THE CURE Songs of a Lost World Fiction/Capitol

The Cure were never better than on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, when Robert Smith was playing Buster Poindexter’s character in Scrooged as an orchestra of midi horns funked up the afterlife behind him. In their artificial brassiness, “Hot Hot Hot!!!” and “Why Can’t I Be You?” were as close to a cyborg utopia as humanity would reach before the timeline diverged and we ended up in our current soy lent reality. In a twist appropriate to our times, it’s become a consensus opinion over the past couple decades that Disintegration, the 80 percent brilliant album from 1989, is the Cure’s masterpiece. That album contained some of the greatest postpunk ballads of the ’80s, and drenched them all in cascading wind chimes and CD run-time. This has resulted in generations of musicians thinking that they don’t have to write a “Fascination Street” as long as they remember to smear the lens. Now, it would appear that the lie that Robert Smith is better as a Hamlet than as a Muppet has sunk far enough into the gothic strata that it’s reached the source. Thank God nobody told the Cure’s rhythm section of Simon Gallup and Jason Cooper. Otherwise, we might be in trouble.

To be fair, Disintegration worked because it was the Cure, a band famously immune to their own failings. It’s not Roger O’Donnell’s fault that his Venus de Milo was so compelling that a million billion cut-rate moodists decided that arms were unnecessary. And Robert Smith isn’t going to chase his own reverb tail, because he’s Robert Smith and he’s some sort of genius, which in the arts is the same as being lucky. So what if much of the Songs of a Lost World don’t sound quite finished? So what if, amidst the contempo influences permeating the album, the band throws so many broad-stroke piano chords against the wall, I kept expecting the Titanic to show up? So what if Smith infuses phrases like “cold black rain,” “blood red moon,” and “I could die from a broken heart” with enough world-weariness that you’d almost think he was innocent of cliché, and possibly being a crappy boyfriend? The Cure, those fuckers, pull it all off. If you didn’t pay attention, you’d almost think Lost World was good. Because it all sounds so good. Which I guess means it’s great.

It’s great even on “Drone: Nodrone,” where minutes of wah-wah-wankery are sustained by a singer intent on beating out Bernard Sumner in terms of getting away with it, and further propelled by a rhythm section that lays it down like they think they’re recording the Gap Band’s industrial album. It’s great especially on “A Fragile Thing,” where our gang of chrysanthemums rewrite Simple Minds’ “All the Things She Said" as a funeral clatter-funk waltz. As in the consensus on Disintegration, I won’t overrate Songs of a Lost World. There are a lot of moving parts here, and a lot of ’em are daft. Yet, when they’re all in the same room—flexing with ease and gussied up in O’Donnell’s finery, with Robert Smith showing off how clichds become pop poetry when you know how to apply the lipstick—I’ll be damned if the whole Frankenstein mess doesn’t come alive.

AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS Cartoon Darkness B2B

Whether one agrees that Amy Taylor is an underrated lyricist depends on whether one thinks that rock ’n’ roll lyrics are a distinct art form, with their own rules of engagement. It depends on whether one thinks that “Some mutts can’t be muzzled/Well, I guess I got you puzzled (woof woof)” is as succinct an encapsulation of rock ’n’ roll’s priorities as “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” or “Tutti-frutti, oh rootie.”

Taylor has stated in interviews that a lyrical influence is hip-hop’s aspirational positivity. If one is unaware of the Sniffers’ palette, it’s possible to take some of Cartoon Darkness as defensiveness. Certainly the band’s success (playing garage punk, which, since the Hives, has been a pretty niche concern), combined with Taylor’s penchant for dressing like a combination of Farrah Fawcett and the Incredible Hulk, has made them an easy target for those who think that it’s one thing for pop stars and rappers to wear booty shorts, but that a female rocker’s bodily autonomy should only be expressed via androgyny, black denim (which can be formfitting as long as it covers the singer’s ankles), and/or suffering. On the other hand, as a fella, that’s pretty easy justification for this reviewer to make. I know females who feel differently about the political utility of a punk singer in a bikini. One can embrace Amyl and the Sniffers for what they are, a great yob rock outfit, without buying into any notion of skinny white blondes being an oppressed class. With that in mind, lyrics like “You are ugly all day/I am hot always/You are just a critic/And you want to hit it/ You are fucking spiders/I am drinking riders” can simultaneously thrill while having an air of a Keiis who resents having to justify the milkshake she was previously so hyped up about. If Amy Taylor didn’t talk about her bikini, neither would I. I’m ideologically committed to dressing all musicians with my eyes.

