and a tracklist that is not only their longest but most varied by a good mile. You get short little wordless tunes like “Zither”, some of the band’s most tender balladry in “Be Mine” and “Electrolite”, or the back to back twin dirges of “E-Bow The Letter” and “Leave”, in all its klaxon-wailing majesty. Michael Stipe’s preoccupation with the day-to-day world feels all more hazy, with his writing moving out of the odd character portraits in Monster into deeply personal territory, tackling the death of his friend River Phoenix, or taking to task the horrifying lack of empathy for queer communities in American media. In all its unsettlement, it’s the closest thing I can think of to a road movie as a rock record, sprawling and unhurried in the way it should be. It’s maybe one of their greatest achievements as a band, and to look at it closely, it all operates in its own un-reality, somewhere moving forward forever in dreams. —Rose
Sturgill Simpson - The Ballad of Dood & Juanita (August 20th, 2021, High Top Mountain)
After almost a decade spent defying expectations at every turn, the most surprising thing about The Ballad of Dood & Juanita, Sturgill Simpson’s fifth album and purportedly his last, is how uncomplicated it is. There are no religious odes to psychedelic drugs, no swooning Nirvana covers, certainly no synth-fried industry diatribes; it’s more or less exactly what he sold it as, “a simple tale of either redemption or revenge.” Created start-to-finish over the course of a week at his home studio, and clocking in at just ten tracks in under half an hour, Dood & Juanita is Simpson’s shortest album, and possibly the easiest to appreciate on its own terms. Its story is indeed quite simple: the half-Shawnee mountaineer Dood’s wife Juanita is kidnapped by a bandit, and he, along with his faithful hound Sam and mighty steed Shamrock, sets off across the Kentucky frontier to rescue her. It’s an easy comparison to make, but it recalls nothing so much as Red Headed Stranger, a connection made explicit when Willie himself drops in with a guitar solo on “Juanita.” A narrative this basic lives and dies on how well the world it takes place in comes across, and Simpson is up to the task of making it larger than life: Dood’s skill with a rifle is such that he can “blow the balls off a bat, reload, and shoot it one more time,” while Shamrock can kick a coyote so hard “it wouldn’t land until next year.” The details are where tall tales come to life, and Simpson’s lyrics on Dood & Juanita are his most vivid to date.
Recorded with the crack team of “Hillbilly Avengers” that backed him on last year’s terrific Cuttin’ Grass albums, Dood & Juanita is a full-on embrace of traditional “mountain music” - not just the bluegrass of those two records, but gospel, a cappella, even military marches, all played with skill and reverence. More than anything he’s released since High Top Mountain, this is the Sturgill Simpson album that’s closest to being a full-on Country Album, with everything those capital letters suggest. It’s warm and lively and, dare I say, approachable in ways that even the Grammy-winning A Sailor’s Guide to Earth wasn’t. It’s almost certainly Simpson’s finest vocal performance, at least to me: he handles the high-lonesome wailing of “Go in Peace” with just as much skill and authority as he rides his lower register on “Shamrock,” and the stirring a cappella number “Sam” (one of two songs on the album devoted to the hound’s death, funnily enough) shows his skill as a vocal arranger as well. More-so than any of Simpson’s albums, Dood & Juanita feels like a real labor of love, and that’s what I find so compelling about it, even more than its actual story. If this really is his last hurrah, he could hardly go out on a stronger note. —Zach
Boldy James / The Alchemist - Bo Jackson (August 13th, 2021, ALC)
In 2020, Detroit’s Boldy James went on a hot streak the likes of which hadn’t been seen in rap since Future’s electric run from Monster to DS2. Beginning that February, James put out four albums with four producers; all four of them were good, at least two of them were great, but my favorite of the bunch was the first. The Price of Tea in China was made alongside the Alchemist, who would later that year helm Freddie Gibbs’s triumphant Alfredo. But alongside James, whose debut album My 1st Chemistry Set he also produced, Alchemist’s work on China felt like a continuation of his work on Return of the Mac, the similarly dead-eyed tape he produced with Prodigy in 2007. Then as now, Alc’s dusty soul loops fit James’s weary monotone like a glove, throwing the rapper’s eye for detail into sharp relief and making his threats pop, even when delivered as nonchalantly as the results of last night’s Tigers game. And after laying dormant most of the year, the duo returned last month with Bo Jackson, the rare hip hop sequel that not only matches its predecessor, but surpasses it. As the billboards raised to promote the album said, “BOLDY KNOWS RAP, ALC KNOWS BEATS,” and Bo Jackson finds the duo in championship form.
