Shallowater – God's Gonna Give You A Million Dollars | Album Review

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Thinking about West Texas roots up a string of memories in my mind. One of my earliest was a big family camping trip where my friend’s dad showed us just about every constellation in the sky. He grew up in Dumas and spent countless nights looking at the stars when he was a kid because there wasn't much else to do. For a while, I was going to college in Colorado and making the cross-Texas drive more often than I probably should have. I got to know West Texas by the pit stops along the route and by how much the speed limit decreased from town to town. I eventually transferred to a school in Texas and made friends who had grown up on the left side of the state. One time, we went on a camping trip and stopped in Andrews to pick up some gear from one of their childhood homes. We couldn't use the front door because it was blocked by too many tumbleweeds.

The tumbleweeds blocking my friend’s front door in Andrews, TX.

Shallowater is a three-piece dirtgaze band from West Texas, currently living in Houston. Blake Skipper, Ryan Faulkenberry, and Tristan Kelly made one of the best albums of 2024 with their debut There Is A Well, and I was an immediate fan on first listen. I am an absolute sucker for a band from Texas and feel deeply connected to anyone who grew up there. This thinking may have some validity anywhere other than Texas, where the immense landmass allows for vast differences in culture and experience across the state. There Is A Well is absolutely gorgeous, a beautiful first articulation of the group’s dust-coated take on shoegaze that they’ve built upon elegantly and precisely with their follow-up. As you venture into Shallowater’s sophomore album, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, it feels as if the band figured out how to inject the entirety of the Texas Panhandle directly into their songs. 

Produced by Alex Farrar, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars is a smattering of multifaceted epics written from “me” to “you,” showcasing all sides of Shallowater’s sound. This album further solidifies the trio as one of the defining sounds of the modern Texas Panhandle. The album trudges through dust storms, tiptoes across the squeaky floorboards of a shotgun house, and blasts down a pitch-black highway with the windows down. 

The first two songs, “God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars” and “Sadie,” seem to tell the same narrative of an experience with grief after the loss of a grandmother. I imagine the grandma being one to poke fun at her own eventual passing, perhaps with the peace of knowing that what was on the other side would be unimaginably better than that of Earth. She would say that when she dies and goes to heaven, God would give her a million dollars and that all her old friends would be there too. The album opens with Grandma having their million dollars and a handful of roses. The rest of the song captures fond memories and personal quirks, ending at a cemetery on New Year's Eve. In “Sadie,” we see some of the ways one processes their grief. 

I’ve been writing down
Every word
You said to me
Cause I like the way they look
Bad year for me
And the roses
So I hung
Them up
Like a trophy kill

Nestled midway through the album, we’re out of the house and on the road, taking in the southern part of the country the way that so many experience it: through the window of a car. “Highway” is the best country western song I have heard in quite some time. Reading through the lyrics, I can practically hear George Jones crooning the words over a steady strumming guitar. At the beginning of the song, the line “Back where I was just / lights on a highway to you” devastates as the lyrics articulate that feeling of finding out you weren’t anything to them but another passing car in the night. As the song nears its end, the lyrics are whittled down to only the last six words – this solitary phrase repeating and feeling like a promise or a hope for future trips to that same lost love. While Blake Skipper sings with more of a casual air than Mr. Jones does, he finds the perfect cadence and tone to bring the country western feel out from the yearning lyrics into the song. 

We’ve all seen the decrepit house off the highway while cruising along the desolate part of our multi-hour drive. It looks like an island breaching up out of the water, usually surrounded by trees that have grown up taller than what is left of the ruins. It takes a split second to drive by, but years of life have been lived out in that frame. This is the song “All My Love,” except here we have gotten out of the car and are looking through the remains with our adventurous little nephew. It doesn't take long for the detour to turn personal and existential. Nothing is just one thing in this album. We hear a creak come from the framing of the old house, and suddenly we are freshly regretting the unrequited love of years past. Their evocative lyrics remove any chance of gleaning personal information while allowing the beauty of human experience to remain. Every word stretches until it meets the start of the next. It's a long drawl that sounds special on top of the ever-shifting sonic landscape.

