ROCK-A-RAMA

ROCK-A-RAMA

X becomes ex, MC5 kick out their last jams, Lanegan from beyond the grave again, a different Strokes, and more!

Zachary Lipez

JACK WHITE

No Name

Third Man

If I were in a popular rock band that sold a lot of records but didn’t get much critical respect, I would hate Jack White. Think about it: You pay your dues to the ZOSO Recreation Society on time, your bassist has an MBA from Nü Metal U, your drummer’s drum kit is made out of Mjölnir, and your singer has had sex over a dozen times just to be familiar enough with female genitalia to know which part is the lemon and which part is the moneymaker. After all that, do critics respect you? They do not. They call you “pastiche,” and “dead from the waist up.” Which would be fine (you are, after all, pretty rich), if the critics had stuck with what they used to do: praising punks, glasses-wearers, women, and people otherwise from England. And they still do that. But, for the past 25 years, they’ve also singled out for adulation an absolute unit of cis manhood, a lumbering gazpacho of guitar virtuosity (after your manager had assured you that critics just didn’t like people who could play), who has made a career of playing the most knuckle-dragging riffs imaginable, lifting Jimmy Page licks like he was the blues’ own repo man, and pretending he’s never heard of nil metal despite having an entire middle period where he did nothing but record variations on “Bulls on Parade.” Through all this, Jack White gets treated like three Elvis Costellos in a trench coat. And why? Because he’s “a singular artist”? So were Rush! Because he’s a blues scholar? What’s “Blame It on the Boom Boom" if not a modernist analysis of the works of John Lee Hooker? Because he’s “not gross about women”? THE MAN POPULARIZED FICTIONAL SIBLING PORN NEARLY A DECADE BEFORE PORNHUB. I mean, he’s not even scrawny. Dude could fold the Struts in two and put them in his lunch pail like they were the Von Bondies.

If I was in Buckcherry, Black Stone Cherry, or any combination thereof, the injustice would grate. Especially in the face of No Name, where our critical sweetheart upholsters the Led Zeppelin catalog, answers the question “What would Dead Moon sound like it they were Foreigner?” and rewrites Tom Waits’ “Step Right Up" with the same respect that Ram Jam showed “Black Betty.”

And how is the album? 10,000 out of 10. Does it boil down to Jack White’s voice: an adenoidal heart-grabber, as keening for the post-punk dead as it is drama-club versatile? Is it the guitar tone: an ’80s dream of Robert Plant allowing Zep to get back together on the condition they only do Hiisker Dil covers? Is it because White is built like Vincent D’Onofrio in My Bodyguard? Yes, yes, and heck yes. But, also, some guys just have the magic that the professionally shirtless lack, even when the cock in the sock has similar surface qualities. There’s simply no accounting for the ineffable.

JADE HAIRPINS

Get Me the Good Stuff Merge

Jonah Falco is best known as the drummer in Fucked Up, the album-oriented hardcore band that burst out of Toronto in the early aughts on the momentum of “Police” (arguably the best guitar song, tied with “Maps,” of the first decade of the 21st century). Falco has also distinguished himself as a kind of Trevor Horn of the D-beat set, specializing in making punk bands sound phatter than God, and—in the power-pub stompers Boss—as a charismatic frontman in his own right. Jade Hairpins is where the duo (of Falco and Fucked Up guitarist Mike Haliechuk) combine all their fancies, from Madchester step-on to woozy glam euphoria. The combo could be schizo if it weren’t all boss tuneage, rendered with brio that’s one part Style Council and one part council estate.

MARK LANEGAN

Bubblegum XX

Beggars Arkive

As both singer and towering inferno of permanent midnight fuck-uppery, the late Mark Lanegan was, for a certain type of a certain age, a terrible influence. Lanegan examined his own life with an honesty bordering on savage. His depictions of his character flaws weren’t bragging. At least no more so than any damaged boy cataloging his defects to a pretty girl with a savior complex and an apartment without roommates. That his rich voice made all the dissolution seem just too romantic for words was his influencees’ bad luck.