*Unless otherwise indicated

Anyway, we can take Amyl and the Sniffers at their word that they are just continuing their particular style of (somewhat vague) wellness. With Nick Launay producing, the Sniffers have never sounded healthier. Having worked with Nick Cave and Kate Bush, Launay excels at getting outsize frontpeople to embody their own distinct charms. In this context, Amy Taylor takes every opportunity to assert how free, in both ass and mind, she is (or intends to be). By the time “Me and the Girls” (a combo of Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” Kix’s “Body Talk,” and the James Gang discography) barrels along, with Taylor red-bouncing-ball rapping, “Me and the girls don’t care if we’re ugly.... Me and the girls want free abortions,” the haters can take the band as they are or keep it moving. Like the saying goes, it takes a dark cartoonist to sing a looney tune.

BOB NEUWIRTH self-titled Sunset Blvd

The selling of the new Bob Neuwirth “revival" doesn’t do Dylan’s No. 1 dude a lot of favors. With a lot of leaning on what a nice guy he was and how he got some of the biggest geniuses and/or hacks of 1974 to show up at the studio before noon, it’s hard not to get the sense that he’s half almost famous for cowriting “Mercedes Benz” and half for being one of those handsome men that Ms. Joplin so famously preferred. Of course, if just being around in the ’70s was enough, every coke dealer in Laurel Canyon would have a reissue series devoted to them. What separates the outshined artists from the hangers-on (who, if they were lucky, rated a mention in a Steely Dan song or two) is the tunes. Well, nostalgia and the noblesse oblige of famous friends helps too, but mainly you still need to have tunes. Which Neuwirth has and had, as evidenced here, on this reissue of his debut album. Remixed to accentuate his strong, affably ragged voice and unpretentiously wry lyrics, the strength of the songs on Neuwirth’s newly stripped-down debut makes a compelling argument for the difference between unsung and correctly reevaluated just being a matter of pushing the vocals up in the mix.

ROTARY CLUB Sphere of Service Iron Lung

As Reno, Nevada’s (maybe all of Nevada’s) premier landline-telephone-themed punk band, Rotary Club’s band members sport names like “Dial Tone,” “Hot Line,” “Operator,” and I. “Speed Dial” Halladay. One assumes that these aren’t the names that the band members were given at birth. If that was the case, forming a landline-telephone-themed punk band would probably be destiny, or at least the best option available. Outside of that unlikely scenario, the band deserves credit for the eccentricity of their chosen high concept. Though, considering that the first band credited to drummer Halladay (who also played in the late/great Sarah Kirsch’s Mothercountry Motherfuckers) was named “The Call-Up,” there could be some larger compulsion involved.

Setting questions of free will aside, the gimmick has longer legs than one might think. Especially when done with the *cough* dialed-in proficiency and joy displayed throughout Sphere of Service’s all-too-brief 25-minute runtime. While landlines have gone the way of travel agents and affordable housing, rock ’n’ roll has granted—from “Hanging on the Telephone" to “Call Me"—the obsolete technology a totemic enough power that having a discography thematically devoted to it is no more exhausting than singing incessantly about any other beloved anachronism (tunnels of love, scene unity, rock ’n’ roll, etc.). It does help if the artist is committed enough to the bit that the music is chronologically consistent. In this, Rotary Club deserve extra credit for seeming to have never heard a note of music recorded after 1982, the year that the Bell System monopoly was ended. As this was the year that the Angry Samoans released Back From Samoa and the Zero Boys released Vicious Circle, it’s arguable that Rotary Club have never heard any music prior to 1982, either. Not sure how that last part fits into the theme, but who’s complaining? If smartphones have made me nostalgic for anything, it’s for a totally wired communication device that does one thing, and one thing only, exactly like you want it to.