Throughout the record, Shallowater exercise a level of skill and restraint that feels increasingly rare to find in “-gaze” bands. These three aren’t just defaulting to a simplistic loud-quiet-loud structure, nor are they pummeling wannabe Deftones riffs through hundreds of dollars of effects pedals. Instead, Shallowater uses these longer song structures to their advantage, exploring the softer side of their sound and executing these changes in sound with careful intention. Sometimes things are rolling along in peaceful post-rock lilt, then suddenly a squall of guitar feedback will rear up and rip you away from the calm. Though it’s more bite-sized in comparison, it’s most reminiscent of another southern rock behemoth: The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. All of this lends to a sense of vision and atmosphere with seven- to nine-minute songs that hold my attention all the way through, either through beauty or force. Equally skilled at filling the track with huge, crushing sound as they are at finding perfect moments for silence. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, and Shallowater’s world is vast, deep, and dusty. 

West Texas is a place where being a cowboy is still a real profession. A place where, when the wind blows just right, and it often does, the air fills with the scent of cow manure from the several million head of cattle that are being raised nearby. Shallowater is a band born from that harsh beauty, and with God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, they consistently and uniquely serve up the Panhandle on a silver platter for any and all to partake.

Kirby Kluth grew up in the suburbs of Houston but now lives in Knoxville, TN. He spends his time thinking about motorcycles, tennis, and music. You can follow him on Instagram @kirbykluth.

Dim Wizard – “Stoicism” | Single Review

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Self-Released

I am still working on learning that people can only give me so much. Nobody can provide me with all that I need. I spend so much time railing against others’ expectations of me that I owe them grace when they fail mine. I know that in coming out as a trans woman, I shattered my parents’ expectations of me as a man, so it is only fair that I accept that, in reconstructing our relationship, I value what they can give me instead of projecting an idealized version of acceptance.

David Combs has been making pop music from the verge for a while now, both in the recently retired Bad Moves and in his collaborative solo project Dim Wizard, which has featured the likes of Jeff Rosenstock, Ratboys, and Ings, among others. Combs’ new single as Dim Wizard, “Stoicism,” a collaboration with the Australian musician Katie Dey, is a piece of clattering synth-pop reckoning with failed projected expectations—those we place on others and those placed upon us. 

Each verse opens with Dey asking, “Do you owe me strength?” before grappling with the fact that, even if the object of her questioning can provide her strength, it’s not always enough to combat what the turning of the world confronts us with. In the final chorus, Dey sings the repeated affirmation that “you don’t owe me nothing / it’s alright,” before the song drops out and the instrumentation comes back with a sense of resignation. 

That final bit, those last twenty seconds, are my favorite part of the song, because it feels like knowing I’ll never get all I need from my parents, but it doesn’t stop me from hoping. 

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on insta @Lilllianmweber.

BOOTCAMP – Time’s Up | Album Review

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Convulse Records

In conversations with friends about our collective feelings of despair watching compounding historical crises from the imperial core, I've been sharing this quote that Sally Rooney gave the New York Times about how she views her job writing novels in the face of calamities: “I suppose I tell myself that in the midst of all of this, people need not become so incredibly overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems that we’re facing as to feel that life itself is no longer meaningful and that there’s no reason to go on.” I worry I’ve been using it as an excuse to justify inaction and complicity in exchange for the comforts of being an American in the face of the final sunset. 

That is the prevailing question driving Iowa City hardcore band BOOTCAMP on their debut, Time's Up. What are you doing as the world burns? The system is content to burn the world to the ground to maintain control as we do just enough to pat ourselves on the back, saying we did all we could as the flood waters fill our lungs. BOOTCAMP doesn’t believe bent ears are enough. 

Throughout the record, BOOTCAMP points fingers at the petit bourgeois class traitors who enable systems of oppression to continue. On “Email,” vocalist Juliette takes the role of a nude HR drone behind a switched-off Zoom camera, masturbating while denying bereavement leave. On “Endless Commute,” they touch on how communities are purposely divided by urban planning and our reliance on cars. On “Ruins,” they point at city folk like myself who step over people begging in the streets because our need to get lotion from Target overrules our innate empathy. I’m reminded of the time I had to kick someone out of the library because they refused to wear shoes, and I watched them get on their hands and knees to beg. I have never felt more inhuman than in that moment. 

