“Dungeonhead,” is the lead single off the upcoming record, Mirrorhead by Pink Mexico. The band has just released a video for the song and we here at Full Time Aesthetic are thrilled to premiere it today!
The video was shot by Steven Ungureanu, who also shot “Dirty & Stupid” from the 2019 album, Dump, and directed by frontman Robert Preston Collum. It opens on an overcast Rockaways morning with bassist Grady Walker sitting on the beach popping a beer and popping a “Dungeonhead” diy cassette into a Panasonic portable tape player. The ensuing four minutes and change follow Collum as he traverses his day, walking unnoticed through the crowded streets of Bushwick/Ridgewood, surrounded by the busy hustle and bustle of the city. The urban landscape is occasionally peppered and punctuated with singular lines from the song’s lyrics as Collum makes his way through the lonely noise further and further out past the concrete grids. He ultimately meets up beside bandmate Walker to sit and share a beer as they look out into the expanse of the ocean’s edge.
When discussing “Dungeonhead,” Collum calls it “a track about never feeling comfortable in one’s own skin while reflecting on the obscurities of life during a time when the regular version of confusing and fucked up is even more fucked up and confusing.” And it feels like a slightly new direction for the band. There’s a sleepy element here that works wonderfully with their heavy components that are still present, but buried just below the surface. It’s almost Dandy Warhols in nature, which is a really cool turn for Pink Mexico and we are really curious to hear how the rest of the new record unfolds.
Mirrorhead is out May 19 via Quiet Panic Records and is available for pre-order now. The band will play an album release show on 6/11 at TV Eye with TVOD, Substitute and a TBA special guest. Get tickets here.
For those who’ve been following along with the rest of us, the Brooklyn quartet and champions of DIY sounds Low Presh have been dropping rockin’ low-fi singles leading up to the release of their third record and its been worth the wait.
Clean-ish guitars cranked to the point of signal overload, the songs feel sharp and heavy, due in part to underlying layers of bass and fuzz to fill the cracks. Following the release of inky and slithering “Dark Eyes” and big guitar banger “Blade Runner” (read our thoughts here), the rest of the record has now officially dropped into our laps and knocked the wind right out of us.
Low Presh—Nick (they/them), Mel (she/her), Nicole (she/her), and Pat (he/him)—are a Brooklyn four-piece that self describes their sound as “floating in a stew of rock/punk sounds ranging from Tropical Fuck Storm to Hop Along.” A lot of the record employs consistently overarching garagey/Hives-esque onslaught, blitzing front and center on tracks like “Seeming the Same.” Still they make make room to zig to the ominously slow bluesy leads offset by frantic guitar noise on “Twangy” and then zag toward something close to discobeat meets 80s retro funk on “Knight of Wands.”
The highlight of LP III for me, however, culminates wonderfully in the record’s final track, “99 Cents” which is full of the delightful quirk of the early aughts anti-folk, cut with a dash of 90s angst. It’s the smile and tension and brood and blow of The Moldy Peaches crossed with Toadies and is an extremely satisfying way to end the record. LP III gives the band the proper room they need to flex the spectrum of their musicality while reinforcing their current strengths and still flashing the guide-lights of what they are capable of doing next. It’s a really strong release from a band who knows what they want to make and how they want to get there.
LP III is out now and available on Bandcamp and all major streamers.
Last year, I had the pleasure of participating in weekly songwriting workshop with handful of other Brooklyn songwriters which was organized by the infinitely prolific chasm of creativity, Maggie Denning of Tetchy. So it’s indeed no surprise to me that she released an entire Tetchy EP recorded on her cell phone, and that it also holds up as a proper release in its own right. It’s also no surprise that it while it may not have been intended to be released in this format, it was at the behest of her friends and fans of the band who insisted it see the light of day. I’ve seen and heard firsthand what Denning is capable of creating in a mere seven days with nothing but a cell phone and a guitar week after week and it’s nothing short of amazing.
Smaller/Better, the EP and title track (read our thoughts here) may lack many of the elements you’d expect of your typical full band Tetchy release, most notably bangin’ drums and a bunch of distorted guitars. The band happened to be in the middle of a metamorphosis of sorts and I’m sure that provided them the uncomfortable space necessary to really dig into some raw places and the opportunity to turn that into something wonderfully vulnerable. Songs like “Crack the Yolk” (smattered with real life VHS audio from Denning’s early years) are heartbreakingly real and expose the layering complexities of familial identity, touching on childhood loneliness, confusion of memory and the utter devastation of loss.