That his damage has been more influential than his art is another kind of bad luck. While recycling Kurt Cobain riffs is an industry unto itself, Eddie Vedder’s yarl continues to thrive in countless permutations, and the alt-metal scene would close up shop if ripping off Alice in Chains’ melodies was ever outlawed, Lanegan’s work has thus far proved harder to replicate. Falling outside the grunge-industrial complex’s nostalgia machine, Lanegan’s solo catalog in particular is even less a part of the sad-boi-withguitar discourse. If dying early(ish) doesn’t get an artist any cred with the ideation crowd, might as well live. Come back to us, Lanegan. Death has proved to be a financial wash.

Hopefully this new, multi-LP reissue of 2004’s Bubblegum—the most balanced mix of Lanegan’s solo inclinations (toward contained experimentation and roots-rich fecundity)—will revive the man in that other, less-satisfying-than-literal-resurrection way. After all, Bubblegum is correctly considered (amongst the church basements and QOTSA rehearsal spaces where Lanegan stans typically gather) to be the masterpiece. It may not teach the shoegaze youth how to enunciate, and a well-curated reissue is not—technically speaking—a miracle. But Lanegan did sing that he didn’t want to leave heaven too soon. And there are a lot of bonus tracks.

LORD BUFFALO Holus Bolus Blues Funeral

Lord Buffalo, a Southwestern heavy psych band from Austin, are not to be confused with King Buffalo, a heavy psych band from Rochester, which is 76 miles southwest of Buffalo, the death place of 19th-century anti-papist John Chase Lord (no relation). Lord Buffalo are also not to be confused with Nick Cave, though the quartet are a bit more hedging in that distinction. I assume that Lord Buffalo frontman Daniel Pruitt references Nick Cave as an influence instead of Rowland S. Howard (the late Cave sideman whose dirging guitar drawl Lord Buffalo more closely resemble) for the same reasons dudes from Allston just say they’re from Boston. That question of subculture etiquette aside, Holus Bolus has plenty going for it. As befitting an album of violin-driven, sand-swept gothic rock, Pruitt’s voice has a magisterial, warning quality to it. It takes a skilled guru to render this kind of quasi-theological-noir hoodoo as anything but hogwash. In the context of the band’s squalling guitar and violin work, Pruitt provides the correct amount of drama. Pruitt is aided in this (relative) restraint by drummer Yamal Said, who could play up the bombast and just pound away but opts for moody soundtrack punctuation, interjecting just enough border radio flair so’s no one forgets that Lord Buffalo is some kind of rock band.

POISON RUIN

Confrere

Relapse

For those unfamiliar with the term “dungeon synth,” imagine Eddie Van Halen’s keyboards on “I’ll Wait." Now imagine that, rather than “I’ll Wait" being about David Lee Roth’s appreciation of print media, it was instead about wanting to fuck an Ent.

For reasons I fail to comprehend, the Philadelphia-based Poison Ruin are associated with dungeon synth, despite the band ruling. I guess because they have album interspatials and the metaphors favored by Poison Ruin’s mastermind, Mac Kennedy, skew Warhammer Fantasy more than they do Warhammer 40k. Otherwise, the band plays blackened-Oi! (translation: punk with polka drums, involving politics of some sort, recorded in a cat’s butt) with Burning Spirits leads (translation: Guitarist is real, real gud). Confrere is an EP follow-up to Harvest, the band’s Relapse debut, and it’s a vast improvement over what was already a better-than-solid release. They upped the stadium-crust drama of the singing while keeping the music itself (semi-) grounded in skinhead romp-stomp (with enough startstop-gooooooo! to keep the listener on their steel-tipped toes). There are a couple Renaissance fair intros/interludes. If those accoutrements neither add to nor subtract from the proceedings, I’m glad they’re there. We all know how bad KISS stunk once they dropped the makeup.

MC5

Heavy Lifting

earMUSIC

Expecting CREEM to be objective about an MC5 LP is ludicrous. It would be like expecting Rolling Stone to be objective about She’s the Boss. It would be like expecting SPIN magazine to be objective about a band made up of Penthouse Pets and expecting Penthouse magazine to be objective about that one Luna album. CREEM wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the MC5. We owe Wayne Kramer everything and then some. Only two tracks with Dennis “Machine Gun” Thompson? Two more than we deserve, and that’s even before you throw Vernon Reid in the mix. If you’re looking for an objective review of an album of new music by the MC5, you must think you’re reading another magazine. And, don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the trades, but: THERE ARE NO OTHER MAGAZINES. So you’ll take our adulation for our Detroit daddies (plus guests) and you’ll like it.

