crème de la creem

crème de la creem

You know how they say that cream always rises to the top? Well, here we have some of the best up-and-coming bands that are rocking our world right now, ranging from experimental art pop to a dub reggae artist schooled on indie to a krautrock warhorse to a punk band with Mideast influence. So if music were represented by a glass of milk, then this would be the cream that sits on top. Or actually maybe the air just above the meniscus. Or maybe the oxygen above the oxygen above the meniscus but still below the lip of the glass. Or maybe it’s the space between when you start to drink that milk, the small sliver of air between the liquid and your pursed lips. IDK, but this shit is up there.

NADAH EL SHAZLY

Nadah El Shazly’s first band was Sick Gdrch, a Cairo punk outfit with a focus on Misfits covers. Outside of the (now Montreal-based) composer going where eagles dare, this detail is irrelevant. Or maybe it’s relevant when coupled with the fact that El Shazly’s greatgrandfather was a poet who wrote for Umm Kulthum, “Egypt’s Fourth Pyramid" of song (whom we’d tie the bow neatly by calling him “Egypt’s Glenn Danzig,” if we were a complete idiot). What’s more relevant, however, is a 2023 interview where, in describing how growing up in Cairo helped get her into noisier experimental sounds, Nadah El Shazly told the interviewer that “from a young age I got used to the noise, and from that I got into very loud music. I think I just needed something that was louder than the city, you know?” Considering how subtle El Shazly’s take on loudness is—how she textures experimental clang and haze into melody and shuffling, staggering beats, overlaid with vocals that would be as much at home in smoky ’60s Greenwich Village cafés as they would be on Middle Eastern pop charts from any era—this line might also feel like a misdirect. Until one considers how the sounds of any booming city ebb and flow with the hour and neighborhood. El Shazly doesn’t need to pummel the listener with post-traffic noise, not when she uses her music to give the listener the sense of traveling through every back alley and along every power line.

“I lived all my life in Cairo, and now, for the first time, I was living so far away, like in the North Pole,” El Shazly says, describing the physical and emotional state she was in while making her new album, Laini Tani (her first non-soundtrack LP since her debut, Ahwar, in 2017), far from home, in a place where she sometimes felt like “a caricature, a meme.”

“I mean, it was the snow in the background, you know? Missing my friends and my family and the streets and everything that I know and grew up with, and this is a physical feeling that you can’t really explain, so I wanted to write songs that can reach you quickly.” It’s 5 a.m. in NYC and noon in Beirut when we talk, with the background noise and the periodic dropping of the call serving to illustrate how, even with modern technology, music is still the most immediate, and arguably only guaranteed, way to make distance livable.

Last year we saw Nadah El Shazly open for Horse Lords, a raucous post-skronk band from Baltimore. Horse Lords, as an instrumental mathcore outfit, were a good fit for El Shazly, but Horse Lords’ crowd are also drinkers, and talkers. So we feared that El Shazly was doomed to be talked over, seeing as it was just her and a harpist (longtime collaborator Sarah Pagé) on stage, with—as if to add to the stress—the elevated L line right outside the venue window. We needn’t have worried. In the face of progdude chatter, El Shazly went quieter, almost a capella, until the entire room of beards and semi-ironic Grateful Dead tattoos fell silent.

“When you first look at what’s on stage, it’s a singer and a harp player. It seems like it’s a fragile setup,” El Shazly says. “But then it’s super powerful and grabs your attention at some point. It’s just a question of people calibrating to a new sound. Obviously when there’s drums and bass and a full band setup, then people need to attune themselves to another situation, and this just usually takes a minute. You just have to persist. And then it happens that people are listening.’’

And when it happens, and the people listen to an artist as singular as Nadah El Shazly, we’d do well to join them. Like the Umm Kulthum of Lodi, N.J., once said, “Moments like this never last.”

