Clementine Was Right – Tell Yourself You’re Going Home | Album Review

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The Blue Turn

On Tell Yourself You’re Going Home, the third LP by Denver’s Clementine Was Right, songwriters Mike Young and Gion Davis give us a joyous road trip album–a rock and roll Paris, Texas for nomads weaving their way through state lines across every corner of the United States. Rowdy country-rock anthems, paint-huffed hellions, wood-chipped workers, cowboy chord croonings, and “boys, boys, boys” sleeping in the river: Tell Yourself You’re Going Home is one hell of a party. For Young and Davis, the party is bigger than ever with over 30 friends contributing to Clementine’s lineup.

Clementine Was Right continue their signature blend of barroom rock and country campfire ballads heard on 2020’s Lightning and Regret and 2022’s Can’t Get Right With the Darkness. This time, the production is a little more polished and calculated. Whether it’s a perfectly placed backing vocal harmony singing “It’s ketchup, we’re fuckups” or guitar licks that flicker like flames in stereo, there are little flourishes here and there that bring the recording side of CWR to the next level. The production choices and sequencing of tracks make the album feel like a house party hosted by the band themselves. Throughout the album, you’ll find Young and Company holding your hand, dragging you through a crowded living room, leading you to the bathroom to get high, and meeting you out back for a smoke.

Tell Yourself You’re Going Home is largely carried by Young’s brilliant Springsteen-esque songwriting. Young, who consistently bills himself as a poet, happens to be quite the storyteller, and each song on Tell Yourself is a chapter or short story into a slice of American life. With drug-addled characters slipping in and out of excitement and despair, “Attic Full of Barbie Limousines” feels like it could fit somewhere in the pages of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Elsewhere, cuts like “Coca Cola Vigil” and “River Boys” tell tales of working-class grief with such specifics you’d think Young is letting us in on a secret. 

Tell Yourself You’re Going Home isn’t a downer, though. The darkness found on these ballads is often balanced with Young’s constant reminiscing on the many friendships he’s made across life and state lines. As previously mentioned, Clementine Was Right created this album with the help of upwards of 30 friends. The narrative of the album complements the band lore quite well. These 30 creatives live all over the place, and as the songs take us from California and Colorado to Mississippi and Tennessee, you get the feeling Young and Davis are meeting up to record with the very same characters depicted in the songs.

On an album so thematically heavy about friendships, it’s no surprise that two of the highlights are when Young lets a bandmate take the lead vocal role. “Attic Full of Barbie Limousines” is possibly Clementine’s best song–it’s certainly a contender for my favorite (though “Nazarene Sheen” from the band’s debut is hard to beat). Young, perhaps graciously or with full artistic genius, lets drummer Dick Darden hop in the vocal booth for a song Young wrote. Darden’s suave rasp couldn’t be more perfect for the bouncy, somber-disguised-as-happy country tune.

Then there’s “Goddamn Universe,” the penultimate track written and spoken by Gion Davis. On this track, Clementine Was Right drop the country-rock act and put on their post-rock boots. Davis recites his poetry over ambient guitar squeals and soft percussion, and the result is the most unique song in CWR’s catalog. Though the sonic qualities cause the song to stand out, it’s Davis’ lyrics that truly bring the track to another level. Rich with cross-country imagery like “Tennessee is a hallway stretching between the lottery numbers in a gas station and sprays of redbud trees in some unmarked canyon” and “I have measured out my life in Cook Out trays,” Davis puts me in every corner of America I’ve ever been. His lyrics sit perfectly between “I have no idea what this means” and “I know exactly what he’s talking about.” Davis is a powerhouse of lyricism, and “Goddamn Universe” is, frankly, a very beautiful song.

There are so many themes and ideas woven through the songwriting of Tell Yourself You’re Going Home it would be impossible to dissect them all in one simple album review. The album isn’t just about road-tripping and partying–it’s equally about returning home from your travels and realizing what has changed while you were gone. Whether it is returning to your birthplace, returning to a city you lived in briefly, or returning to the ones you love, there is this sense that you should “tell yourself you’re going home” no matter where you’re headed. It’s this constant homeward-bound sentiment trickling through the tracks that make Tell Yourself You’re Going Home Clementine Was Right’s strongest album yet. 

Russ Finn is a writer and musician who leads the band Dialup Ghost in Nashville, TN.

Origami Angel – Fruit Wine | Single Review

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Counter Intuitive Records

Origami Angel, the Washington, D.C. second-wave easycore duo, is back to dunk on the haters with their newest single, “Fruit Wine.” 