That said, the MC5 taught us that it’s only acceptable to lie to cops or landlords and, according to our marketing department, that’s 7 percent of our readership, tops.

Luckily, Heavy Lifting is better than solid. It runs hot and joyful in the vein of the ’80s hard rockers (like KIX or Living Colour) who were too tuff to be college rock, too fun/funky to be punk, and too smart by about a billion degrees to be strictly hair metal. A couple tracks are badass enough that they’d have fit nicely on some alternate-reality third MC5 album that would come out in 1975, be hated by purists at the time, but eventually be seen as a classic. One of those—the title track featuring Tom Morello—quite literally answers the question of what an MC5/Rage Against the Machine hybrid would sound like (the answer, I’m happy to report, is “Monster Magnet”). Their take on Edwin Starr’s “Twenty-Five Miles” is at least as good as Grand Funk’s version of “The Locomotion.” We’d say it was even better, but we still have family in Flint. (And relations are strained enough on account of our quoting John Sinclair at the Thanksgiving table and our insistence on annually ending our grace-saying with “Bring out the cran, motherfucker!”)

FATHER JOHN MISTY

Greatish Hits:

I Followed My Dreams and My Dreams Said to Crawl

Sub Pop

It’s no coincidence that Father John Misty’s place within the cultural hierarchy started shrinking around the same time that everyone started binge-watching The Office. Even at his most productive, Josh Tillman only had enough satirical (but with a lot of heart) material for a season or two. Even the respective 70and 50-minute run times of 2017’s Pure Comedy and 2022’s Chloé and the Next 20th Century were no match for an endless feeding tube of Jim & Pam’s fluent-in-sarcasm slurry. It could’ve been worse. The Office could have gone with the initial plan to use an ELO song as its theme, rendering Father J’s project moot from the start. Our man got the time he got and it was plenty. If he wanted Lana Del Rey’s career, he never shoulda winked. Or even blinked.

Caveat: While being a prick about Father John Misty is always a fine time, the new song on this compilation, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All,” is fantastic. If it means that Tillman is leaving the Schmilsson pseudo schmaltz behind and going full Scaggsian pseudo funk, I'll gather every print copy of this issue that I can find and eat ’em all. Might want to buy a second copy as an investment.

ALIEN NOSEJOB

Turns the Colour of Bad Shit Total Punk

At this point, I’m begging for a single Australian punk band who sucks. This is getting dumb and beginning to hurt my feelings. Adding insult to injury, these nerds put out a fantastic album of tossed-off wellness-check garage punk every 15 minutes and spell “color” like they think they’re fancy. But never mind how I feel. If you enjoy the Spits, peeing in bottles, the films of Amy Heckerling, and/or an accelerationist mindset about getting fired/dumped, you’ve already spent your boyfriend’s rent money on both the red and black vinyl variants. Rest assured, it’s money well spent.

MOURNING [A] BLKSTAR AncientZ/Future

Don Giovanni

Always inspiring, often fascinating, and never prioritizing the feels of those outside their intended audience, the avant-soul collective Mourning [A] BLKstar consistently make albums that can make a listener’s head spin, while also consistently having a couple tracks that soundscape a bit further into space being the place than this earthbound midwit can follow. It’s with no small amount of selfish joy that I say that AncientZ/Future is head-spin delicious from start to finish. I’m hesitant to call it “fun” (as calling the despair/defiance dialectics of a song like “Her Song” “fun” is needlessly disrespectful to the subject matter of disappeared Black women), but the album is compelling in a way that I (selfishly) always wanted from the band. Lyrically heady, AncientZ/Future still finds space for the jealousy and heartache that will still need expressing even after the systems of oppression have been converted into lawn furniture. Mourning [A] BLKstar back the complexities with near-doomy slinkiness, minimalist dread/yearning (like Suicide trying their hand at quiet storm), and—particularly in the front-loaded first half—a heaviness equal parts Bill Ward and Betty Davis. The question of havin’ fun can be elided, but the getting kicked off is undeniable.

