Rock-a-Rama

Rock-a-Rama

Nineteen albums guaranteed to treat you like a Saturday night

Zachary Lipez

KNOCKED LOOSE You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To Pure Noise

How you’re going to feel about this bad boy depends on a few factors: how one feels about guitars that sound like bass drops spilling from the butt of a Dodge Challenger, how one feels about metalcore guest features designed to set the Twitch chat on fire, how often “Ad-Rock spitting in my mouth” shows up in one’s search history, and if one could make it through the last couple Code Orange albums without falling on the floor from laughter. I go back and forth on all but the last one. So I hated this at first. Now I kind of love it. If you’re on the street, trying to enjoy your $15 cup of cookie dough, that Dodge Challenger is obnoxious. But if you’re in the passenger seat of the Challenger, nodding to the music, staring right through the NPCs on the street, enjoying the day with your best friend Craig as the bass rattles the essential amino acids around both your skulls? Well, life doesn’t get much better than that.

ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO Echo Dancing Yep Roc

Alejandro Escovedo has been around. The Nuns, then Rank and File, then True Believers, then nearly 20 solo albums (and more collaborations/appearances than one can easily count); over four decades—often at a scene’s year zero—of punk, cowpunk, roots rock, Americana, orchestral experimentation, with a little new wave added for taste. Less a journeyman than a journey, man. On Echo Dancing, Escovedo revisits songs from his own catalog, applying modernity (percolating dmm machines, ambient fuzz, etc.) to some that were initially rootsy, while debuting new songs that feel as lived-in as dirt. Some of the old songs, like “Everybody Loves Me,” are on their third iteration, as if the song was so restless that it’s all Escovedo can do but to try to pin it down every few years. And some of the oldest songs (“Outside Your Door,” a True Believers standard) are “updated,” but shifted forward in time mainly to pay tribute to artists like Suicide, who made future sounds in 1980 but played ’em like Gene Vincent. The time travel would give you a headache if it all didn’t sound so sad and sweet.

LORD SPIKEHEART The Adept HAEKALU RECORDS

Martin Kanja, aka Lord Spikeheart, is a longtime veteran of the Kenyan extreme music scene who— besides a number of international freak scene collabs released on unimpeachable Kampala labels like Hakuna Kulala and Nyege Nyege Tapes—fronts the noisenik-revered, Sub Pop single-earning, bleak-metal duo DUMA. The Adept may technically be Spikeheart’s solo debut, but the album sharpens a sound that he’s had on the anvil for some time now. That sound—a sly, bracing death ’n’ bass mix of a million electronic dance permutations, and the kind of dissonant metal that blurs the line between the music genre and the substance good for conducting electricity and building Titanics—distinguishes itself further on The Adept by (a) getting the production it deserves (the album feels like getting slapped around by Tricky) and (b) being beat-heavy enough to be almost accessible to normies (if your normie idea of a good time is “Nag Nag Nag,” remixed for a haunted hangar rave). The listener doesn’t need to know that one of the album’s central themes is “fuck colonial oppression (especially the English)” to wild out to it. But if you haue been fucked over by the English (or 15 cough* an oppressive colonial power closer to home) and are looking to play while you break all the furniture in your house about it, Lord Spikeheart has got you.

OMAR SOULEYMAN Erbil Mad Decent

Twice, while deejaying Souleyman in a bar, a Syrian expat came up to the DJ booth to explain that the cigs, sunglasses, and shemagh-sporting icon’s success was a CIA psyop. As documented in a piece (by Hassan Hassan in New Lines Magazine) about gate keeping in Middle Eastern music, the richies in Syria couldn’t get behind the idea that anyone but Syrian poors might actually like some wedding singer from the sticks playing dabka (a folk-dance music combining electronic beats, Kurdish influences, and Middle Eastern melodies). When the expat confronted me, I tried to explain that we loved Souleyman as roughed-up techno, not as some perceived imperialist denigration of glossy Syrian pop. I think, when trying to explain hipster appreciation for less-than-pristine voices, the only example I could think of was Mike Ness. So, if I didn’t win anyone over, that’s maybe on me. Anyway, with no disrespect to the conspiracy-minded haters (you can’t go wrong blaming the CIA), if American spooks had ever evinced an iota of the good taste required to push sinewing electro-throb of this caliber, the Dulles brothers would have been called the Exciting Brothers.