Stylistically the whole EP plays out like a haunted music box, slightly warbled and detuned from from years of neglect, forgotten and buried deep in the traveling carnival trunk of a snake oil salesman. Much of the lyrics feel almost stream-of-consciousness or journaistic in nature. The songs are almost Schwarzenbachian in their lack of lyrical repetition. But that’s all because Tetchy’s not the kind of band that would drop your typical acoustic EP with a couple of guitars and standard vocal meter. Tetchy is the kind of band that uses the fact that they are going through something as an opportunity to GO THROUGH SOMETHING together and make something truly special in the process.
That’s not to say the entire record is an emotional onslaught of complex darkness. There’s levity and tongue-in-cheek humor in the hopeful “Next Generation” (read our thoughts here) and an ugly beauty in closer “To Give You My Heart.” Stacking up the broken human pieces of biological and emotional matter in a crescendo of crude dissonance and a perfectly-suited overblown guitar lead that settles nicely into the final vocal movement until it’s abrupt and awkward end, reminding us that this wonderful record was indeed recorded on a cell phone.
Smaller/Better is out now and available on Bandcamp and all major streamers.
“Keep your arms and legs inside the spaceship. Try to keep your head straight. Enjoy the trip.” Inspired by anti-folk and the energy of NYC basements, and filtered through the imagination of Mallory Feuer, the psych art rock band of abstract collaborators are back with new record Patterns and as the kids say these days, it fucks.
From the jump, “Help” rolls right into a fast-paced thick bass chugger. My personal favorite, it’s a controlled onslaught drum attack punctuating urgency and driving a palpable and desperate vocal hunger. Alternatively, “Poetry,” has a fuzzy super feel-good chorus, and is teeming with pop-sensible hooks that will snag the corners of your mouth leaving you smiling ear to ear. While moreover there’s still that signature angsty jazzy quality I’ve come to expect from The Grasping Straws. And you really hear the band shining in their truest element on tracks like “Enjoy the Trip” and “Home.”
The Grasping Straws always has been quite adept at remaining authentic to their roots yet at the same time evolving their nuanced sound to remain fresh. I’m a really big fan of some of these heavier grungier tunes, but at the same time, no one can make you cry with nothing more than a heartbreaking whisper quite like Mallory Feuer.
Patterns was self released and is available via Bandcamp and all major streamers. The band will embark on a tour to support the album, check Instagram for all dates.
I’ve been a long time fan of Bobby Lewis’s art-sound musical-projects-turned-bands, most recently the now defunct Mustardmind. So I was excited when I found out he had started a new outfit along with his brother, Billy. A little late to the game, I bumped into Lewis at a show and learned he’d started Whenwolves (a named I’d started to see popping up on live bills with bands I love at venues I frequent). We here at FTA premiered their last single (see what we said here), the mathy dreamy “The Minutes” and spent many many more minutes digging into their debut five song EP, Recon for the Weirdos.
Lewis explains that following the expiration of his last band during the pandemic, “picking up the pieces and starting work on new music fell solely on his shoulders, as there were no other bandmates to develop the songs with at the time” Eventually he recruited Eric Slick (of Dr. Dog) to play drums and Kristin Slipp (of mmeadows and Dirty Projectors) for backing vocals, in addition to his aforementioned brother on bass. What resulted was a new live band ready to play shows and cool quirky EP to support this new endeavor.
Opening track, “Chin Up!” sets the tone of the record, employing a subtle power in its piano attack across Slipp’s ghostly backing vocals. It somehow manages to remain relatively simple in structure but feel a little mathy at the same time. The composition of elements is so good, that I stopped counting almost immediately, and my brain leaned toward the ripping guitar lines.
Whenwolves know how to let the beat… mmmmdrop? I’ve previously likened them to God Lives Underwater, and tracks like “Impostorium” reinforce that in a way that also brings out bits reminiscent of Radiohead’s more experimental guitar work mixed melodic choices that feel almost Incubus somehow.
But at the end of the day, I’m a sucker for a good pop song, and it’s the final track “Sugarcoat” with its mellow electric piano spine and perfectly fuzzed guitar that hooked me on Recon for the Weirdos. It’s a sweet hook infused closer that hits like sunny Sunday morning cup of coffee and goes down smooth like a dose of OkGo power pop ballad. Not quite sure in the end if they actually “sugarcoat the worst parts and leave best parts out,” but what they left for us is indeed a charmingly smart record worth peeling into.
Recon for the Weirdos is out now and available via Bandcamp and all major streamers.