This is the first we’ve heard from Gami since their sunny summer mixtape, 2023’s The Brightest Days. This time teaming up with Grammy-nominated producer Will Yip, the track features vocalist/guitarist Ryland Heagy slamming an anonymous antagonist, akin to the Drake vs. Kendrick discourse currently unfolding in the rap community. Heagy drops barbs such as “You’re only as strong as your greatest weakness, so you better get used to your obsoleteness.” While the aforementioned rappers have their fair share of gripes with each other, it’s hard to imagine anyone having beef with Gami when all they do is release banger after banger. 

The lyrics find Heagy comparing himself to Jesus in the humblest way possible when he lays out, “As simple as it seems, it’s still so hard for me to make it look easy… turning water into fruit wine.” Admittedly, I don’t know shit about wine, but here are my findings: fruit wines are generally harder to vint than plain grape wine, so Heagy seems to be speaking to the extra hard work himself and drummer Pat Doherty have been investing in the band. Formed in 2016, Origami Angel have released something (an album, EP, mixtape) each year for eight years straight now, keeping fans fed and letting their work speak for itself. The “gami gang” is real, and the duo didn’t build it by merely reaching for the low-hanging fruit. 

Clocking in at a brief two minutes and fifty-one seconds, “Fruit Wine” leans into the patented Gami Gang easycore-emo blend more than ever, maintaining those catchy vocals while still finding room for gritty chugs. After the feel-good breezy bops of The Brightest Days, it’s a welcome return to form to hear Gami spout off again. And, of course, none of this would be complete without Pat Doherty’s impeccable drumwork driving the track forward, bringing the perfect blend of power and detail that we’ve come to adore. The band has never shied away from disclosing their love for French easycore band Chunk! No, Captain Chunk!, and that affinity is on full display in this track, which builds to a fist-balling breakdown in the last minute, narrated by Heagy’s guttural screams. 

It’s easy to see where Heagy is coming from when, even after the band released arguably one of the best emo albums of all time in Somewhere City, they were still paying their dues and working at grocery stores to make ends meet. So, while the band has smashed through various ceilings (and is even about to embark on a nationwide tour with Microwave), they’re still perpetually grinding away for something better. 

Brandon Cortez is a writer/musician residing in El Paso, Texas, with his girlfriend and two cats. When not playing in shitty local emo bands, you can find him grinding Elden Ring on his second cup of cold brew. Find him on Twitter @numetalrev.

Mister Goblin – Frog Poems | Album Review

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Spartan Records

Growing up, I was always too scared to download music illegally. Because of this, a large chunk of my iTunes library was ripped from CDs that I had borrowed either from my older brother or from the public library (I’m not sure about the legality of ripping the latter, but there were no commercials telling me not to do it, so I figured it was fine). Most of the time, I was just grabbing CDs with no real concept of what was on them; as a middle schooler, my depth of music knowledge was pretty shallow, and I was mostly interested in ripping as many things as possible so that I could brag about how many songs I had on my iPod. 

During this period there were two CDs that really stood out to me, both taken from my brother. One was The Vines’ 2002 album Highly Evolved. The other was a mixtape made for him by an old girlfriend that was a sampler of hits from poppier 90s alternative bands like Toad the Wet Sprocket and Better than Ezra. On Highly Evolved, I fell in love with the aggression of The Vines, and on the mixtape, I fell in love with the melodic hooks and great pop songwriting on tracks like “All I Want” and “The Freshman”. 

I thought back on both of these CDs frequently while listening to Frog Poems, the fourth album from Mister Goblin. Throughout Frog Poems, you find the kind of well-crafted melodies and arrangements that helped make bands like Toad the Wet Sprocket and The Wallflowers radio mainstays throughout the 90s, but with an edge that those groups lacked. There are plenty of bands around right now that pull from this era of alternative, but the way that Mister Goblin mixes these influences with heavier elements taken from post-hardcore and Braid-era emo means what they’re putting out isn’t something you’ve heard before.

The album’s third track, “The Notary,” is a song that stood out to me immediately. It starts with a driving but controlled full band sound before falling away, a softer drumbeat acting as the backdrop for a subdued guitar lead and mellow bass. “I want to be a notary,” bandleader Sam Goblin sings, “so somebody somewhere will always need me.” Goblin continues to opine on the desire to be essential as the song builds back to the intensity of the beginning through its hook before falling away again, leading us into another verse and then another build, this time surpassing where we started.

I’ve always loved songs like this that build, fall away, and then build again; the alternating periods of restraint and outburst make you appreciate each section more than you would with a less dynamic structure. When your songs are as well put together as the ones on Frog Poems, each vocal line and instruments’ part is strong enough to stand alone in this type of deconstruction; “Goodnight Sun,” “Grown Man,” and “Lost Data” all follow a similar path, though the peaks and valleys differ from track to track, which means things never get stale.