TSUNAMI Loud Is As Numero Group

Readers of our CREEM vs. the ’90s issue will have noticed that we hold the Arlington, Virginia, indie label Simple Machines in high regard. Despite having released early recordings by some of the finest bands of the decade (Autoclave, Lungfish, Scrawl), the label’s discography is overshadowed by that of the label's kindred spirits a few miles away at Dischord, the Fugazi/Minor Threat label whose front porch currently gets more tourist visits than the Lincoln Memorial. Numero Group is attempting to remedy this historical oversight by reissuing all the albums by Tsunami, the band started by Simple Machines founders Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson; five LPs in all, collecting all eleven 7-inches and demos, complete with a book of essays (by “six respected music writers,” though where they found six “respected” music writers is anyone’s guess) edited by Fugazi scholar Joe Gross. While Numero Group’s reissue series is admirable, it can veer into ’90s fetishism (if not *gasp* onset boomerism). Without picking on any band in particular, the label does sometimes seem intent on filling the collection gaps for a certain kind of nice, politically astute, decidedly unsexy librarian. It’s churlish to say so, but not every album by every band that played a Food Not Bombs benefit needs to be repressed. That said, Numero Group isn’t spending their money on bombs. So clearly those early lessons took. (And, full disclosure, this unsexy librarian bought every Chisel repress and has $27 saved for when a Merel reissue is announced...)

Churlishness out of the way; the Tsunami box set! Much more than a footnote at the time of their existence, with a span of influence that can be lipstick-traced all around the DIY punk-o-sphere, Thomson and Toomey’s moody punk-pop outfit paired understated (though affecting) melodies, sung with conversational gorgeousness, and bursts of fuzz and drama that often seemed pointedly truncated, as though following through to anything too anthemic would be letting the alt-nation profiteers win. What may have seemed at the time like the band just didn’t have a Smashing Pumpkins megabit in them sounds, in retrospect, more intentional; almost decent (but not in a boring way). Like contemporaries Sebadoh or (the great) Scrawl, Tsunami’s almost Wire-minimalist take on rock music feels less like an absence of ambition/ability and more like a hardwired talent at drilling down on the minutest of moments, rendering (in generally non-cringey fashion) the personal as political and vice versa, and making interiority rock hard. Even the song “Punk Means Cuddle” now charms more than it grates. Whether this is a sign of history being kind to Tsunami—or if it’s a sign that Tsunami’s refusal to reciprocate history’s general cruelty now feels that much more essential—is a question above my pay grade.

PYPY Sacred Times Goner

Ten years ago, with Pagan Day, this Montreal band (the “y”s are pronounced like the “i” in “FYI”) put out what was possibly the greatest new wave krautrock Aerosmith album ever made. The world understandably wasn’t ready for that level of Wendi-go-go, so the freak scenesters went back to their day jobs of singing in Duchess Says, playing guitar in Red Mass, and general druidry/ bartending. Now, after a decade molting in the French-Canadian permafrost, the PyPy peacock has risen. Maybe it’s because the American psychers, Death Valley Girls, have made the world safe for esoteric hard rock bands who worship at the altar of Asheton, Osterberg, F Schneider, and the lady from Suburban Lawns who disappeared to go into real estate. Maybe Merlin called the band forth from the realm of the faerie. Maybe PyPy’s underground lair ran out of poutine. Whatever the reason, PyPy are back, and they want to dance this gnostic mess around. Annie-Claude Deschenes is wailing like a Kindercore Ann Wilson, the synths are one part herky-jerk and one part Herk Harvey, the guitars sound like they were pulled like copper wiring from the Stooges’ Funhouse, the motorik-discotheque rhythm section is steady as she goes, and nearly every song has at least one verse or chorus that most bands only come up with after they’ve gone mad on account of being a nanny at a haunted orphanage.