MYLES KENNEDY

The Art of Letting Go Napalm

There is another world, millions of miles away from the effete and impudent planet that nerds such as myself call home, where bands with names like “Big Wreck” and “Alter Bridge” are incredibly popular— beloved, even—despite those bands never having played Lollapalooza or even recorded a single song with Steve Albini. Which is pretty neat (different strokes, etc.), but it does put a critic like myself in a bit of a bind. I write for a magazine that has always been assiduously opposed to snobbery in how it covers rock music. But also, when this whole universe of post-grunge guitars and messianic yowling dominated the radio, I was too busy cornering the market on white belts and Diesel jeans to notice. So I’m at a loss here. If I like The Art of Letting Go, does that mean I’d like Creed? Should I have been parting my hair like a Goo Goo Doll (a style now known as the “Clean ’n’ Sober Mulaney”) all along? Have I been wasting my life listening to the Swans? (Don’t answer that.)

Point is: I’d never heard of Myles Kennedy. But though I have no metric for judging this stuff (and I don’t know how fair—to anyone—it would be to judge it against White Light From the Mouth of Infinity/ I’m a diligent reporter. Turns out I like Kennedy’s first biggish band, the Mayfield Four. And it’s objectively neat that the man turned down singing for Velvet Revolver and was briefly, kinda-sorta in Led Zeppelin. As for the actual music on Kennedy’s new album: pretty good! Heavy, heavy blues, slitheringly sung like a more heartfelt (and more consistent) Axl, with a winning QOTSA anti-sheen that, despite some intrusive journeyman professionalism, keeps things from getting too Spotify Alternative. I don’t know that there’s anything here that’ll persuade me to trade in my Camel Cash for a Black Stone Cherry onesie. But if other parts of mass culture are this fun, I may consider voting this year.

CHAR-MAN

Down On Ready

Masticating Shit

This SoCal outfit features ex-members of Annihilation Time, Lecherous Gaze, and Nails. Which is kind of a long way of saying, “Don’t leave your drugs unattended in the greenroom,” but also—if, uh, you’ve heard of any of those bands—gives a pretty good indication of what we’re dealing with here. On the off chance that you weren’t huffing Febreze and selling fixed gear bike parts out of the back of a truck in 2004, and therefore aren’t familiar with Char-man’s collective CV, it basically means this is a band that saw hardcore less as a break from history than as a continuation of a certain carnivorous brand of party rockin’. With Char-man, these miscreants have taken their love of classic rock beyond just the weirder Black Flag songs and gone all the way back to the notexactly-classic-rawk thuggery that Lester Bangs preferred over the Yardbirds. It’s a damaged hoot by design.

Smoke & Fiction

Fat Possum

I dunno why this is the last X album. Alphabetland, the Los Angeles roots-punker’s ’20 comeback album, would have been celebrated just for showing up, but it was 99 percent as good as all of us in the grip of onset boomerism wanted it to be. And if the band is breaking up just because Exene Cervenka believes in lizard people and Billy Zoom’s politics are slightly to the left of 99 percent of yer average rockabilly fans, those details would have come up before the band got back together. And, if Smoke & Fiction is any indication, X aren’t out of gas. Maybe Exene knows something about the apocalypse that she’s not saying, or maybe she and her bandmates prefer to go out blazing, with their dignity intact.

For all its energy, Smoke & Fiction does feel like a final album. In its not-unwelcome familiarity, Smoke & Fiction is less like a greatest-hits album than X’s Greatest Parts, with all the stuff that worked rejiggered into new songs. But, for all the strutting down memory lane, there’s also songs like “Face in the Moon” or “The Way It Is.” The two tracks stand out not just for their lunar imagery (as if the overlap between werewolves, Lorca’s ghost, and X fans wasn’t already a perfect circle) but in how both have the blast of old X, the patience of middle-period X (think “Around My Heart”), and an elegiac romance to them that hints at what might’ve been. I don’t know if the latter’s lyrics (“We were never just kids/But we were pretty young /We did what we did/Just to get along”) were written with Patti Smith’s memoir in mind, but they do nicely stake out the different ways of looking backwards. Not that there’s anything wrong with looking at the lean years with poetry-tinged glasses. But that’s the trick of punk desperation: If there’s a danger of getting used to it, it’s time to quit.

ETRAN DE LAIR 100% Sahara

Guitar

Sahel Sounds

It’s true that a number of West African guitar acts draw from traditional templates and have overlapping lyrical concerns. This can be confusing to the neophyte. But it’s not like my mom could tell the difference between the Fall and Yard Act. Anyway, AC/DC adhering to traditional confines hasn’t hurt those costumed desert bloozemen even a little.

