With their newest release Art History, New England band Perennial offer up an album that would be at home on a dance floor or a mosh pit. Over twelve tracks, few of which top two minutes, the band —Chelsey Hahn (electric organ & vocals), Chad Jewett (electric guitar & vocals) and Wil Mulhern (drums) wiggle and thrash their way through a mash up of genres. Perennial wear their influences on their sleeves—influences that include Q and Not U, Black Eyes and Blood Brothers, according to the band who spoke with FTA last year in a Q and A, when Jewett told us:
“Perennial came from a really sincere desire to form the kind of band we all wished existed. There were all these artists and sounds and aesthetics that we really adored, and we formed Perennial as sort of an art project to put all of that stuff together: 60s soul and 90s Dischord stuff and free jazz and electronic music, and so on.”
Art History doesn’t pull punches and tears right into it on the title track, the dual back and forth yell of Hahn and Jewett immediately grabbing our attention. At no point after this does the album let up. Perennial mix the loud guitars and shouting vocals with grooviness—this might be a punk record, but it’s also a dance record. The syncopated drums throw out rhythms and fills that induce a need to move, and the understated synths provide electro flourishes.
Perennial have a “sound” but they do try new things within that, including arty instrumentals like “A Is For Abstract” and “B Is For Brutalism,” where they play into the album title. (On their Bandcamp, the group bills themselves as “modernist punk.”) They do go quiet-loud at times, so it isn’t full “everything at 11 all the time,” even when the song itself is fast and catchy (“Uptight”). Highlights for me on the record were “Art History,” “Tambourine On Snare,” “How The Ivy Crawls” and “Mouthful of Bees,” on which they remind me a bit of We Versus The Shark. (Editors note: “Action Painting” is my favorite over here at FTA headquarters)
If you are familiar with Perennial’s earlier work, like 2022’s In The Midnight Hour, you’ll love this album as well. They haven’t reinvented themselves, but they don’t need to. Art History is a lively and raucous record by a very fun band, one that also very much shines in live performances, so if you have a chance to catch one of their shows and the matching outfits (as we did last year) then definitely do so.
To All Trains starts with one guitar plucking out a warbling riff, a riff that will cycle back across the song. But it is quickly joined by the bass and drums, a formula that held Shellac throughout their career. Over thirty-odd years, guitarist and singer Steve Albini, bassist and singer Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer took the classic three-piece rock lineup and delivered punishing, jagged music breaking down structure, rhythm, and melody itself. And yet for all this deconstruction, Shellac nonetheless drove straight to the core of rock and roll.
This review is later than others; I wanted to listen to the album on its own terms, not in the immediate wake of the death of Albini—who passed away only ten days before the album’s release on May 17th—and was a man whose work in music I’ve always admired. And To All Trains deserves to be considered as an album made by three people, not just the most famous member, and held up against the impressive body of work that Shellac leaves behind. As an album—their first since 2014’s Dude Incredible—I think it does this admirably, just as vital and compelling as anything they’ve put out before. In a way Shellac built their songs as if they were on a construction site rather than in a carefully mic-ed up studio: the buzzsaw guitars, the chugging bass, the jackhammer drums. And if it’s true the composition can lend a cold quality to the songs, it’s equally true that the recording and their live-as-possible sound brings out the organic side.
As expected from the group, this record is a versatile mix of noise, math, rock and experimentation. Shellac have been known to throw a long song in the mix, but To All Trains only has two songs that top four minutes, and just barely at that. It’s all they need to make an impression. Lead track “Wsod” has pierced your eardrum and exited the other side before you even know it, but you remember it was there as “Girl from Outside” kicks into a dirge-like march.
The record really gets going on “Chick New Wave,” a mosh-worthy rocker filled with headbanging moments and throbbing drum fills. If Shellac were a singles band (they seem to have left that in the 90’s) this one would be the likely selection.
Other highlights include the mathy “Tattoos;” the punchy “Scrappers,” which pairs a straight up old-school rock riff with an aggressive rhythm section; and the bassy “How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (Cock & Bull)” which in an alternative universe could be considered almost bouncy.
It’s often the bass in the driver’s seat, with Weston pummeling the songs through to a finish while the guitar hooks around and provides textures and flourishes. Trainer is adept at rolling toms and gunshot snare, and holds everything together in a box lest it all burst apart. The production is, as expected, fucking flawless, recorded and produced by Albini and mastered by himself and Weston with all the skill and perfect mic placement one would expect of them.