THE SUBMISSIVES Live at Value Sound Studios Celluloid Lunch

What with the eccentric tuning and somnambulant, faux-naive harmonies, the Submissives’ first proper LP, which was recorded in 2017 but is only now seeing the light of day (via the bandleader’s newfound sobriety), can be enjoyed by anyone who loves the famously unintended geniuses known as the Shaggs but who also worries that loving the Shaggs might mean they’re either living at an unbridgeable distance from anything truly felt or, worse, are living as though “unintended genius” isn’t an incredibly cruel way to describe someone’s art. Because, while not as problematic as New Hampshire’s premier fili-sploitation act, the Submissives (the brainchild of Quebecois actual braingenius Tara Desmond aka Deb Edison) do put the “sham” in “shambolic.” Meaning that pulling this shit off requires more skill and muso grace than your average prog band could dream of, and that Edison manages to convey the same sense of otherworldly invention as the Shaggs; she just happens to do it within exquisitely (and, tbc, intentionally) crafted songs, which only sound like they’re being made up on the spot because every instrument conveys hesitancy—the Voidoidian no wave chords and lounge lizard snare/hi-hat combo feeling their own way through the dark—and each sound works in the most fragile conjunction with the one that precedes it. The songs end when Edison stops singing.

FRANZ FERDINAND The Human Fear Domino

Alex Kapranos’ singing voice has always given everything Franz Ferdinand do an air of Jessica Rabbit. The songs aren’t necessarily naughty, they’re just sung that way. Dude’s tessitura—which, in technical terms, ranges from “gentleman bandit" to “elfin prince”—simply has an open-blousey tone that demands reciprocation. The disco that the band likes to default to also implies a degree of boxer-brief drench, but since Franz Ferdinand’s idea of disco can veer into (befitting the band’s name) Oompa Loompa territory, the lion’s share of the blame lies with Kapranos. This holds as true for The Human Fear as it did back when these Glaswegian smarty-pants-removers first burst upon the scene (with 2004’s “Take Me Out,” an indie-dance smash hit beloved by 21st-century girls and boys who wanted the “Girls & Boys” lifestyle without any confusing lyrics about anal sex). I don’t know what these 11 tracks are about. The promo material says some stuff about overcoming and accepting fear, but never mind that. It’s easy to be brave when you’ve got a rhythm section as intuitively tight as Bob Hardy and (new drummer) Audry Tait and all your new songs are orchestral-ska, and that’s somehow a good thing. At these levels of justified hubris, I don’t want to hear about Alex Kapranos being as scared of death as I am. My man’s heaven probably has red leather interiors. Therefore, until academia says otherwise, all these songs are about having Veronica Lake’s sight line and no visible panty lines.

AL-QASAR Uncovered WeWantSounds

Thomas Attar Bellier, the Los Angeleno (by way of France) ringleader of international psych outfit Al-Qasar, calls what his band does “Arabian fuzz.” In both profession and disposition, the stoner rock veteran is a booster of non-Western sounds. This kind of boosterism, in the wrong hands, can make for a real pickle. When Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African music is spearheaded by musicians not from the Middle East, South Asia, or Africa, you can, historically, get well-intentioned but vacuous silk road exoticism or worse. On the other hand, there are few redder colonialist-hipster flags than imposing one’s puritanical notions of “authenticity” on musicians whose desire to collaborate with musicians from a few streets over is reciprocated. If all temperaments involved are open to more than the Western-mandated 12 tones, the riffs are sick and the checks clear, and someone is good at filling out visa paperwork, why be a cop? Al-Qasar elide overanalysis by not giving a hoot about borders, colonial or otherwise. While others have screwed the transatlantic pooch by either wearing the Middle East et al. as a costume or being so focused on “modernizing” the Pomegranates sound that they sound like they were working for the CIA (which they occasionally were), Attar & Co. approach this album of covers like Attar’s miles are about to expire so he’s flying all his friends in for a bender.

Someone more self-conscious might see doing “Personal Jesus,” but sang in Turkish, or Sean Paul’s “Get Busy,” but transformed into chaabi, as novelties. If they did, they’d miss out on all the fun that Al-Qasar are having, and the long-ass tradition that this kind of cultural exchange (when done right) exists within. Instead of being the playlist oddity it could have ended up as, Depeche Mode’s hit (sung here by Sibel Durgut as “Ki§isel isa”) is pushed around in time so the original’s glam stomp is upped to “My Coo Ca Choo" levels, saz and synth are combined to raise a Selda-esque cosmic funk, and a rave sheen is applied till the song is only as novel as one of the KLF’s polyglot bangers. As for the Sean Paul track, the Jamaican dancehall hit (which utilizes a riddim named after a Hindu holiday) is moved to Morocco, with Sami Galbi putting the ra'i in riddim and Souleymane Ibrahim (Mdou Moctar’s drummer) banging it home (wherever that may be). Meanwhile, Nada Mahmoud plays a wiry scorcher of an oud-line that sounds as surfy as its ancestors did, both back in Tunisia and back in America; back when Richard “Dick Dale” Monsour mixed his Lebanese roots with guitar feedback and got future Pulp Fiction fans to see an Eastern Mediterranean folk song as the 101 soundtrack to a bitchin’ life.

