Still Thinking

The following was written as a dual review with my friend Kelly Minnis, who merely liked the new Bully record. **************** I heard Bully for the first time while playing YouTube jukebox with Kelly Minnis in my living room. We were swapping the TV remote, slamming beers because I still did, and he says, “Ah, yes. You like female vocals.” Then he played the video for “Running” from Bully’s sophomore album Losing . The recommendation took. I owned Losing less than a week later. The thing I instantly liked about Losing was the nostalgia it contained. The album felt a time-capsule of 90s sensibilities. The production. The muted, twisted guitars and trigger-thumpy bass lines. Bognanno’s riot grrrl vocals. Even the video for “Running” (minus the cell-phones) looks like something that would make a young Noah Baumbach lose sleep. Losing feels like a love-letter to a bygone, younger era. It’s a solid record, one I turn to when it’s too hot for a flannel AND a cardigan but I still don’t w...

  Those who love metal music, especially extreme metal, understand something that those who do not simply never will, and that is how a music so immediately dark often reveals a light, even while explicitly challenging it. The idea is similar to horror cinema and literature: that which deals in mayhem often points most vividly to virtue. It’s the law of opposing forces. The dance of irony. The reward of the initiated. If the Devil can appear as an angel of light, perhaps the flip begs possibility for his adversary, as well. Crazier things have happened and will again. Ask the plagued Pharoah. Konvent is a four-piece hailing from Denmark. After a ridiculously successful demo released in 2017, which shot the band into immediate prominence on the festival circuit, Konvent released their first full-length album, Puritan Masochism, on January 24 via Napalm Records. An initial listen offers one blazingly solid assurance about these ladies: they’re not messing around. Puritan Masochism ...

The fact that Amalie Bruun released her new album Folkesange under her Myrkur moniker is significant. In a career spanning a mere fourteen years, Bruun has recorded under three names, each projecting a different timbre of her musical voice. As a debut self-titled solo act, Bruun recorded a handful of schizophrenic singer-songwriter “pop” albums that paid homage to an array of artists spanning ABBA, Kate Bush, Bjork, The Beatles, and maybe early career Beyonce(?). These songs were musically quaint and lyrically juvenile, but not necessarily in a good way. In 2013 and 2014, Bruun formed Ex Cops with a forgettable and chisel-chinned male hipster. The duo released two either pop-rock or rock-pop (actually, there is a difference) LPs -- albums as sugary and delightfully easy to sip as chilled Capri-Suns by a mid-summer swimming hole.  However, in 2014 Bruun also unleashed her greatest claim to clickbait fame when she was ousted as the one-woman black metal artist known only as Myrkur. ...

Although The Ex-Optimists have a distinct sound and stage presence, I never know what to expect from their new music. And I love this about The Ex-Optimists. For instance, 2012's  Bee Corpse Collector,  nearly a decade old and half a different band ago, pays homage to swimmy-guitar college-rock radio, while 2015's  Phantom Freight  opens with a 15 minute chime-infested soundscape of "True Evil" only to be followed by 2018's angry AF full-fist, shoe-gaze rocker  Drowned In Moonlight.  Various splits and 7" releases along the way feature Ex-Ops playing post-punk thumpers ( Bee Corpse Thousand ), sweaty-stadium stompers ( Save Your Love ), and summer-love crooners ( Reruns from the '60s ). Listening through their catalogue is like reading a musical memoir of the band's influences and ideas. Life reveals itself in the progression of their recordings (2012 - poppy; 2015 - experimental; 2018 - pissed off), often telling their collective stories more throug...

Two conversational topics, we are told, should never enter the work-place: religion and politics. You might as well add to that list “mortality” -- people work too hard making a living to be reminded of their death. We don’t talk about these things because they get sticky. After all, we might disagree. We might have varying opinions. You might want to give more weight to something than I want to give weight to it. What happens when the weight you feel outweighs the weight I don’t feel? See? It’s too tricky. We might even decide we don’t like each other as much as we thought we did when we both agreed that all these schmucks ruin their black coffee with vanilla flavored liquid PVC. Man, those were the days! Back when you and I agreed on what mattered most! Pure black coffee without the frou-frou nonsense! But that all had to get spoiled when I found out you think / believe / want / pray (or don’t) for and to ______________. And now my coffee doesn’t taste the same around you. My coffee...

I studied the Russian language in college. The Spanish and French classes were more popular, so I chose the language class with the fewest number of students. That would be Russian. My teacher was a little spit-fire from Moscow named Irene Trofimova. I loved her. She hated me. She called me “Kee-van” and told me frequently, “You vill go into the vorld, and you vill die.” One day, when only the two of us attended class, she said to me, “Kee-van, vhat is this vord, this ‘hanging-out’”. As she said the word, she threw her hands in front of herself like a farmer sowing seed. I said, “It just means to spend time together. Like you and me, right now, we are ‘hanging out’”. She blushed and waved her hands in the air. “Stop it, Kee-van. Don’t say such things!” I asked where she had heard this phrase - this “hanging out”. After more blushing and hand-waving, she finally said she’d heard it in a movie. A prostitute had said it to a client. She invited him to more prostituting. They could “hang ...

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me in the fall of 2016 and rejected both the text and its author. Coates’s tone felt too venomous to be constructive, roiling with an anger that frightened me, that set my hackles on the defensive. I much preferred the measured and cool voice of James Baldwin, whose anger translated into something far more cerebral, less poetic and visceral. Coates wrote from the heart. He opened his jugular ink well and released the terror held in his Black American body. The fact that Coates, like James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time , wrote his book as an instruction manual for a teenage boy on navigating the American experience shocked me all the more. It was too violent. Too reactionary. I highlighted one particular episode, somewhere towards the middle of the book, of Coates sharing beers on a New York City rooftop with friends as they watched the smoke from the Twin Towers rise. He explained his inability to feel sorrow for first responders on th...