BOOTCAMP understands that while the CEOs set the policies, it is in our daily interactions that we enforce the rules because we can’t imagine giving up the slight comforts this dying system affords us. As Juliette screams, “It’s a choice.” That choice is to live in a fantasy, one where the world isn’t built on violence, one where “painting some quirky signs” is enough to enact change. 

That is not to say BOOTCAMP spares those in power their ire. “CEO” evokes what happened outside the Hilton Midtown on December 4th, 2024, “September 11th” denounces American imperialism, and “Asylum” begs for the relief of open borders. 

At the end of the record, Juliette takes stock of what our collective refusal to change means for the future generations. On closing track “Decision,” they grapple with the idea of bringing a child into a world destined to burn. After a record of pointing fingers begging for change, it is legitimately chilling to hear someone as fearless as Juliette shriek, “Don’t want to bring her into this hell,” as the guitars fume towards the end. 

I was watching The Battle of Algiers, a beautiful ode to the freedom fighters who helped overthrow French imperial rule in Algeria, for the first time the other day, and I couldn’t help but think, “when will we have had enough?” BOOTCAMP want you to see that the time has long since passed and find something liberatory in that. In the face of the end, what is left to try but everything.

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on insta @Lilllianmweber.

Greg Freeman – Burnover | Album Review

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Transgressive Records

To pay respect to a record that wastes no time getting right to it, I’ll do the same. Greg Freeman’s Burnover is one of the best projects of the year, and it makes its case in the first five seconds. The initial moments of the first track and lead single “Point and Shoot,” a straight shooting guitar-forward heater that tragicomically evokes the Alec Baldwin disaster, lay out the blueprint that defines the entire record. Freeman’s delivery of the opening lines “Shot down in the shade of cardboard canyons / They cut the scene and saw blood on the Cameraman” lets the listener know exactly what they’re in for. The vocals are idiosyncratic yet immediately iconic. The lyrics are somewhat elusive but evoke vivid imagery rooted in a physical place. Emotionally, there’s a touch of familiar wryness, but his heart is refreshingly on his sleeve. Where many insert a throat-clearing preamble or instrumental intro, Freeman starts with a confident crack and a bang.

Freeman kicks off his sophomore album with an appropriate level of urgency as he tries, and succeeds, to capitalize on the organic ascension he’s experienced since the release of his 2022 self-released debut, I Looked Out. Unlike Burnover, which seems to have built up a bit of a hype train, his first record was released with no label and basically zero marketing. Freeman earned his traction with a once common, now radical formula of involvement in a strong local scene, playing a bunch of kickass live shows, and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. Now he’s got a record deal, a calendar full of shows opening up for Hamilton Leithauser and Grandaddy, and a Rolling Stone profile. In his words, he’s “not trying to cater to anyone” on this album, but I think it’s safe to say Greg knows he’ll be addressing a larger audience. 

In conjunction with his individual rise to relative stardom, there seems to be a growing appetite for this flavor of indie rock. I imagine anyone reviewing Freeman’s sophomore effort will be playing a version of the “Don’t Mention MJ Lenderman Challenge,” and it’s hard not to see these two as part of the same overarching trend. Though I’m not sure alt-country is the perfect label for Freeman’s music, some of the elements are there, as are the en vogue ‘90s guitar music references spanning the modern music landscape. These influences are connected. The current alt-country boom mirrors a similar explosion in the ‘90s, both of which coincided with a rise in commercialized country music. In a sense, Greg, MJ, and others in this lane are photo negatives of the larger pop country industry, and their respective local scenes are rough and rowdy antidotes to its monolithic polish and sheen. 