Throughout Uncovered, Attar enlists a who’s who of African and Middle Eastern hepcats, so many that space doesn’t allow for due credit. Attention, though, must be paid to the singer Alsarah, who reps Sudan, America, her own bad self (and—if we may brag for a moment—CREEM magazine, for whom she has written). The Nubatones frontwoman helps transform “Desse Barama,” by Hamza El Din (whom spiritually aligned readers will know from the Grateful Dead’s Rocking the Cradle, Egypt 1978 live album). The Egyptian Nubian composer’s delicate ballad becomes a barely contained (if Sade-sophisticated) psychedelic freakout. If all the geographical dizziness of these sounds is seamless to the ears it’s because, well, did you think all this shit was invented in Orange County? Novelty? Not a bit. In their willful eclecticism, Al-Qatar are traditionalists. It’s borders that are the joke.

PIXIES The Night the Zombies Came BMG

The TV show From is about the residents of a small town shouting at each other as they are picked off one by one by malevolent spirits. It’s appropriate that the Pixies, a band known for its infighting and the way that none of its bassists are safe, provide the show’s theme song. The band’s version of “Que Sera Sera” is a minor-key, almost neo-folk take that spares nothing from the Doris Day version except the notion that, in its perverse sense of dread, Alfred Hitchcock would dig it. As a further nod to that director’s less savory aspects, it’s difficult to get proper credits for which of the Pixies’ ladies played bass on it.

There’s nothing here as evocative as “Que Sera Sera,” but a lot of it comes close. New bassist Emma Richardson (formerly of Band of Skulls) has a distinct enough voice and playing style that she doesn’t sound like a shadow of Kim Deal (even if nobody sane is pretending that the Pixies will ever fully exist outside of their cofounding member’s absence). But it is through the theme from From that this album makes sense. The From song doesn’t sound like the Pixies, but it stands on its own merits. Outside the occasional moments of “Sleepwalk” bringing back memories of Bossanova, The Night the Zombies doesn’t bear much resemblance to early work. Unlike the band’s maligned mid-period, this is a plus. If the band had decided to leave all that reunion money off the table and change their name, the material here would be regarded as swellegant noir-rock, made by reinvigorated journeymen and fantasists, three of whom used to be in the Pixies. Inflation being what it is (and assuming that “the Pixie Chicks” was a nonstarter), I wouldn’t have changed my band’s name either.

KIM DEAL Nobody Loves You More 4AD

It’s all well and good to bandy about words like “community” and “art,” but anybody who tells you that there are no circumstances where music is a competition has either already won or has a management team that does the shooting on their behalf. Sometimes the competition is due to one’s insecurities and sometimes it’s caused by the market imperative that there can only be one lady and/or one minority at the top of any scene at a time. Those reasons being different ends of the same bullshit doesn’t make them any less real, but sometimes the cause for competition is nice and concrete too. Like, say, when you release a solo album within two months of a new album by the band that you cofounded and have parted ways with, in an acrimonious fashion, on multiple occasions. So, with apologies to art, community, and the Pixies (who, to their credit, go down swinging)...this round goes to Kim Deal. (With extra points awarded for Deal collaborating with the two members of Savages, Fay Milton and Ayse Hassan, who deserve a bit of shine.)

WARHAUS Karaoke Moon Play It Again Sam

Maarten Devoldere has enough steam in his sex machine that he can pull off singing “choo choo,” which is pretty much the litmus test regarding such matters. If you don’t believe me, feel free to test the theory. Grab your boyfriend (of any gender), doll him up like Jarvis Cocker, Teddy Pendergrass, or Harry Nilsson in a bathrobe (if you share a place in Bushwick or otherwise pay the rent), give him the lyrics to “Cuddly Toy,” or even just the words “choo choo" written on a piece of loose leaf, and have him read the script aloud. Let me know how it goes. No wrong answers.