Like AC/DC, Etran de L’Air (Stars of the Air) have been drilling down on their workingclass, wedding-party blues for decades. Main difference being: AC/DC typically serve as soundtrack nine months before a wedding. And Etran de L’Air earned their reputation through platonically shaking wedding parties all night long on the occasion of the nuptials itself. On the aptly titled 100% Sahara Guitar, Moussa Ibra and Abdourahamane Ibrahim maintain the cleanliness of their band’s engine, with pointillist passages of astounding fretwork sounding unhurried even as they spark. Having run out of AC/DC metaphors but still needing to fulfill my market-driven function of “compare the West African guitar band to some American indie act,” I’ll say that Etran de L’Air’s devotion to blissed-out repetition reminds me less of AC/DC and more of the recent album of Will Oldham doing 20-minute Lungfish covers. And if the euphoric virtuosity (combined with this listener not speaking Tamasheq) does make the album feel more like a single happening than a collection of singles, all the better. Nobody’s looking for three-minute pop on their wedding night.

PARTY DOZEN

Crime in Australia

Temporary Residence

Making haunted biker-bar sleaze rock without going full cornball is a problem that’s vexed wide-collared lotharios ever since an ex-Bad Seed first went looking for a side hustle. In the 21st century, with our societal norms no longer allowing for lyrics about some fool’s mess running down a gal’s legs, the challenge looms larger. Party Dozen, an Australian outfit (Jonathan Boulet and Kirsty Tickle), have a solution to the problem. Eschewing singing almost entirely, the duo let Tickle’s saxophone do the talking and, acknowledging that the saxophone is the sleaziest of all instmments, they make it sound like a sax only half the time, with the rest of her blurt being rendered as a banshee, a car crash, a Japanese horror movie, the evil doppelganger of Steve Vai’s guitar on “Yankee Rose,” Delia Derbyshire throwing a black-and-white TV set out a hotel window, a baby walrus, the wind, and (occasionally) James Chance (R.I.P.). My only caveat is that the album’s conceit is that the first side is the “order” side and the second is “disorder.” It's a delusional

delineation. As if Henry Mancini was some difficult cat to get into. Plus, only a nerd could listen to side A without breaking all the laws on the books (I’m typing this on my notes app while jaywalking).

MEMORIALS

Memorial Waterslides

Fire Despite being a fanboy of Verity Susman’s earlier work in the 2000s dream-psych outfit Electrelane, and being an admirer of Matthew Simms-era Wire (better than all the other bands who sound like Wire combined), I approached Memorials’ debut album nervously. The duo’s previous work together has been making film soundtracks, a gig that—in the context of aging post-punkers—can mean you don’t have another “Head Like a Hole” in the tank, so now all your fans have to learn to like classical music.

Happily, Memorial Waterslides has no such educational value. Yes, the songs are plenty smart. You don’t bliss out on modal jazz, “Launderette” poltergeist-ska, and Caretaker sizzle in the course of a single track (“False Landing”) without having the k-punk tab open for at least a few years. And not for nothing is the skittering “Ghost Town”-hop of “Book Stall" a contender for song of the year. But as far as librarians go, Memorial Waterslides skews sexy, even as it keeps its hair up and glasses on. Songs bubble and pop—starting as studio concrete and resolving as something akin to yd-yd choral music—following their own internal logic. But it’s dream logic. Less scientifically experimental than immersively fluttering; an introvert’s fantasy of disco.

THE CACTUS BLOSSOMS

Every Time I Think About You

Walkie Talkie

I can’t say enough about how grateful I am to the Blossoms brothers (Jack and Page, actual brothers who have different last names, which is none of my business) for being so pretty, in both face, gear, and song. While so many of their peers in alt-country grow beards long enough to disguise the Brown University cum laude pouting underneath and otherwise try to hornswoggle twang into Replacements riffs, the Cacti frontmen subscribe to the Chris Isaak school of country rock. Meaning they get their hairdos did by werewolves from London, keep the twang tastefully spooky, and sing songs so sweetly that lip-synching even a single track on Every Time I Think About You is guaranteed to get you insanely laid, by any Kelly or Kenneth McGillis you desire, at any Air Force bar in the nation. So unashamedly romantic are these two love fools that they reverse the ballad-to-rocker ratio and kick up dust on a few and spend seven out of 10 tracks swooning. And yes, they do at one point call a gal both “kitten” and “tiger,” as though we still lived in a society.