Like all good sequels, Bo Jackson is a refinement and expansion of what made The Price of Tea in China so special. The key ingredients are intact, but both producer and rapper feel like they’re playing for keeps this time around. Alchemist’s beats feel more intense and driven throughout, and James’s raps are even more hard-hitting, his delivery more forceful and flows more varied. China was an immersive, atmospheric album, one in which James could sometimes be lost if you weren’t paying close attention; there’s no missing him on Bo Jackson. Whether sprinting through “Speed Trap” or the second half of “Double Hockey Sticks,” reflecting on his close calls on “3rd Person,” or effortlessly holding court on the 48-bars/no-hook tour de force “First 48 Freestyle,” James owns Bo Jackson from the jump. And what few guests there are come correct. China standouts Freddie Gibbs and Benny the Butcher and new arrivals Roc Marciano, Curren$y, and Stove God Cooks (who steals the show with his “Diamond Dallas” hook) are firing on all cylinders; only Earl Sweatshirt’s punch-drunk verse on “Photographic Memories” feels out of place. However, the main draw remains the uncommon synergy between James and Alchemist, a duo whose connection and chemistry rivals that of Joe Montana and Jerry Rice. Early on the album, James sneers “these n***** ain’t cut from my cloth, ‘cause I’m steel wool,” and Bo Jackson is proof positive that James is a cut above the rest. —Zach
WILDCARD: The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (October 21st, 2003, Sub Pop)
Consider, if you will, the predicament facing the Shins in 2003. Oh, Inverted World had two years prior been hailed as one of the best debuts of that year, one not exactly lacking for high-profile debuts; the band were still about a year away from Zach Braff shoving them into the mainstream, but were still catching heat from all corners, even their label-mates and local alt-weekly, for courting the greater public and licensing “New Slang” for commercials; and most pressingly, they had the unenviable task of figuring out just how to follow up an album that earned not-unwarranted comparisons to the Beach Boys and the Kinks. A worrisome position for any young band, but considering how much of Inverted World’s power came from its intimacy, the question was, how could they take the next step without giving up what made them so special? If you were the Shins, however, you had a not-so-secret weapon: James Mercer, one of the greatest melodic minds of his generation. So here’s what they do: they take ten of their best songs, they head into the studio with Phil Ek, and they make Chutes Too Narrow, an album that matched Inverted World in every respect and cemented them as one of the truly great indie bands of the 2000s. Not as easy as it sounds on paper, but when you have Mercer tossing off sophisticated, glittering ear candy as easily as a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, you’d be forgiven for thinking that maybe it really is that simple.
Chutes is an all-out charm offensive. From the handclaps and the “woo!” that cold open “Kissing the Lipless” to the whistling that closes out “Those to Come,” Mercer and company put together an album that’s positively overflowing with hooks. It’s beyond a cliche, but every moment on Chutes Too Narrow truly feels like it’s striving to be the best moment. (A short list of my favorites: “Lipless” hitting the stratosphere on its chorus; the interplay between the strings and backing vocals on the beautiful “Saint Simon;” the harmonica on “Pink Bullets.”) But more than that, it feels even today like a band genuinely leveling up. It’s quite difficult to imagine something that rocks as much as “So Says I” fitting in on Inverted World, but here, the Shins make it feel like second nature, a facet of themselves that was always there and just didn’t have the right tools to properly show until now. It’s really almost irritating that they could make an album that must have been labored over intensely to sound the way it does also sound this effortless, this smart, this “oh wow, this has been stuck in my head for the last week” catchy all at once. But the Shins were capable of some incredible things, and Chutes Too Narrow is 33 minutes of bliss, a master class of depth and craft and feeling in pop songwriting. If you write them off as “the Garden State band,” give Chutes another look and you might be amazed at how much you’ll find. —Zach
Editor’s Note: Ethan did not realize that Q3 is July through September, as he picked two June releases. We’re still gonna publish them anyways so before you go “hey wait a second that’s Q2!”, we know.
Meat Wave - Volcano Park (June 11th, 2021, Big Scary Monsters)
I think that Meat Wave’s music can best be described as “pop-post-punk”. Meat Wave is to post-punk as The Descendents are to hardcore. They fall in the middle ground between modern post-punk bands like Protomartyr and the other pop-punk bands on their former label, SideOneDummy. This all is to say they have a unique sound. No other band sounds exactly like them and even if another group tried, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could do it better than Meat Wave. Due to the pandemic, shit hitting the fan at SideOneDummy, and maybe other unknown factors, it has been 4 years since their last proper album, 2017’s excellent The Incessant. Fans have been dying to hear new material for the past few years (beyond singles and compilation appearances) and the band has finally delivered with a new EP.