LOST LEGION

Behind the Concrete Veil

Mendeku Diskak

There was a time—as bands like Chubby and the Gang were getting reviewed in the online pages of DIY Fancy and the Journal of Beyonce Studies alike—when it looked like there might be something like an Oi! revival. Every day there were new bands with Slade in their blood and “nazis fuck off” in their bios (which might understandably raise a red flag in its need to be said). Skinhead shows—historically made up of sociopathic swells dressed for construction or Rod Stewart’s funeral—were suddenly infiltrated by non-terrifying types (such as myself). The trend never crossed over. Asking indie kids to keep their collars crisp was always a nonstarter. More the pity because if there’s a band who deserves to be able to quit their day job of breaking rocks in the hot sun, it’s Lost Legion. Chicago’s finest esoteric-themed thug rockers play with enough rough-hewn sass that you’d think Blitz had been from Australia, write tunes with enough brains and brawn to populate a Pet Shop Boys song, and sweat out hooks so naturally that I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the grandchildren of one of those boy groupies the Go-Go’s impregnated on tour. (Lost Legion do such a sweet version of “Tonite” that I’m convinced that last part is true.)

BIG/BRAVE A Chaos of Flowers Thrill Jockey

As the one-sheet for this new album by Qudbecois “massively minimalist” subversion-of-power trio BIG/BRAVE makes a point of mentioning how much external poetry was utilized in the album’s making, I’m tempted to respond by just quoting poetry back. Unfortunately, CREEM has rules forbidding poetry not written by Patti Smith or, like, Deep Purple. So go look up James Tate’s “From an Island.” The poem discusses ghost ships, memory, fog, dust, low horns, and “the rubble that was everything.” It won’t describe exactly how BIG/ BRAVE’s bassless magnitude and dirging, Rhys Chatham-orchestral folk clamor celebrate infinite difference, but it’ll give you a rough idea. Or—if you’re as poetry-averse as the bosses—you can just read Deep Purple lyrics. If you ignore the lines about Zappa and focus on the smoke, the water, and the burning gambling house dying with an awful sound, that’ll work too.

PEARL JAM

Dark Matter

Monkeywrench/Republic

Dark Matter works nicely as an alternate-timeline greatest-hits package of other bands. “React, Respond" sounds like Christian Death. The title track is Monster-era R.E.M. doing “Feel Like Makin’ Love." The guitar coda on “Won’t Tell” could be the burliest Cure song never written. “Wreckage” rewrites “Learning to Fly" as “Learning to Fly." None of this is to say that Dark Matter is pastiche. There’s only so many vibes available if you want to rock ’n’ roll. Rather, Pearl Jam have become a folk-rock band of wide and discerning taste; plying/twisting the traditions of the past half century in ways both novel and winningly familiar. Also, I dunno if 30 years of countless therapeuticlanguage-abusing abusers ripping Eddie Vedder’s nasal purr off has made the original’s shine in comparison, or if dude’s voice has just gotten fuller and sweeter. Either way, it used to make me twitch but now I kind of want to curl up inside it.

Much-needed reissue of classic rockabilly album by the ex-frontwoman of Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, largely overlooked despite featuring the Clash’s rhythm section, members of the Rich Kids and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and a veritable Cracker Jack box of sweet ’n’ crunchy popcorn, novelty keepers, and temporary tattoo prizes. Calling a rockabilly album that came out in 1980 a “classic” might seem odd. It’s not like they erect statues of Civil War reenactment generals (no matter how inspired the General Lee cosplay in question may be). But it’s 2024 and—seeing as how all historical memory is higgledy-piggledy—1954 may as well be yesterday. It’s fascinating to observe what the mirror does! Anyway, it’s not like Sun Studio was exactly running amok with half-Filipino belters who flunked out of new wave only to graduate Rock and Roll High School with straight A’s. (Top of the class artistically, that is, if not in terms of sales. Pearl Harbour is still kicking around, though, recovering from cancer and still making swell roots music. So help her out with those bills. She seems real, real cool.)

CHOO CHOO LA ROUGE The Sunshine State

Klam Records

The Sunshine State, the first peep by this (originally from) Boston outfit since 2009’s Black Clouds, is reminiscent of a time when clever/disheveled scamps who were born to the Byrds-to-DreamSyndicate pipeline, and raised in the belief that college was primarily a place to have radio shows, could still make a decent living plying their trade. It’s going to sound like an insult when I say that Choo Choo la Rouge would have made a great ’90s one-two-(three-tops)-hit wonder. But anyone who knows how deeply I treasure the Golden Age of Rom-Com Soundtracks from that era (which was, roughly, from Clueless to 10 Things I Hate About You) can reassure the band that I mean it as high praise. Half these tracks would sound perfect blasting from Julia Stiles’ Walkman while she ignored some supple-lipped athlete’s entreaties to take off her glasses. The fact that more than half are wry meditations on how the flesh grows weak and dignity flickers is beside the point. If being literally young was a requisite for conveying the pains of growing up, both Jane Austen and Shakespeare would have spent the ’90s looking for work.