A joking sort of dread permeates the vocals, which is characteristic of the band. I’ll admit the lyrics are what I pay attention to least on Shellac records; I’m always hypnotized by the instrumentation. They aren’t a weak spot or an afterthought, they just don’t grab me the same way, and To All Trains is no different in this respect. However, it’s impossible to ignore the words on the noisy drudge-rocker “Wednesday,” as the climax is spoken over the end without music, a heavy tale of suicide. On the the polar opposite end of things, “Scabby the Rat” had me rolling on the floor with lines like
Scabby the Rat
Ooh, he’s inflatable
Scabby the Rat
That’s right, I said inflatable
Scabby the Rat
Makes the whole room pregnant
Scabby the Rat
Pow! you’re pregnant
Albini also takes the time here to shout out the late Chicago musician Rob Warmowski (The Defoliants, Buzzmuscle) who ran a pro-labor Twitter account named after the titular inflatable rat (who, if you didn’t know, often pops up at union strikes).
The ten-track album closes out with “I Don’t Fear Hell,” a menacing, sneering knockout of a final track, with juddering stop-starts so you aren’t quite sure when it will be over. Albini’s final words on To All Trains are:
Something something something when this is over
I’ll leap in my grave like the arms of a lover
If there’s a heaven, I hope they’re having fun
Cause if there’s a hell, I’m gonna know everyone
It’s low-hanging fruit to ascribe this parting shot any more significance than a solid album closer; Albini’s death was sudden and unexpected. He reported suffering a cardiac incident in his 20’s, so it’s possible he had some thoughts of mortality rattling around in his brain. (The band even joked about it in interviews.) But he was also a famously snarky bastard, and the vibe of “I Don’t Fear Hell” is perfectly in place with the rest of the album.
Overall, To All Trains is a seamless document, a piece of art from three musicians who know music, who work with it and feel it in their very bones, yet never suffer the temptation to over complicate things. If you like Shellac, you will love this record; if you’ve never heard them before and are curious after Albini’s passing, this isn’t a bad place to start.
To All Trains is out now on Touch and Go Records; buy it or stream it on Bandcamp and Spotify. Read The Wire‘s wide ranging interview/oral history with Shellac published shortly after Albini’s death here.
On their newest LP Dark Ice Balloons, New York scene stalwarts Nihiloceros bring us both the vibrant rock music we know and love and a new direction. The band (on this album featuring Mike Borchardt on guitar and vocals, Alex Hoffman on bass and vocals, and German Sent on drums) acknowledges that Dark Ice Balloons is a bleaker record, with musings on life and death and the liminal spaces in between, but the music raises everything up so as to not be a depressing affair.
Nihiloceros bill themselves as “trash pop,” and are certainly on the punk side of pop, but not the pop side of punk, if you know what I mean. Dark Ice Balloons punches right in with “Penguin Wings,” showing how the band stands above the punk pack with interesting chord choices and progressions, and sharp harmonies on the choruses to add dynamic range.
The single “Skipper” is another great example of dynamic choices, with bopping verses and a changeup of vocals and timing of the beat on the chorus, like crashing waves moving into a rolling sea. According to the group, “the first single off our forthcoming EP questions, “if our soul screams out alone at sea, will it make a sound that anyone will hear?…We are destined to die, but does the soul live on?”
Nowhere on the eight songs of the LP does the band get lazy. Borchardt’s guitar work is cutting, Hoffman is a creative bass player, and Sent propels everything into the stratosphere, while the contrast between Borchardt and Hoffman’s vocals—used to especially great effect on “Skipper” and “Purgatory (Summer Swim)”—adds another layer. Musically, the album moves from unrelenting (“Halo”), poppier (“Krong”), and intense (“Purgatory (Summer Swim)”) while touching on the band’s ideas of the afterlife (and also a space explorer in the Midwest, on the single “Martian Wisconsin”).
“Counting Sheep” was a favorite of mine, a chameleon of a track that constantly changed direction, as was the soaring “Halo.” The stellar ending track “Purgatory (Summer Swim)” is the best song on the record, with intriguing musical flourishes and an earworm of a call and response chorus—seriously, does “I’m gonna kill you when you’re gone” have the right to be so catchy? The album was mixed by Jeff Berner at Studio G in Brooklyn, and he doesn’t overdo the production, keeping everything clean without losing any of the rawness.