Meat Wave have picked up right where they left off with the last album as if no time has passed. While there is a slight disappointment in the fact that the band hasn’t further evolved their sound, these songs are too good to really care that much. The guitar riffs on opening track “Tugboat” and the single “Yell at the Moon” are so goddamn catchy that they’ll be stuck in your head for days after listening. It almost seems like every instrument, even the vocals, are competing for your attention with angular and pounding rhythms. This cacophony could turn into chaos, but the band keeps it tightly wound within pop structures, which makes for an enjoyable contradiction. —Ethan
Liz Phair - Soberish (June 4th, 2021, Chrysalis Records)
Liz Phair was primed and ready for a comeback with her seventh studio album. Between the reissue of her classic first album, the publication of her memoir, and the constant outpouring of admiration from the current generation of indie rock from artists like Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail, things were looking good. While it doesn’t reach the heights of anything on Exile In Guyville, Soberish is a very solid album from an artist who has been struggling to put out anything good for decades. Phair’s newest album is her strongest of the century (despite the recent reevaluation by some of her 2003 self-titled album, I have seen no such attempts at defending the two albums that followed it) and even the most enjoyable since her debut.
The confidence that defined her earlier music is at the forefront once again. Phair knows these songs are good and doesn’t care if you like them. However, it’s a more mature bravado than the defiance of Exile In Guyville. Phair hasn’t become more accepting of misogyny and music industry bullshit over the past thirty years, but the feeling that she might self-destruct at any moment into a white hot ball of pure rage is gone. So much of Phair’s appeal came from the raw sound of her righteous anger, which was lost over the years. Now, she can make emotionally compelling work that also has high production values and catchy hooks.
Familiar topics such as sexuality, gender, and substance abuse are explored on this album with Phair’s trademark frankness, but from the perspective of someone older. One highlight of the album, “Hey Lou”, features Phair exploring what it would be like to be Laurie Anderson dealing with Lou Reed’s drug addiction and generally volatile personality. The track “Bad Kitty” is classic Liz Phair with its unashamed discussion of female sexuality, and is especially compelling in how it shares how it has changed over her life. The trenchant thematic boldness of her earlier work combined with the polish production of her later material makes for a compelling listen that fans always believed she could make. —Ethan
WILDCARD: Pill Friends - Child Sacrifice (February 12th, 2016, Self-Released)
Truthfully, I haven’t been listening to much music outside of the weekly new releases lately. However, one album I did revisit was Pill Friends’ 2016 album, Child Sacrifice. Because it’s PWYW on Bandcamp, I’ve had the album on my phone since its release (yes, I actually still use MP3s). A lot of albums from my high school years were free downloads from Bandcamp because Spotify didn’t work with my car’s stereo, so artists like Spencer Radcliffe, R.L. Kelly, Katie Dey, and Pill Friends were in my regular rotation.
It’s a melancholic listen to say the least. Themes of death, violence, sin, and other dour topics make up most of the album’s lyrical content. The album was meant as the band’s swan song and the shadow of lead singer Ryan Wilson’s sudden and unfortunate death in 2017 looms large above the whole affair. However, despite all of this, the music is not bleak; there is a sense of hope at the core.
Standout track “Abortion Ceremony” is a prime example of this dialectic. Lyrically, the song paints a bleak image, but Wilson’s delivery over a catchy and repetitive keyboard and drum machine part keeps the song from becoming too sullen. I can’t 100% vouch for the validity of this quote, but Wilson apparently said in an interview that the song is about how “[t]hings can feel extremely negative in terms of the context you can find yourself in, but if you’re able to find some sort of value or joy or happiness out of it, that thing is worth striving for.” Even if this quote isn’t real, the song conveys this feeling so clearly that it almost doesn’t matter.. —Ethan
Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever (July 30th, 2021, Darkroom/Interscope)
We do not deserve the timeline where Billie Eilish is this good, this weird, this cool, this popular, and this self-aware all at the same time, but I’m grateful we’re here regardless. Her latest, Happier Than Ever, sees the 20-year old superlative-magnet and her sibling-in-crime Finneas continue their run of being all that and then some, delivering a batch of pop songs so impeccable it's almost boring to talk about how unimpeachable they are. The duo hardly leaves a note or line out of place across the hour-long runtime, all while broadening their sonic and thematic scope from the abstract spookums of their debut in ways that make it damn near the platonic ideal of a sophomore album. To pull this off in the mainstream pop sphere is a sight not seen for decades, to say nothing of the fact that they barely break a sweat while doing it.