LENNY KRAVITZ

Blue Electric Light

Roxie Records

For all the lazy dismissals of his work (yeah, the Grammy voters think he’s a genius, but that’s like being called a poet by the board of directors of Baskin-Robbins) as pastiche, Kravitz haters are missing something. Like, what exactly does Kravitz sound so much like? The Time if Morris Day was a sweetie pie? Led Zeppelin if Robert Plant had never wanted to fuck a hobbit? Prince if Diamonds and Pearls was his only album? The Gap Band if the munitions they dropped was L.O.V.E.? Kravitz doesn’t sound like any time in music that ever actually existed. If anything, he sounds like a 21-year-old who’s super into Lenny Kravitz (with the abs to match). Part of the issue might be his whole “my religion is love” thing. Not saying the man should pray to being an asshole. But if “Up, Up and Away” is your sacred

text, it doesn’t hurt to remember those poor saps still stuck on the line in Wichita. Anyway, if you think I’m going to run Lenny Kravitz down, you underestimate my appreciation for kittens, sunshine, and the kind of sex that you don’t regret because it’s with someone you love who loves you back. Life is suffering, but it’s other stuff too. Why shouldn’t a 60-year-old black leather bodhisattva, rocking a body built to satisfy ya, say so? Especially when major dude in question has the voice of a kula shaker half his yuga and makes songs—shamelessly catchy songs, with bass so rubbery it’d make King Leopold drool in hell—that add nothing to the world but joy.

IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE

Pull the Rope

Merge

In terms of minds blown and asses freed, it’d be tough to beat Electricity, the album this U.K. collective released in 2022. For a band so aggressively polyglot (especially in terms of musical language), Electricity honed their disco/not disco, Africa-avant (from King Sunny Ade to Nyege Nyege Nyege Tapes), psych-rock, Afro-rock, and krautrock influences (basically every dance-adjacent cult fave released on the 12" format between 1982 and 1987) into something spectacularly cutting. Acknowledging that some might find even a streamlined amalgamation of all the pre-’95 names dropped in “Losing My Edge’’ to be a bit messy, it can’t be denied that Ibibio Sound Machine set themselves a real bitch of a high bar.

Whether Pull the Rope meets that bar is debatable. “Debatable’’ in that, if you ask me on any different day of the week, I’ll give you a different answer, and then have a spirited debate with the “me’’ of the day before, that idiot. Perhaps on account of the stated influence of Chicago house music, Pull the Rope is a warmer affair than previous albums. If it’s also less immediately blinding than Electricity, is that also the house influence; the prioritization of pulse over flash? If Chic’s dream was to be a Black Roxy Music, are the multiethnic Ibibio Sound Machine the utopian ideal of both those bands smooshed together? Is that notion bolstered or undercut by Sound Machine’s seeming refusal to purchase an album (outside those released on the aforementioned Kampala label) recorded after 1989? I can’t decide. If Pull the Rope isn’t exactly as jaw-droppingly good as the last Ibibio album, well, neither is your mom. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t still express gratitude for all the truth and funky beauty she’s contributed to the world and offer to carry her groceries to the car. (Ibibio Sound System would not approve of me disrespecting your mom.)

COUCH SLUT

You Could Do

It Tonight

Brutal Panda

Growing up, I had a mixture of bravery and cowardice that sometimes worked out and sometimes didn’t. Like, I’d get myself in bad situations—cos I was brave and wanted to see how shit would pan out—and then, occasionally, I’d find myself in a situation where my being 6'3" meant that, if I fought back, I’d probably be able to leave. But that’s when the cowardice would kick in (on occasion) and I’d just sort of be like, “Whelp. This sure sucks. Oh well.’’ When I think about that stuff, it doesn’t feel great BUT I sure am grateful to the art that I consumed around those times—Lisa Carver, Cows, some transgressive work by some people Couch Slut probably wouldn’t appreciate being compared to—which telegraphed nicely a message of “Yeah, man. Life is pretty wild.’’

Anyway, Couch Slut are pretty wild as well. They sound like a slaughterhouse after the livestock get their hands on a captive bolt pistol and have a glint in their cow eyes. They sound like early Sonic Youth freak-out parts when the CD skips. They sound like AmRep Sisyphus shouting “yeehaw” as he rides the boulder down the mountain. Sometimes they sound like Mountain, if Mountain was a black metal band. Yeah, The Jesus Lizard shows up too, but unlike 99 percent of noise rock bands, Megan Osztrosits has enough of David Yow’s charisma and lyrical prowess to avoid noise rock revival tropes of rewriting Bukowski poetry in crayon. Osztrosits begins one song like Bikini Kill’s “Carnival" before going morally/aurally off the rails.