0KSE

s/t

Backwoodz Studioz

In a 2020 interview, drummer Savannah Harris was asked, “Is the world ending?” Her response was, “Definitely. Respectfully.” Possibly my favorite answer to any interview question ever. If this whole avant-garde musician thing doesn’t work out, 0KSE’s drummer should consider a pivot to media training.

0KSE, a supergroup (or at least group of niche-beloveds) consisting of Harris, Afroelectronica visionary Vai Jeanty, Swedish bassist Petter Eldh, and sax player Mette Rasmussen, play experimental free jazz. Don’t let “experimental" scare you. The album was recorded, in part, by Willie Green, the Backwoodz producer correctly adored for his knack for making noise rappers sound like they’re in the Stylistics. For an LP that begins with guest vocalist Elucid intoning, “Cut out, cut out, cut out the light/We heal in the dark” over a crane-necked sax line, this is a plenty rockin’ affair. Actually, the early appearance of Elucid—a rapper who’s never met an experiment he can’t make sound like Frankenstein’s monster—is an indication of just how hard 0KSE go. The drums swing and do indeed run free alongside the vamp and squawk of the saxophone. But Harris’ drums also, when appropriate, bang forward with the kind of martial vigor discussed in the Second Amendment. And several of the beats here are seductively drum ’n’ bass enough to put Everything but the Girl back on the map. Throughout, the bass and electronics rumble and scrap like a bat cave. The whole thing is life-affirming in intention and practice, while still sounding like nature reasserting itself. An excellent soundtrack for the world definitely ending, respectfully.

HUMAN TROPHY

Primary Instinct

Iron Lung

Primary Instinct is chock-full of meaty riffs rendered bone dry via waves of primitivist black metal fuzz. Once you get past the Geigercounter guitar tone, what you get is songs with a keen, chiming brightness to them. The atmosphere is bleak and the rhythm akin to (U.K. death punk legends) Rudimentary Peni drenched in cough symp, but Reuben Sawyer’s quasi-baritone has a charisma to it that comes through even from the bottom of the well. Despite Sawyer’s previously stated affinity for Raspberry Bulbs, I was going to avoid comparing the man’s current musical outlet to that band (a similarly lurching and excellent death-crust outfit) since the latter carries an iffy association or two that your average Portland Antifa agent wouldn’t necessarily approve of. The life of an esoteric depressive is hard enough. I figured I wouldn’t add any burden by inviting Instagram comments demanding he state unequivocally that “Julius Evola was a stupid bitch.” I mean, my cat Brisket sounds just like Amebix when she snores and I still love her, but just to be on the safe side, I’ll state that Primary Instinct also sounds like classic (and classy!) DIY acts of the Scottish and/or K Records variety (if those bands wore corpse paint and drew pictures of the demiurge on their jeans).

TAMAR BERK Good Times for a Change self-released

This review section is more than a little partial toward the mid/late-’90s TV/movie soundtracks. While modern-day aesthetes may go gaga for the faux-classical and moody-tooty stuff that “prestige” television goes for these days, we here at CREEM still prefer sad ’n’ breezy pop rock songs performed by any given year’s dandiest warhols and most michelle branches.

Which brings us to Tamar Berk. Ms. Berk knows her way around the two kinds of pop that matter: “power” and “Lilith Fair.” Armed with an extremely lovely voice and a backing band of fellow International Pop Overthrow survivors, the range of Good Times for a Change is well balanced between both-sides-now alt-balladry and the kind of post-breakup rave-ups that coulda come outta either Matador or Maverick Records during the golden age of getting dumped. With less to prove than aspiring superstars of the teenage dream catcher circuit, Berk’s allows her maturity to shine in her lyrics while keeping the tunes melancholically bright enough to be featured on any TV show—where the cast of high schoolers were played by models in their late 20s—of your choosing.