I mean, consider that this album contains a sequence in which the most thumpingly horny song of the year is followed by an eerie, introspective trip-hop jam about the vulnerabilities of fame that opens with a full goddamn four-part chorale. Now consider that this album manages to pull the same trick twice (hello, “Your Power” -> “NDA” run) without feeling like it’s repeating itself even a little. Now consider that the former track in that run is a breathtakingly candid appeal for accountability to Billie’s male counterparts in which an acoustic guitar part is punctuated with stabs of sub bass. Now consider that all this high-wire weirdo shit is being pulled off on one of the biggest-selling albums of the year. Seriously, I cannot stress how much none of this should be possible. And yet, the Billie Mode era has arrived in full force. If I was any other pop star right now, I would simply try to be half this great. —Lily
Low - HEY WHAT (September 10th, 2021, Sub Pop)
A common talking point for Low’s 2018 late-career reinvention Double Negative was the sense that the Minnesota duo had “turned their sound inside out,” filling the empty space in their arrangements with rushes of static and burying their voices in the mix. If this change in direction was a response to a heightened sense of global unrest, this year’s HEY WHAT responds to an even sorrier state of the world by attempting to build something new out of the exoskeleton that Double Negative left behind. In asking the question “do we get heavier or more intimate from here,” Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker have wisely answered “both.” HEY WHAT amplifies the noisier qualities of Double Negative, all while foregrounding their trademark harmonies, always centered as an anchor to the surrounding squall.
This immediacy is complemented by a near-total lyrical transparency. HEY WHAT seldom entertains abstract imagery, and Parker and Sparhawk instead take a scalpel to global inequity, their own complicities and privileges borne from it, and heck even their own marriage, as on “Don’t Walk Away” and eight-minute stunner/SOTY candidate “Hey.” All this self-flagellation, however, is invariably in the interest of finding hope for a better world, and working towards a better version of oneself. It is a midlife crisis album that embraces the difficulty of change rather than denying it. Just as an ever-present pulse somehow builds throughout an album almost entirely devoid of percussion, so too does a mounting sense of anxious optimism. The refrain of the explosive closer, “it must be wearing off,” feels desperate to make itself true. It must wear off. By the time its last cacophonous wave crests, Low manage to make you feel like it really could. —Lily
Space Afrika - Honest Labour (August 27th, 2021, Dais)
For years scientists (me) have asked the question: what if you made a whole electronic album out of just interludes?
What if you could bottle the ineffable magic feeling that Burial tracks like “In This McDonalds” and “Night Bus” manage to conjure for 2 minutes and stretch that experience out to a full album length. The real challenge of pulling off this hypothetical “Oops, all interludes” album is making something that constantly feels ethereal and without pop song structure without alienating the listener in a way that would lose their attention or actively annoy them.
Enter Space Afrika, an ambient music project composed of duo Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid, both from Manchester and go as far as to call themselves “Manchester ambassadors”. Their music is a strange, beguiling mix of ambient music, sound collage, and whatever other instrumentation these increasingly ambitious producers can throw into this musical stew that they themself term “overlapping movements” . Honest Labour is their most ambitious and expansive album yet, but all of that ambition is in the service of creating a constantly mutating and dissolving series of interstitials and deconstructed songs that evoke a strong sense of mood and place and feeling without any concrete song structures, clear melodies, or hooks to grab on to. The closest thing to a beat this album presents is the shambling, trash can percussion of "B£E feat. Blackhaine", which is closer to the experimental hip hop Dean Blunt than any kind of propulsive pop rap beat. And as far as ambient music goes, this is far from new age chill out music. In Reid’s own words, “Ambient is usually associated with natural sounds, but what we do is inner-city ambient for chaotic living”.
That unsettled, restless feeling inspired by the urban soundscapes, when combined with the duo’s love for dreamy synth pads, creates an intoxicating atmosphere that draws you in but never allows you the comfort of knowing exactly where it’s going. And before these tracks arrive at what would be any sort of traditional destination, they evaporate and the next song begins, often suddenly, like waking up from a dream. Honest Labour is a portrait of the city of Manchester and some of the artists who populate this local music scene, but it’s a portrait as seen through a rainy bus window, overheard down alleyways. It’s like those “but you’re in the bathroom at a party” memes, but on Honest Labour the muffled quality is artfully executed in a way that makes it feel more like an audio impressionist painting rather than a simple edit.