Devoldere, the former frontman for the Belgian group Balthazar, now performing solo under the moniker Warhaus, is a witty, just-shy-of-showy lyricist with a cigarette ’n’ honeyed voice that threatens a consensual good time. Slyly being mostly handsome (strong chin, possible redhead), and having his Wikipedia age listed as “36-37," the singer offers up come-ons with enough arch gravitas that the listener is granted a reasonable amount of complicity. In this, the space-age bachelor-pad R&B buoying the songs is produced phatly enough that the grooviness gets a little pushy, endearingly and otherwise, depending on the track. It’s a fine line, these kind of whispered bittersweet nothings. When invested with too much meaning, you get Geordie Creep shouting “pussy” as a critique of male toxicity. Not enough meaning and you get Charlie Puth. Warhaus walks the line adroitly; knowing that negging is for creeps while understanding that you don’t decline to eat an onion just because it makes you cry. As with Pulp or Serge Gainsbourg, this is the kind of seduction music that you’d have to be insane to fuck to. But you sure can comb your hair to it. For a collection of torch songs, what with doing drugs off of CDs being a bit of an anachronism, what more could anyone ask for?

HIGH REEPER Renewed by Death Heavy Psych Sounds

In stoner metal, there’s a blurry line between the space truckers (like Sleep)—the kind of almost krautrock that Thurston Moore listens to as art—and the gas buffers (Pentagram or Small Stone Records) whose Sabbath worship is designed to impress winos and Scott Weinrich, not the whiners in the press.

I was going to open with a joke about how High Reeper’s new album is named after what the Wilmington DMV told the band members when they tried to get their driver’s license unrevoked, but I have a rule about not making fun of dudes whose ball cap brims are creased at an acute angle. I’ve been punched in the face by whiskey-fueled characters, often with cause, but I can see by their promo shots that our guys have cheekbones that don’t come from Ozempic and give off the squirrelly energy I associate with wallet chains that are connected to nothing but chaos.

Luckily for the safety of my next passage through Delaware, High Reeper’s squirrelliness also comes through in their music. In the aforementioned high time divide, High Reeper takes the latter left-hand path. If the band’s first couple LPs grooved nicely within the stoner category, they did so with a mean streak akin to the snaggletoothed heaviness of bands like Weedeater. High Reeper peppered their bass-driven songs with titles like “Plague Hag’’ and, fuck a fine point, “Weed and Speed.’’ On Renewed by Death, the band accentuates the negativity further, ditching the fringes and playing the classic doom riffs as thrash. In turn, the stoner repetition accentuates those riffs’ jaggedness. In upping the singing register, the phantasmagoria rings out bracingly (almost vulnerably!) in all its satanic, wounded glory.

CHUCK PROPHET FEAT. ¿QIENSAVE? Wake the Dead Yep Roc

Wake the Dead isn’t a cumbia record, in the way that Desire wasn’t Dylan’s roma album. Rather, it’s a cumbia-inflected Chuck Prophet album, with ¿Qiensave?’s masterful cumbia urbana bolstering the hard-luck/heart-full-of-wonder Americana that Prophet has been embodying since his days as the guitarist for Green on Red. As evidenced by their recent collaboration with Chicano Batman’s Eduardo Arenas, ¿Qiensave? aren’t concerned with reverent adherence to genre. Here the Salinas quintet thread high-noon boogie with Mysterian funk to provide texture and tension, rather than to crowd the dance floor. This is good, because Prophet’s style of phrasing doesn’t lend itself to compromise. At the risk of damning with sky-high praise, our guy comes from the school of The Sensitive Survivor; where the Replacements are “The ’Mats,” Joe Strummer is Saint Strummer, and every night is so thick with police or thieves it’s a wonder that anything prosaic gets done at all. Not an insult: Prophet is tied with Alejandro Escovedo and Mike Ness for staying gold in the bad-boy balladeer Olympics. If I’m shit-talking in signifiers it’s because the notes are all there. Still, sometimes meaningfulness is best served with a bit of sass. So, regardless of which partner is taking the lead (or if it’s just a side effect of the singer recovering from stage 4 lymphoma with veins coursing with renewed angry young manhood), it’s nice to hear Mr. Prophet singing with his hips.