In contrast to Lenderman and others who carry this “alt-country” label, Freeman’s style is more freewheeling cowboy than Southern gothic. Greg was nice enough to respond to a few questions I sent over to him, and he was clear that he didn’t have a strict master plan for what his second album was going to sound like. “I let the songs kind of write themselves, and wasn’t too concerned with having them fall into any cohesive sound or style.” That starts to become apparent when the second track, “Salesman,” comes in with its walloping horns and buzzing guitar, then gives way to the plucky piano ballad “Rome, New York.” These two songs flaunt Freeman’s ability to turn his sound on a dime and his trust that the songs “would have some kind of cohesive identity, without putting any rules on [them] sound-wise.” They’re in totally different energetic registers but feel cut from the same cloth.

When I asked him the somewhat cliché “musical influences” question, he indulged my suggestion that Modest Mouse may have imprinted on his sound, and I hear in both artists that lack of concern over sonic cohesion. On some of Modest Mouse’s best projects, like 2000’s landmark The Moon and Antarctica, the band didn’t confine themselves to a particular genre and instead seemed more focused on evoking salient imagery (as exemplified by the album title). Greg seems to take that approach as well. On the brilliant title track, a reference to a region of upstate New York known as a hotbed for 19th-century religious fervor, he sings of a blue frozen morning, smoke on the horizon, a fire station barroom, psychic highways, and glacial lakes. It loosely tells the story of a firefighter’s strike, but the narrative is incomplete and secondary to the pictures the song projects onto my brain. It’s all set to a backdrop of acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica that would sound right at home on a ‘70s Dylan record.

These folk rock arrangements are one of the most obvious ways in which Freeman’s second album progresses from his debut. His band of talented musicians from the local Burlington scene flesh out the album’s “live in the studio” sound, making every track feel as if it’s being brought to life just as it enters your ears. On an Instagram post earlier this summer accompanying the release of the single “Curtain,” Freeman recalled joyful laughter in the studio as his piano player laid down the track’s “honky tonk” riff that was simply “so perfect that it’s kind of funny.” That magic certainly translates to the studio recording. The band’s chemistry is audible as they jam along so effortlessly for seven minutes that I wished it would go on for seventy.

I’ve spent months with Burnover at this point, and it’s still slowly revealing itself to me. Greg and I agreed that the album wasn’t necessarily “accessible,” but it does offer several handholds and entry points in the form of highly memorable melodies, riffs, and lines. The guitar riff on the pop-punkish “Gulch” and the “rusty metal throne” line from “Curtain” are just a couple of tidbits that have stuck with me for weeks now, and I suspect I’ll continue digging up new golden nuggets as I keep listening along with the rest of the world. The album just dropped on streaming as I’m writing this, and it feels like the celebration around Burnover has only just begun. I asked Greg about the future of the industry, specifically in the context of the recent Spotify reckoning and his complicated feelings towards the platform as a sort of necessary, but possibly transient, evil. He left me with his hope that “the freakier the future gets, the stronger our communities and independent movements will become.” He’s certainly doing his part.

Parker White lives and works in Atlanta where he moonlights as a music writer. When not attending local shows or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hiking/running, or hanging out with his beloved cat, Reba McEntire. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @parkerdoubleyoo, and you can read other stuff he’s written over on his Substack.

Jobber – Jobber To The Stars | Album Review

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Exploding In Sound Records

For every generational talent that the world of professional wrestling has produced, there are dozens of other lesser-known wrestlers that have slipped through the cracks. For every “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, The Rock, or John Cena, there is an unsung titan like the Brooklyn Brawler, The Oddities, or the comedic parody firestorm that was Gillberg. For these lesser-known performers, their role was often losing matches to the bigger-name wrestlers, propping them up as the superstars they were meant to be. Within the art form, these designated losers are known as “jobbers,” and even though they are looked down upon by millions of fans tuning in, there’s a certain beauty in sacrificing yourself for the 1… 2… 3… pin. It’s a selfless act to put others before yourself for the greater good of the spectacle, all to benefit another wrestler in hopes of elevating your own career down the road. 