On When I Get Paid, the latest from Nuclear Family Fantasy, lead singer Mossy Ross delivers hard-hitting and relatable truths on the struggles of living paycheck to paycheck, the turmoil of toxic relationships, and the importance of leaving behind old demons while battling new ones, all steeped with the rebellious spirit of punk rock. The album offers a variety of roaring punk rock anthems and introspective moments that resonate with the anxieties of modern life.
Album title track “When I Get Paid”’ bullet lists the various ways life is put on hold until payday, with lines like “I’m gonna get therapy/When I get paid/I’m gonna take care of me/When I get paid.” The theme hits home for someone like this writer, who feels like the work never ends and the fun hardly ever begins.
The lyrically bleak but tongue-in-cheek chorus from “Guns and Boobs” lingered long after the music stopped. It’s a particularly infectious earworm that could’ve easily been penned by the B-52s. I sang this one to myself in the voice my husband and I give to my dog (picture Pee Wee Herman voicing a muppet), “Guns and boobs! Guns and boobs! All I want are the guns and boobs! Can’t be entertained without the Guns and boobs!”
In “Tell Him You Love Him,” the narrator’s inner voice is questioning the wisdom of staying with an emotionally stunted partner, urging its subject to be their own guide to breaking free from the cycle of toxic behavior once and for all. This one hits for those of us who have gone with the motions of a relationship that leaves us scratching our heads, finally seeing why we feel so dizzy and drained. The resounding “Leave him!” is a satisfying denouement.
“Bleeding Heart” confronts the echo chambers of misinformation, renouncing the far-right for their selective consumption of news. It invokes the feeling of acknowledging the nitpicking and naysaying of someone who lives in a delusional bubble while saying to them that they’re still wrong. Ross has a knack for approaching political subject matter while avoiding sounding cheesy, which is refreshing.
“When I Get Home” explores nostalgia while observing the need to move on, with catchy and incisive lyrics like “You’re not helping me, you’re haunting me.” Album closer “Wikipedia Page” comically touches on the desire for recognition in the digital age, acknowledging the reality of making music in today’s economy and finding fulfillment in modest success.
Also included among this collection is a sickening cover of “I Burn” by The Toadies, which fits in with the overarching theme and could have easily been penned by Mossy, a brilliant lyricist in her own right.
All in all this is a short and sweet set of songs that would be fun to see live, tackling serious and not-so-serious subject matter in the voice of someone living through it all. It balances horror and humor in a knowing way, as without it we’d all be doomed.
When I Get Paid is out now and available via Bandcamp.
Package Pt. 2, the new album from Brooklyn art punks Gustaf, is a successful sophomore outing and a definitive statement from a band once seen as promising up and comers that they are here to stay.
Gustaf is made up of Lydia Gammill on vocals, Tine Hill on bass, Vram Kherlopian on guitars and synths, Melissa Lucciola on drums and Tarra Thiessen on percussion and “Cafe Bustelo Can.” This is a simplistic breakdown of the lineup; Gammill also plays flute, bass and keyboards and all members contribute backing vocals, most prominently Thiessen with her pointedly dispatched pitch shifter. Past and current projects of the lineup include Sharkmuffin (Theissen) and Tea Eater (Theissen and Kherlopian) and Francie Moon (Lucciola). Their first record Audio Drag For Ego Slobs was a post-pandemic burst of post-punk, and at times dance-friendly outing that drew praise from critics. Beck is a fan (he remixed “Design” from their debut 7 inch release) and the band has spent the last few years opening for acts like IDLES and Wet Leg, further bolstering their resume.
On Package Pt. 2 the band uses musical edges and angles like a construction crew, building layed tunes out of deceptively simple architecture. For me, the record invokes a concrete and faded neon tour of our city, à la Sonic Youth at their most New York. Gustaf will also inevitably draw comparisons to post-punk greats like Talking Heads. It starts off strong with “Statue,” as Gammill seems to outline her own compelling stage presence (“I project my way to the center of the stage”) before something seems amiss:
If we stand still at the center of the stage
Will I see what they’re grabbing?
And oh!
The Statues!
They’re alarming!
Oh The Statues linger on!