Everyone is going to call You Could Do It Tonight “scary" but, like, it’s music, which isn’t very scary. Everyone is gonna call it “claustrophobic." But it’s not. It’s a bunch of shovels for digging your own way out. It’s basically gospel music.

INTER ARMA

New Heaven Relapse

These Richmond metal lifers know their way around a slowed-down Sabbath riff. But they’ve always used doom (and sludge, crust, and all the other ways to say “not fast heavy metal”) as just one layer in their cake of brutality. Other layers include death (as metal and inevitability), Pink Floyd, Finnish psychedelic black metal, NIN, Prince (specifically ’81 to ’84), Nick Cave, a touch of Suicide (both band and ideation), punk of all shapes and sizes, and, increasingly, enough Swans to make Tchaikovsky’s lake look like a puddle. It’s a pity that the term “funeral doom" is already used to describe the metal subgenre that sounds like a prehistoric wedding band covering Mendelssohn at glacial enough pace that both bride (a giant sloth) and groom (a gelatinous cube) have time to reach the altar. I say this is a pity—despite Inter Arma’s obvious disinclination to be pinned down—because New Heaven is a transcendently dirging* album. One that takes doom as a given, but not for granted. Any of Inter Arma’s dead or dying friends would be stoked to have it played at their burial.

MELVINS

Tarantula Heart

Ipecac Recordings

You know how, when a famous musician dies and their label runs out of unreleased songs from the vaults, the bean counters will occasionally start Frankensteining old demos and practice sessions together? Selling the scraped DNA of a corpse might seem distasteful to prudes and communists, but what if said DNA were scraped from the musicians... while they were still alive? Taboo as that may sound, that’s what the Melvins—clearly not trusting Mike Patton to monetize their inevitable passing—have done. After having the individual Melvins improv and jam out parts, King Buzzo—a man with little time for communists (and probably prudes, too, I guess)—then wrote entirely new songs from all these parts. I looked it up and it’s all perfectly legal. According to the law (such as it is in Joe Biden’s America), “corpse fucking" minus the corpse is just “fucking."

(I’ve been told that this review reads like I don’t like Taran tula Heart. Not the case. Besides reckoning that the 20-minute song could have been a cool 15 with no one being the wiser, I think Taran tula Heart may be one of Melvins’ best. All in all, it’s a woozy, writhing, bracing-in-not-tedious-ways slab o’ gnarled fun. But if the band is gonna make me read about the recording process—when, once again, the lyrics to “Smoke on the Water” would have sufficed—I’m gonna follow my bliss.)

*The two adjectives aren’t contradictory. Think: “Valkyries mud wrestling.”

TIDIANE THIAM Africa Yontii

Sahel Sounds

Look, I already know that the cover art for this Senegalese guitarist/polymath’s second album (third if you count his improvisational collaboration with Amadou Binta Konte) is going to be an issue for some. An acoustic guitar sprouting branches in an arid big sky landscape might lull the reader into thinking they’re in for some aimless new age plucking. But, while there are indeed ambient animals jamming throughout, and Thiam’s playing contains meditative quietude to spare, this ain’t that. So pretend it’s a Talk Talk album cover and let’s keep it moving. What Africa Yontii is—and, truth be told, I could make further Talk Talk comparisons if I wanted to—is the artist’s overarching need to get exploratively free and some pointed subtext about the state of Senegal/ Africa in general, sung only through his guitar (and interspersed electronics provided by beatmaker Ndiaye Moctar). Not that the silver-spun melodies need to spell out any liberatory ideology; Thiam’s guitar already rings out like a bell.

LES SAVY FAV

GUI, LSF

Frenchkiss

In a lot of ways, Les Savy Fav represented the dream of the aughts, with only enough of its reality to have, you know, actually existed. The living embodiment of the hoodie/blazer combination, before it all went to hell... Smart without being “literary,” DIY in that they had their own label, but never DIY-er than thou, tuneful and funny, bearishly non-model hot, without ever prioritizing sleaze over indie. With the heart of a TVOTR fan club and the record collection of a sassy DFA librarian, Les Savy Fav made the sort of noise that only a post-hardcore collective of disco aficionados could make. Like if James Murphy had never turned his back on the ice-cream-eating shores of Fugaziland. At their worst, they were the Ikara Colt who almost made it. At their best, they were the best. And now they’re back, putting all their chips on being the latter.