MYSTERY LIGHTS Purgatory Daptone/Wick

Mystery Lights definitely mind neither the retro nor the go-go, and I have it on pretty good authority that, when they go out in Ridgewood, Brooklyn, they still know at least half the people they see. But the songs aren’t just memories of better tunes. They have some real sugar and venom of their own. Not not like everybody else, but not not not like everybody else either, you know? If you’re reading this magazine, you’ll probably love this record. For myself, I like it very much. The Monks fetishism has enough Monkees thrown in that I don’t feel like I’m at a monastery. The classicism has the pep of at least the Cynics (the band, not us critics). There’s something decidedly sinewy the way the clean-shave guitars go in and out of the fulsome organ like a train, the rhythm section is Zombie graceful, and when I say singer Mike Brandon reminds me of Dan Sartain, I mean he kind of makes me want to be young again, and also cry.

PATOIS COUNSELORS

Limited Sphere ever/never

Saying that Patois Counselors started as an above-average Sprechstimme band doesn’t mean much considering the dire state of the Sprechstimme median. So let’s say that Patois Counselors have been, at least since 2020’s The Optimal Seat, at least a couple claws cooler than the majority of crabs in the talkytalk post-punk bucket. On their new album, the South Carolina concern leaves the bucket entirely. The singing is majorly pretty now, touching on Vic Godard fragility. Still post-punk adjacent. Still with off-kilter rhythms. But now the post-punk is mainly in the sonic touchstones shared with other artists who bristled at being relegated to the spirit of '77-’81. The shebang is very sweet, almost soulful. The American EXEK we’ve all been clamoring for. Nii romantics that Patois Counselors are, they even (on “Bands I Barely Spoke To”) leave a Dear John note for all the crabs they’ve left behind. Though the sentiments expressed therein could also be taken as a vestigial habit (post-punk bands love to talk real wryly about the scene).

TINDERSTICKS

Soft Tissue

City Slang

Last year, CREEM ran a piece arguing that Hot Chocolate were one of the truly great and misunderstood bands of the 20th century. This year, our friends from the Quietus furthered that argument. Now, as if to confirm our hopes of a corrective Zeitgeist, Tindersticks, Stuart Staples’ quiet noir storm band whose reason for being—besides making infidelity seem sexy and monogamous sex seem like betrayal—is to make a case for Hot Chocolate’s enduring influence, have a new album. I’m not exaggerating. There is no act that so adeptly carries Errol Brown’s torch of sultry, minimally pulsing, fragile-hearted, and irresolvable romanticism. And Tindersticks do so without pastiche; partially by wisely avoiding the whole “funk” end of Hot Chocolate’s oeuvre and partially by kicking the lipstick traces/cigarettes aspects of soul up about a hundred notches, so that every encounter is a murder mystery and even the twee babes who might favor Tindersticks (over, say, Sade) are femmes fatales if they want it. Staples’ voice (a mix of plea, bleed, and Aualonpurr) has always been suited for strings and Tourneurian vibes. Even when the coolly dismayed phrasing makes him more true love’s foil, a man doomed to incisive post-punk rendering of soul because his first choice (being Teddy Pendergrass circa 1979) is off the table, he pulls it off with an urbanity that implies that the sex will be, if not mind-blowing, at least extremely filthy.

CHUBBY AND THE GANG

And Then There Was...

Flatspot

Chubby and the Gang’s stellar debut, Speed Kills, kicked off the skinhead rock resurgence (or at least put it on the radar of Condé Nast). So much so that the Gang jumped from the punk label that put Speed Kills out and rereleased the debut on Partisan Records. Now, consciously uncoupled from the majors, they’re back on the hardcore streets, with 16 mnemonic devices regarding the struggle. I appreciate the fact that Chubby are the Taylor Swift of the Oi! revival (with besties the Chisel, whose recent album was also 16 songs in length, as the Oi! revival’s Beyoncd), but this run-time arms race is killing me. Admittedly, Chubby squeeze out their 16 tracks of Chelsea-cut rock ’n’ roll in half the time of Tay Tay’s differently Chelsea-obsessed quadruple (and counting) album. But, adjusting for punk scale, 16 songs is a lot.