Honest Labour is full of guest voices: passing street chatter and overheard arguments in the soundscapes, spoken word interludes where subjects are asked questions about their own definition of love or the meaning of life, as well as a number of features from a variety of Manchester singers, rappers, and poets. But even these artists are shrouded in the same layers of emotional distance. For example, the two features from the singer who goes by the name guest on the songs “Indigo Grit” and “Rings” are beautiful, but her performance never rises above a breathy whisper. Other vocal performances like Bianca Scout on the stunning “Girl Scout Cookies” fade in and out of lyrical coherence as her voice is slathered with reverb and doubled over itself. Space Afrika use this record as an opportunity to highlight the diverse talents of the Manchester music scene they come from, but those voices are obscured in the same murkiness and obliqueness as the instrumentals.
The most distinctive thing that unites the many voices of Honest Labour, besides that they all come from Manchester, is that they are never allowed to complete the end of their sentences. This is made immediately clear at the end of “Indigo Grit” where a woman is asked a series of questions about the difference between true love and just liking someone a lot. After saying she believes there is a difference between the two, the man asks her to explain herself further, and as soon as she says “Um”, the track ends abruptly before she can come up with an answer. Like the “overlapping movement” instrumentals that end before they reach their typical destination, or the rappers that fade back into the soundscape before they finish their verse, the core elements of this album are always slipping just out of your grasp, like a ghost in the rainy Manchester night. Yet somehow this never feels unsatisfying, and instead makes you keep coming back for more, trying to uncover the many secrets this album seems to contain. —Jackie
Turnstile - GLOW ON (August 27th, 2021, Roadrunner)
So *Jerry Seinfeld voice* what’s the deal with the pink album covers???
As someone from an indie / electronic background who only got into heavy music genres like hardcore and metal in recent years, I’m no stranger to the crossover heavy music album, the album designed to reach beyond the confines of their somewhat insular scene and connect with the Pitchfork crowd. Emo and hardcore purists tend to look down on these kind of bands, the Foxing’s of the world who clearly have a desire to be “not just an emo band” and transcend their particular genre tag to reach a mainstream rock audience, but for me they have been the gateway to the world they come from. The best, clearest example of that phenomenon in 2021 is Turnstile’s GLOW ON, a hardcore album with catchy hooks, a strong sense of melody, slick production, and yes, a pink album cover. With clouds!!! *gasps*
The original “heavy music band has a pink album cover to show they’re not like those other heavy bands” was fittingly Boris’s record from 2005, Pink, and probably the most famous example is of course Sunbather by Deafheaven. What those albums did for stoner metal and blackgaze in helping those particular genres crossover to the mainstream indie consciousness under the disguise of their pink cover, the GLOW ON hopes to do the same for hardcore music at a particularly exciting moment for the genre. With production from studio veteran Mike Elizondo, GLOW ON is the biggest, shiniest, and punchiest the band has ever sounded, and the album incorporates multiple full departures from hardcore into straight up indie music including two tracks with features from Blood Orange, which they pull off with surprising precision. Even the momentary Frank Ocean impression with pitch shifted vocals that they attempt in the middle of the dreamy “UNDERWATER BOI” works really well, and somehow fits in with the heaviest parts of the album without clashing.
Having these rapid shifts in style risks derailing the forward momentum of an album, but luckily this album is a freight train of hook after hook, catchy moment after catchy moment, never slowing down for more than a moment or two. This band is a goddamn riff factory, and especially on the opening run of tracks “MYSTERY”, “BLACKOUT”, and “DON’T PLAY'' they produce a series of bangers so undeniable they would make any arena rock band jealous. But they also execute all these songs with the heaviness, intensity, and relentless energy inherent to hardcore as a genre. This is still music to mosh to, even if there’s a twinkling synth at the start or a sing along anthemic chorus. Turnstile are smartly trying to bring as many people into the hardcore fold as possible rather than gatekeeping it and making it stay insular, and they’re doing so while ripping as hard as any of the hardcore bands like Vein, Gulch, and Godshate that they share festival lineups with. And if people tell you that Turnstile’s sound like 311 as a way to try to insult them, respond to them as I do with the Ariana Grande “And what about it?” gif. This music, much like 311, is about turning your brain off and having a supremely fun time, and few albums this year are better at doing that. So crank up the volume, grab your pink cloud album cover vinyl, and let’s get in the fucking pit. —Jackie