I realize the above reads like a band bio. Hardly critical at all. My being in NYC and of a certain age might imply that Les Savy Fav are friends and this is just more of the hideous nepotism that dominated criticism in the early/ mid-/late 2000s. Well, rest easy. In the aughts, my band sent Frenchkiss our demo. They didn’t sign us. Know who they did sign? Call Me Lightning. CALL. ME. LIGHTNING. I spent the next 10 years tending bar.

So, I can assure you that, on a personal level, I don’t like these pricks even a little. Album still rules hard.

EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN

Rampen: apm (alien pop music)

Potomak

Running at one hour and 15 minutes, the new album by Einstiirzende Neubauten, aka the Beatles of industrial music, is three minutes shorter than Beyoncd’s Cowboy Carter. That’s what happens when you become a superstar; nobody tells you the truth that CDs aren’t making a comeback. To be fair, Rampen is 18 minutes shorter than the Fab Four’s White Album, which supposedly inspired all this. To be fairer, of the three aforementioned albums, Rampen is easily the least of a slog to get through in one sitting. Of course, a band that makes a signature sound out of ball bearings and sheet metal being set on fire has a bit more wiggle room in terms of singles. The conceit of the album (Einstiirzende Neubauten play alien pop music) is both needlessly self-effacing (at least half the bops on 2000’s Silence Is Sexy blow “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” out of the water) and self-defeating (anyone looking for a hit as solid gold as “Yii-gung” will be disappointed). Still, it seems unkind to punish Einstiirzende Neubauten for consistency. It’s not like regularly pulling jaunty beauty out of literal wreckage is something anyone can do. But maybe the band does need a little competition to push ’em to the next masterpiece. BEYsturzende Neubauten, Beyonce Voltaire...Musique Carterete...Zyklon Bey Zombie... (ok I'll stop) (sorry) (but I do have more...)

MDOU MOCTAR

Funeral for Justice

Matador

Mdou Moctar’s bassist, Mikey Coltun, also plays with Noura Mint Seymali, Oumou Sangare, and Yonatan Gat—three artists who have made stronger arguments for “Rock Is Back!!!!” than all the ’90s retreads I don’t care to name combined. So when dude compares Mdou Moctar’s origin (playing wedding parties in Niger) to the D.C. punk scene, we’ll simply say it’s a funny comparison. Funny, in that one can’t really talk about the coups in Niger and Mali, the Taureg’s aspirations for an independent state of Azawad—basically all the things that have been themes for albums by Mdou Moctar, Tinariwen, BKO, Imarhan, and half a dozen other extremely

exciting rock bands originating (and, for many, currently in exile) from the region—without talking about Libya. And one can’t talk about Libya without talking about American interference. And Lord love the D.C. punk scene but, well, one could probably play Six Degrees of Separation between the parents of some of those D.C. punks, some of those parents’ jobs as “diplomats,” and the fall of Gaddafi. And still have a couple degrees left over. Not a jab at Coltun, who’s kind of a genius, nor at Moctar, who—in a truly generous act of noblesse oblige de la riff—has taken it upon himself to single-handedly save American jam music. I’m just pointing out that using punk as the barometer for all that’s good and true—even when the intention is to essentially say, “Hey, idiots, if you like Black Flag there’s no reason not to love Kei Assouf, unless you’re an asshole"—can open its own can of worms.

On the other hand, Mdou Moctar does kind of sound like a mix of Beefeater and Lungfish. (It’s okay when I do it. I’m a professional.)

CAGE THE ELEPHANT

Neon Pill

RCA

Perusing Cage the Elephant promo photos, it’s clear that the band has always understood the assignment. I’m not slapping them around with a fake compliment; they really look terrific, like a genuine glamour-puss rock ’n’ roll band. Of course, the image and the music are a bit of a bait and switch; like if Motorhead sounded like Toto. Again, not trying to hurt feelings. Why should the 1975 corner the market in lite-alt-funk dressed as sluts?

At CREEM, we’re not delusional. The role of the critic in 2024 is nil. We’re all here for kicks exclusively. Cage the Elephant fans should rest assured that this whizzy concoction will fulfill a fan’s needs. Purchase like wild. (But I am going to say that, with six members in the band, there’s a 100 percent chance that at least one of them hates this music with every fiber of his being and just needs to get his kid into a good college. It’s whichever one spends his time on the tour bus staring out the window, listening to Si lent Alarm on repeat. To that dude, on the dark days—when he wishes he’d listened to his mother and joined The Dandy Warhols—I say, “It’s okay. Hunter can go to a state school. You’ve done enough.”)