I harp only because some of the songs here are as bruisingly catchy as anything currently within the street-punk-o-sphere, and the album’s highest points are better. Tracks like “Company I Don’t Want to Keep’’ and “A Lust for More” combine Small Faces swagger with the mooneyed reverie, gruffly served, of the least excruciating region-rock punk bands. And Then There Was... is often fantastic. But I don’t want Chubby and the Gang to be often fantastic. I want them to rule. The Small Faces did drop the “small,” and maybe there’s a lesson there I’m missing. But Rod the Bod and his gang of soccer hooligans still kept their ellipses masterpiece to nine songs.

THE CLEARWATER SWIMMERS s/t

New Martian

The resurgence of interest in “slow-core” (a term, coined in the ’90s, for sad music that was favored by people too shittily dressed for goth) does not thrill me. So let’s not call the Clearwater Swimmers “slow-core” or, worse, “sad-core.” These Queens moodists do go at their big-city Americana at a relaxed pace. And, as with their indie forebears, I’d love to have a long, threatening chat with whoever dresses them (I get that young people in Biden’s America enjoy looking like extras in a Sheryl Crow video, but I remain resolute in my belief that musicians, regardless of gender identity, should dress like they’re either in the Temptations, the Runaways, or Gwar). But if the band’s gift for the understated informs their sartorial choices, it also gives their songs a steady grace. And if the band’s sound—their twang and delicately applied distortion, tastefully applied horns, piano, and brushwork—is so subtle that they get lost amidst other drift merchants (most of whom have never heard Galaxie 500 but are savvy/cynical enough to woo the post-fun set with egregious levels of shoegaze), that’d be a shame. Something this searchingly pretty shouldn’t have to shout to be heard.

KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD

Flight b741 p(doom)

I had an old roommate whose bedroom mix consisted of “Fly Like an Eagle” repeated for 90 minutes. So I’m open to King Gizzard citing the Steve Miller Band as an influence on their newest. It would have been just as cool/accurate to claim the Monkees as an influence. A casual viewing of King Gizzard’s video for “Le Risque”—where the boys play dress-up, trade off vocals, and cavort around an airplane hangar like a bunch of huggable goofballs—does suggest some of the shared spirit of the somewhat unfairly labeled Prefab Four. I get that the world isn’t ready for that conversation. Of course, when a band capable of the motorik-Sabbath of an album like Nonagon Infinity uses the same skill sets to make hootenannified choogle, it’s a bit like the Manhattan Project being used to make marshmallow treats. That said, if you combine the Monkees with the Steve Miller Band, you get the Doors. And once you do that math, questions of fluff go out the window. What’s the point of being a lizard king if you can’t do what you like?

THE VOIDZ

Like All Before You

Cult

Two anecdotes about the Voidz’ Julian Casablancas:

(1) In the early aughts, I was tending bar and a very drunk Casablancas came in. I gave him free drinks because it’s Bartender 101 that, if the bar is empty and two girls come in, buy them drinks because girls bring in boys. And, at that time, Julian Casablancas was the NYC equivalent of one thousand pretty girls. After a few drinks, the Strokes frontman ambled off, neglecting to tip me. It must have gotten back to him that I was annoyed because, a few weeks later, he showed up and gave me $50.

(2) In 2018, I was at a party for the opening of the Levi’s flagship store in Times Square. As part of the entertainment, Julian Casablancas sang “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed’s song about Levi’s getting opened in and around Times Square. Casablancas performed the song with gusto. Except he swallowed the “colored girls" line every time. It was 2018 and he wasn’t taking any chances. If no one else was laughing as hard as I was, it was because the crowd thought they were hearing a Strokes original (or just had no idea who this strange dad, slated between Joey Bada$$ and Princess Nokia, was).

These stories are why I can’t review the new Voidz album. I derive too much pleasure from the Voidz singer’s existence. If the Strokes have evolved into some War Babies-era Hall & Oates yacht/prog thing, Casablancas has only gotten weird, with the resultant Voidz albums being delightful/inscrutable. Like All Before You continues this trend. Some of the most questionable songwriting choices to come out of the Class of 2000s—auto-tuning, fantasy novel voice-overs, repurposed New Order riffs, repurposed Randy Rhoads riffs, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk with Peter Cetera-era Chicago production—with an end result more satisfying than anything the Killers, the Strokes, and Kings of Leon have done in decades. I hope it’s universally panned so that it can be correctly reassessed, years from now, as another high-esque point in the career of our generation’s Scott Walker (if Scott Walker had gone funk-metal).