ZACHARY LIPEZ

PACHYMAN

Our journey with Pachyman began in the weirdest of places, Rockefeller Plaza in NYC, just a few short steps away from where they plant that giant Christmas tree every year. The occasion was iNDIEPLAZA, a well-curated and free-to-all fest located in the thick of it all, just steps away from Rough Trade Records on the occasion of Record Store Day. The temperature was in the upper 40s, the rain was steadily light but steadfastly irritating, and Pachyman was performing to fans who were fighting inner monologues about loving the grooves and hating the environment. Pachyman won his round, but some of the other acts weren’t so lucky. The night before was the start of the rude awakening, as Pachy Garcia (pronounced “Pa-chee” and not like the Greek root for “elephant”), who hails from San Juan, Puerto Rico, flew in from sunny Los Angeles to a cold and wet NYC, only to hail a $100 Uber to his hotel.

Thank God Pachyman’s sound cut through all the gray and bleak of the day and night, illuminating the plaza with his sunny take on dub reggae with psych and funk influences. But all those sounds come from a variety of different bands that Garcia has played in throughout the years, from reggae to postrock and with every type of band under the sun. “Well, I had an all-instrumental, experimental kind of, like, post-rock, very inspired by Can,” recalls Garcia. “I played in reggae bands in Puerto Rico for 10 years, and the same people would be doing ambient projects, lots of improv and all over the place. When I moved to L.A. I was looking for a job, and I tried to get a job at Permanent Records— I ended up working in a little café right by there. Eventually I landed a slot opening for the Traditional Fools, which was Ty Segall’s first band. ”

Pachyman’s love for the indie and experimental scene kept him in that world, and the Permanent Records tie eventually led to his debut, In Dub. His latest is Another Place, which hit via ATO in May and is another set of galactic dub reggae that shows Garcia’s roots, whether in indie or world music. A multi-instrumentalist, Garcia identifies himself as a drummer primarily, and it shows in the neck-snapping grooves that ooze throughout the recording. “I feel like Carlton Barrett and Sly Dunbar are incredible drummers, and I still see Santa Davis playing in Los Angeles from time to time because he lives out here. And Tony Allen—huge inspiration. I used to sit down and play for two hours at a time, and a lot of the time it was Tony Allen riffs. Also Phill Calvert from the Birthday Party. I was listening to a lot of them when I first started playing drums. And I can’t forget Jaki Liebezeit from Can.”

For all that influence, Another Place rounds up to make for a funky, blissed-out good time, perfect to lighten your mood or for a particularly nice day at the beach. Or where they shoot The Kelly Clarkson Show, apparently.

FRED PESSARO

POPULATION II

There’s a three-piece band, and there’s a fucking power trio. As much as any of us love them, the first iteration of the Cure, despite those songs and Robert Smith’s unmistakable presence, was not a power trio. Same with Rush. ZZ Top. High on Fire. Melvins. While all of them have a certain hard riff quality, it’s more about the skill of the players, the versatility, and how just plain badass they are.

Population II? That’s a motherfuckin’ power trio. The Montreal-based band is psych at their core, in the same manner as Hawkwind and Can or the more recent DMBQ, Green Milk From the Planet Orange, Wand, and Destruction Unit. They’re proggy, krautrock-y, technical without being dorky, melodic without the wimp factor—how about we settle on ripping and badass? So far the band has released four EPs and as many LPs, including the recently dropped and very gnarl-heavy Maintenant Jamais for Bonsound in late March. And while they tip their hat to all of those styles and bands, they credit one thing as the most important: the swing. “That swing that was so important to the Meters, that’s really important to us, too,” says bassist Sébastien Provençal matter-of-factly. “That is very similar to L’Infonie from Montreal, which also has its own approach to swing and improvisation. Just watching each other and reacting. The way Pierre-Luc plays drums and sings, we are so connected. We actually use a metronome on parts of this record, so it’s just as crucial to know when to follow it as when we know to stay away from it. Bower power!”

So in one train of thought we jump from native Québecois improv to funk gods to Eyehategod—a fun tell of the wide diversity of the band. And though Population II lean more toward krautrock than heroin blues metal, it’s the little idiosyncrasies that make Population II way more unique than any list or discussion could account for. That’s probably a function of the different backgrounds of all the members, as well as a willingness to play with anyone. “We’re really privileged to play with all sorts of bands, and musically they are usually much different than what we do,” recalls guitaristkeyboardist Tristan Lacombe. “We’ve done dates with Osees and J.R.C.G., but we’ve also had times when we played with punk and hardcore bands like Béton Armé, Faze, and Puffer. We’re kind of between a lot of scenes because of our punk attitude and our prog sound, but that just makes us stand out more, I think.”