This underlying uneasiness is a common thread on the album, and it’s not always lyrical. The jerkiness of the music, the slinkiness of the basslines, all intertwine and judder about to form a strange, jittery soundtrack. That edge of menace is maintained on the second track “Close.” Never has single note and octave work been so goddamn catchy:
Gustaf are adept at using what isn’t there as much as what is, and nowhere is their command of the pause more evident than the first single “Starting and Staring.” The music video turns the expected laid-back atmosphere of a house show into an intense outing, as Gammil commands the viewer to “stay on my eyes” and the band slowly notices an otherworldly presence among the lackadaisical audience.
“Here Hair” finds the band in a softer moment (“still I love you, I wake to your hair… you’re keeping me safe and warm”) which is paired with the punky coda “Hard Hair” for the video, in which Gustaf lose none of their weirdness despite slowing things down for a moment.
The singles from Package Pt. 2 are well-chosen. Other standout tracks include “I Won,” a tale of frustration, anger and ‘winning’ arguments, and the closer “End Of The Year.” The groups Bandcamp page for the album includes lyrics (highly appreciated by reviewers, to be sure) yet many songs for me remain at a distance, solid meanings hard to tease out, although the general vibe can be deduced. Gammill tackles longing with “End Of The Year,” reminiscing “out there you stay bare / somewhere out there I still feel you here / oh to enjoy being yours again / to wonder how I let you in / could the memory come back to me?“
Package Pt. 2 was produced, mixed and engineered by Erin Tonkon, and recorded at Studio G Brooklyn, Circular Ruin and The Honey Jar. Tonkon has done a stellar job here, with every instrument coming through on its own plane of existence and Gammill’s voice never overshadowed, while maintaining total cohesion between every part.
They actually sound like a band. That’s probably the most impressive thing about The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, which, by virtue of the people involved, sets an immediately high bar. It isn’t The Messthetics, with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis playing over top what the group would might typically do; nor is it the Messthetics serving as a backing band for Lewis. This is a true collaboration that demonstrate true musical kinship.
Sure, we all knew that the Messthetics could do a legitimate jazz record, but to hear what actually sounds like, in collaboration with the superb Lewis, is a revelation. And while this most assuredly falls within the context of jazz (or, as Nicholas Payton would rather we call it, Black American Music), the four musicians’ experimental and boundary-pushing leanings still are on full display.
The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis in 2022 (photos by Kate Hoos)
The lead track, “L’Orso,” eases us in. A nice, buzzy roll from drummer Brandon Canty slides into a simple, sparse beat with guitarist Anthony Pirog, bassist Joe Lally, and Lewis engaged in a three-way conversation. Canty remains sure and steady, while longtime battery mate Lally offers up very cool bass chordings, giving Pirog plenty of space to shred. Pirog then falls back and begins a sort of call-and-response with Lally, while Lewis solos. Simple, sparse, thrilling, tasteful.
“Emergence” follows, with a groove reminiscent of Canty and Lally’s previous long running and iconic band, Fugazi, but it soon launches into something else. The rhythm partners double time, while Lewis and Pirog play in and around each other in a what can be described as intergalactic ska. Another left turn as the rhythm section turns up the intensity, Pirog steps on the distortion, and Lewis is off to the races. Punk jazz, baby.
The group slow down the pace for “Three Sisters,” featuring a dexterous guitar theme that segues into languid sax melodies and back again. The versatility of the rhythm section—the stuff of legend—is ever present here. Restraint, taste, and decades of telepathy are evident, as the rhythm shifts into high gear. Lally holds it down, while Canty plays off-time around him, while Pirog and Lewis solo and play off each other. There’s an improvisational feel to it all, belying the newness of this collaboration. Yet, they are together.
Another superb cut is the last tune, “Fourth Wall.” Pirog arpeggiates the main theme, mildly evoking Radiohead, with Canty and Lally locked into a relentless, driving groove. Lewis stretching out long, warm notes over top. Lewis, then Pirog, solo triumphantly over the krautrock-style rhythm. It’s hypnotic, heady, and hooky, feeling like it could go on forever—and you kind of wish it would.
It says a lot about the quality of the record, too, that it is out on the legendary jazz label, Impulse! Records. This ain’t no fluke or forced mashup. The music feels organic; it flows, it drives; it’s beautiful, it’s gnarly; it’s punk, it’s jazz; it’s traditional, it’s experimental. And it’s absolutely worth picking up.
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis is out now via Impulse! Records and available via Bandcamp and all major streamers.