THANK I Have a Physical Body That Can Be Harmed Big Scary Monsters

Noise rock was once a music by and for jerks. Not capital “J” jerks necessarily, but definitely people you wouldn’t ask to babysit your child or bag of drugs. In time, being a jerk has become frowned upon (go figure), so noise rock is left with the quandary of being generally populated by sweetie-pie nerds who have to sing like they hate the world (insofar as it extends to a few feet shy of their merch table). Acting the heel is harder than Steve Albini (or Steely Dan) led us to believe.

So kudos to Thank for eschewing sounding like a bunch of assholes entirely. Instead, the quartet keep the rhythm throb-y-throb bouncy and the misanthropy slyly bombastic; mustache-twirling circus ringleader with a dash of Circus Lupus. Consistent with the sounds of Thank’s native Leeds (as traditional to the Gangs of Four and the indigenous Doktor Avalanche people), Thank dapple inverted bravado and squiggle-disco bass/guitar/synth tones with a spiritual yelp that can only come with regularly getting shaken down by society. Thank look and sound like that famous cartoon of R. Crumb walking down the street, glaring at the buff dude who’s just whistling his day away under a pair of Ray-Bans as our hero positively seethes. That’s what / Have a Physical Body That Can Be Harmed sounds like: positive seething. They have a song (“Down With the Sickness”) that starts with “I’ve got a sickness called 'sad little guys’ disease.’” My people!

THE HARD QUARTET self-titled Matador

Full disclosure: I’ve been making jokes about Pavement since 1990. Less out of animus, more out of my preferring my white blues to sound more like Danzig. I’ve attended two Pavement reunion shows in the past 15 years and left both early. The first because UV Race were playing across town and I was too pigheaded to figure out Seattle public transportation, and the second because, when I saw them a few weeks ago, Pavement played “Trigger Cut,” their main song besides the other one, and I needed some pizza. Point being: The Hard Quartet’s debut may have a drummer (Jim White) I love, a brilliant guitarist (Matt Sweeney) I owe big-time for turning me onto Sleaford Mods a decade ago, another guitarist (Emmett Kelly) who’s kind of incapable of making bad music (and has cornered the market on the remaining good band names to prove it), and Stephen Malkmus. The album is also 53 minutes long. Being a due diligencer, that’s at least six hours of my life, with little offered in return except, best-case scenario, Matt Sweeney following me back on Bluesky.

Luckily, the album’s worth the time. I wish there were more songs like the delicate sludge of the opening track, “Chrome Mess,” but I understand that isn’t really the target audience’s steez. I can’t tell the singers apart because they all do that unassuming rocker thing of sounding like a ball of yarn in a brown paper bag. But as anyone who has friends with kids, and therefore has drunk beer on a dock while listening to John Prine at sunset, will tell you, this can be quite nice. All in all, the album is like that. Like fall foliage, shared amongst old friends and one charming frenemy. I don’t know that I need it more than a few times a year, but it’s worth traveling an hour or two to take in.

SONGHOY BLUES Heritage Transgressive

Ostensibly to pay tribute to Malian artists who have inspired/supported them (but also maybe out of exhaustion at a decade watching critics strain desert wind/sand guitar metaphors past the breaking point), Songhoy Blues have made a decidedly un-desert blues album. Engaging in neither the proto-punk rawness of their Nick Zinner-produced debut nor the funk rawk of 2017’s Matt Sweeney-produced Résistance, these apparently no-longer-exiles from the Sahel have instead delicit-ized their once rambunctious sound, with each instrument and voice feeling as immaculately intertwined as the vines running through a hothouse garden. While “arboretum rock” doesn’t have the same oomph as “desert blues,” the quietude that the band achieved in their Bamako-based recordings is as stirring as when they previously turned the transmogrified Hendrix/Knopfler/traditional riffage up to 11. The band’s hopeful sweetness is already indicated by the simple fact of the musicians’ return to (now BRIC-affiliated) Mali, but even if it didn’t, the music itself conveys a reverie in the past and a (at least partially realized) dream of a better, potentially beautiful world.