Kate Meizner, Michael Falcone, Michael Julius, and Miles Toth, the wrestling super fans that they are, appreciate the plight of the underdog. Entering the squared circle by way of Brooklyn, New York, a sludge-pop band by the name of Jobber was born in the early 2020s. The group’s first offering was an EP titled Hell In A Cell, named after the devilish steel cage match that’s been a fixture of WWE since the late ‘90s. Throughout that five-song collection, Jobber displayed a potent combo of both hooky pop songs and power guitar riffs, sounding as if a tag team was formed between The Breeders and Helmet.

Jobber To The Stars, Jobber’s full-length debut, finds the band joyfully elbow-dropping into the alternative rock era of the past that still resonates with so many people today. The opening track “Raw Is War” is named after the longest-running weekly episodic television show of all time, which WWE commentator Michael Cole routinely reminds the viewing audience every Monday, by threat of a cattle prod by the higher-up executives if he refuses. The song is a steel chair shot over the head from the opening bell, complete with gnarly riffs intertwined with bubbly sweet melodies. Meizner has all kinds of mental imagery running throughout her writing, from a snake eating its tail to lines like “hanging on by the skin of your own teeth.” Just when you think the track has run its course, there’s a killer guitar outro that sounds downright apocalyptic.

Wrestling is a fascinating spectacle where the performers depend on connection with the audience in order to rise through the ranks in a company. Great wrestlers have larger-than-life personas that develop cult followings that are everlasting, even decades after they hang up the spandex. Professional wrestler Brian Pillman, known for having a chaotic typhoon of a personality, lived a tragic life – he had to constantly live up to the character he had built himself up to be, not only on the screen, but in real life as well. “Pillman’s Got A Gun” is a slow-burning track dedicated to the ‘90s wrestler, accompanied by vicious guitar riffs that are executed with precision. It’s Jobber’s version of a ballad, coming out of the gate at a slower pace, but gradually ratcheting up the tempo as the song progresses. Meizner’s silky smooth vocals singing, “It just takes one shot to kill me,” is in reference to the moment when Brian Pillman, in-character, tried to shoot “Stone Cold” Steve Austin for breaking into his house. Yes, ‘90s wrestling television was as wild as it sounds.

For all the commitment Jobber made to the wrestling aesthetic, it’s worth mentioning that listeners don’t need to be a mark to enjoy this album. You don’t have to know what a Lou Thesz Press is or know the importance of Bret “The Hitman” Hart; wrestling itself is being used as a device for the band to discuss real-life problems that we all have encountered. Take the grungy cut “Summerslam” for example, in which Meizner compares a guy manipulating women to an arachnid “Spin webs and calculating, spider waiting, catching its prey.” A couple of tracks later, “Million Dollar Man” is bursting with enough energy to fuel a three-mile run; the topic at hand is not Ted DiBiase, but about dating someone who is like a failed summer blockbuster flop.

Outside of these interpersonal takedowns, Jobber also write about how the corporate world is hell on earth. On the jangly power pop single “Nightmare,” Meizner sings about full-of-shit CEOs, the colossal weight of being an overworked/underpaid employee, and getting talked over by switched-on bros. Her lyrics are an accurate depiction of what everyday people suffer through on a daily basis, forced to work for companies whose primary objective, nine times out of ten, is corporate greed. Waking up at the crack of dawn every morning, clocking in for a passionless job, all the while knowing that the company you’re breaking your back for couldn’t care less about you, is a type of Sisyphean hell relatable to everyone from professional wrestlers to the person reading this. 

Penultimate track “HHH” is named after the legendary wrestler in charge of WWE, and is a cerebral display of perfectly paced riffs that hammer home into a sludge-filled guitar solo that is one of the best on the whole record. Each song consistently has big guitar hero riffs on display with sweet honeycomb melodies that stick in your mind like double mint gum. Jobber created a throwback alt-rock vibe that strives for each song to belong on the A Block of MTV’s Alternative Nation.

The way Jobber uses wrestling as a guise to delve into larger issues is executed in such a clever way that it makes me want to keep hitting repeat to see what other themes I can pick up on. When you peel back the curtain, there are detailed layers not only behind the powerful production, but also within the lyrics being sung. Through thoughtfully smart songwriting and powerful alt-focused ‘90s riffs, Jobber makes a memorable debut from the opening bell to the closing pin.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He's also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.