And stand out they do, head and shoulders above legions of bands with that prog tag— laying waste to the wimpy with their intensely spaced-out jams and thundering interstellar grooves that come to life. Yes, when it comes to killer riffs and grooves, Maintenant Jamais is a certified boner-causer, especially if you love Earthless or This Heat. But more than anything, Population II are a live band you need to see. And ASAP. -FRED PESSARO

PROSTITUTE

One of the dumber public musings of 2016, at the start of a 10-year run where competition to say the dumbest thing imaginable has proved to be as cutthroat as at any time in human history, was when Amanda Palmer said that the incoming President of the United States was “going to make punk great again.” She said this with the best of intentions, as the hellbound famously do, but some appreciations for a cup of rancid milk being half full are better left unsaid. Now, a decade later, Palmer is half right. “Greatness” remains subjective, but, considering that students are being thrown in unmarked vans for social media posts, it’s now plausible that, for the first time since possibly ever, punk has stakes. Especially if you’re Prostitute, a post-punk band from Dearborn, Mich., with a membership representative enough of that area’s population, whose debut album ends with a song called “Harem Induction Hour,” sports cover art depicting Arabic script and a man in full black headscarf, and is titled Attempted Martyr.

When “Prostitute” is the only part of your band’s identity that the Powers That Be Deportin’ might find appealing, you and yours could be a touch fucked. This concern was apparent when talking to the band’s cofounders Moe (vocals, guitars, keyboards, sampling, lyrics) and Andrew (drums, sampling, lyrics) during the time allotted for the two men’s respective lunch breaks. (Like their namesake, Prostitute are workers, baby.)

“There was a manifesto that was supposed to be released along with the vinyl that we had to pull at this point because of what’s going on,” Moe explains wearily, his obvious sweetness in direct contrast to the “Arabian prince who thinks he’s hot shit” aspect to his personality that he inhabits on stage. “There’s a bunch of stuff we’ve tried to do, now or in the past, that has leaned more into what interests us and maybe more so the message, but we also don't want our personal lives affected. We’re straddling a line between playing it safe and going all out.” He pauses before adding, “Things aren’t looking too good now, you know? Arabs are being arrested for any fucking reason now. Anybody’s being arrested for any reason now. And yeah, it’s...sorry, what was your original question?”

I’d asked if the intention was always to combine post-punk and Middle Eastern music. A question that would have once been anodyne bordering on banal, now complexified by the latter part. Regardless of any agents of the state eventually claiming otherwise, Andrew and Moe’s answers to the question make clear that Prostitute are still a rock band. They’re two longtime friends (later joined by Dylan, Ross, and Brett) who wanted to combine a shared affection for sampling, for post-punk acts like Women and Preoccupations, with Moe’s interest in Aphex Twin and horror soundtracks like Silent Hill and The Shining. Like any rock band, Prostitute’s journey consists of countless shows played to the bartender and was delayed by both COVID and the hassle of convincing friends in their late 20s to risk it all for potential, at best, mid-tier notoriety and no bucks.

Now, with the label sharks circling—whether out of identity/atrocity profiteering or based on the undeniable merits of Prostitute’s mix of death disco verve and dabke-in-the-pit propulsion—what started as “kids just having fun” has all the thrills and headaches of potential success and/or complete ruination. As with any proper band, the two quibble about to what degree either politics or theatrical provocations were “baked into” the project, but they both agree that, as Moe puts it, “the parameters that Andrew and I have kind of instilled and agreed to are: It has a Middle Eastern influence to it or a sound to it and it’s also, you know, chaotic and heavy and just sounds like fucking war.” If this is Prostitute’s idea of “playing it safe,” their “going all out” just might make post-punk great after all (inshallah).

—ZACHARY LIPEZ