MELTED BODIES The Inevitable Fork self-released

The problem with a lot of “extreme” metal (or hardcore) bands is that the confluence of complicated song structures and bark-bark singing can eventually feel cut off from humanity. I guess the pain is supposed to be so intense that only animalistic howls will cut it. I don’t mind the Cookie Monster stuff on principle, but I’ve talked to a lot of rabid wolves in my time, and the sounds they make don’t resemble the approximations attempted by the majority of extreme metal singers, even when discussing their lupine ex-wives. At a certain point, I don’t feel like I’m listening to any living thing making music, I feel like I’m listening to a product ornately designed to convey suffering. But what do I know? Maybe all these dudes’ ex-wives are really that bad.

Anyway, Melted Bodies singing the way they do is a real plus. Like other exceptions-to-the-rule (Voivod, System of a Down, Virus), the singer’s not afraid to sound a bit like a pushed-upon weasel, as humans often do. The music certainly does convey a degree of punishing racket, but it’s anchored by a sweet knack for uncommon melody. The striving capability of the musicians and nerdy vulnerability of the voices conjure up both Celtic Frost’s version of “Mexican Radio" and a dream world where Wall of Voodoo returned the favor and did a border radio version of “Dethroned Emperor.”

TOYS THAT KILL Ex-Posse Vol. One Recess

That McConaughey-ism about high school girls in Dazed and Confused—“I get older, they stay the same age”—could also apply to any number of shitty pop-punk bands clawing at fame from 10-20+ Punk-O-Ramas ago. And not just because of pop-punk’s unfortunate reputation in regards to age-gap dating. Pop-punk as a musical form is a pair of old skinny jeans— made for the young, may or may not be out of fashion, definitely more suited for back then, and looking worse and worse as each day passes.

Which is what makes all of Todd Congelliere’s projects and the latest Toys That Kill LP, Ex-Posse Vol. One, so out of the ordinary. Out now on Recess Records, Congelliere’s batting average as he’s gotten older isn’t subpar or even middling—it’s progressing. There is no such thing as a bad or even shoulder-shrug TTK effort, and with every FYP release, every Clown Sounds or Underground Railroad to Candyland or Jumpstarted Plowhard LP, it seems like Todd’s brand of pop-punk gets more and more refined. The focus on influence from the Davieses as opposed to the Ramones gets more and more pronounced, replacing the toilet humor and shitty drunk-punk nihilism. Now we more than recognize the grand irony/almost laughable notion of using the words “pop-punk” and even inferring “maturity” in the same sentence, but that’s what the fuck is going down here. Good old-fashioned, no-frills songwriting with an ear for melody as the years have crept by. -FRED PESSARO

NEON NIGHTMARE Faded Dream 20 Buck Spin

If you’ve listened to metal for more than a couple years, at some point you’ll be confronted with a photo of Peter Steele hanging leg in the infamous Playgirl spread. Now, part of that is because of his hog, let’s be real; another part of it is because he’s an objectively good-looking man (pause) who seems like he could have slid out of the pages of an Anne Rice novel. But the third part is that both Carnivore and Type O Negative were objectively fucking ill, and Steele died way too young (at age 48 in 2010).

Just like in pop, for every band that sells a zillion metal records, the A&Rs manage to find 15-20 others that sound the same and try and slide them in without you knowing the difference. The problem here is that when you looked and sounded like Peter Steele did, that is no easy feat. Which leaves any band that is able to pull off anything near the Type O Negative sound as impressive because it’s a total rarity and hasn’t been pulled off thus far.

Now Neon Nightmare aren’t Type O wholesale, but they do have a good goddamn lot in common with them. It’s gothic, slithering, sexy metal built for the stripper pole, with a Bela Lugosi baritone as a frontperson. But where NN deviate is where it gets interesting—and the shrouded frontman (now revealed to be Nate Garrett) put his fingerprints all over it, calling on classic Ozzy, doom metal, and more to punch up the more traditional TON approach. It’s basically a more gothic Spirit Adrift, complete with all those impressive hooks but now tipping the cap to Mr. Steele more than ever. Or maybe he’s tipping the cap to that hog. No judgment either way. —F.P.