Another highlight of Frog Poems that comes through both in production and arrangements are the vocal harmonies. Throughout the softer section of the album harmonies, especially those punching through in the higher register, do as much to contribute to the songs’ depth and width as anything else in the mix.  One place this happens is “Mike Shinoda”, a spooky Halloween-themed song about indecision that erupts into fractals of harmony during the final third of the track. The higher harmonies remind me a bit of Nicole Johnson’s vocal work on early Modest Mouse songs like “Head South” and “Interstate 8,” becoming essential without overtaking or diminishing the lead vocals. 

When things get heavier on songs like “Run, Hide, Fight” and “Open Up This Pit,” Mister Goblin show that they can deliver fierce sledgehammer power just as adeptly as they can work with reserved finesse. It’s these sections of the album that reminded me of listening to Highly Evolved on the bus home from school and just letting the power and grit wash over me. Sonically, these tracks are far removed from other songs on the record, like the mellow “Goodnight Sun” or the alt-country-tinged “Saw V,” but rather than result in an uneven listening experience, these half-shade genre explorations only make the band's vision feel more singular. If Mister Goblin are a baseball player, they’re prime Yu Darvish: they have a ton of different pitches in their arsenal, and they throw them all well.

Often, when someone is putting together songs with eclectic influences, you can see the stitches; a verse might clearly be “the grunge part” before transitioning into a chorus that is “the pop-punk part.” There’s nothing wrong with this, and it can be fun to see different styles that someone clearly loves set right next to each other in one track, but what I think makes Frog Poems unique is that each song’s mixed influences have been fully incorporated to create new sounds that stand on their own as more than the sum of their parts. The result is an album that feels like a continuation of the music that came before it rather than an homage, a new must-read chapter written in the neverending story of alternative rock.  

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. You can keep up with his writing on music and sports on Twitter and listen to his band Cutaway Car here.

Water Damage – In E | Album Review

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12XU

Water Damage make music that feels like it was concocted in a tonal laboratory exclusively for me. Their core discography up to this point has spanned five songs between two albums, 2022’s self-descriptive Repeater and 2023’s quantifiably titled 2 Songs. Their mantra is simple: “Maximal repetition. Minimal deviation.” The ever-rotating collective creates murky, album-side-length tracks that zone in on a singular riff or groove and ride it until it mutates or decays. They employ tactics that draw me so heavily to bands like Seattle’s drone-country legends Earth or Japan’s “underground freak out” collective Acid Mothers Temple. I’m no geography expert, but somewhere between Seattle and Japan must lie Austin, Texas, the home base for the members of Water Damage. The band appears to be the next installment of an already-incestuous scene of musicians, some of whom are already spread across fellow 12XU artists like Spray Paint and USA/Mexico. Most notably, Water Damage features multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris, who has played with Shearwater, Swans, and Xiu Xiu, among many others. The band’s first two albums were made in a seven-piece permutation, but they’ve now grown to ten members strong for their latest release, the massive double album In E.

Other than the semi-eponymous track titles (“Reel E,” “Reel EE,” and “Reel EEE”), the album title is a nod to Terry Riley’s 1964 landmark composition In C, one of the most celebrated works in experimental music. Unreleased until 1968, the initial In C performance and recording is a hypnotic, minimalist piece of neo-classical layers and rhythms. In C's first cut was made up of eleven players, with Riley’s orchestra featuring such avant-garde pioneers as Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich, though Riley is quoted as suggesting, “a group of about 35 musicians is desired if possible.” In C has been re-interpreted by many experimental artists, from the aforementioned Acid Mothers Temple to the Swiss industrial cult group The Young Gods. It’s precisely the type of root that a band like Water Damage is well suited to pull from, being a relatively large band obsessed with long-winded, single-key grooves.

The only composition named differently is the closer “Ladybird,” which has featured performance and writing credits by Water Damage-associated band Shit & Shine. It actually is a minor break from the rest of the album’s mold, with the grounding riff being an E to F bent repetition. It’s also Water Damage’s first song to feature vocals, as garbled and affected as they are, but it was refreshing to hear them throw some new sounds at the listener after listening to an hour’s worth of intentionally consistent music.

It’s amusing to think about there being a “single” from this album; I suppose a better term may be “teaser,” although if The Decemberists can kick off their album rollout with a 19-minute, Wilco-aping prog-folk number, then Water Damage certainly has the capability and freedom to let “Reel E” be the “hit” off of this record. There’s a rich history of opening tracks on leftfield albums becoming genre staples: “Hallogallo” from the self-titled NEU! debut comes to mind, or more recently, “John L” by black midi off Cavalcade. “Reel E” isn’t too far from standard Water Damage fare, and is exactly what I come to the band to get: a swirling lo-fi jam with subtle progressions until its finish. The main noticeable change from last year’s 2 Songs is that the violin is featured much more prominently, almost like a lead instrument, whereas their previous recordings seemed to use it as an accent. Additionally, the presence of three extra members is clearly identifiable. These tracks have just that extra ounce of big room collaboration to them that round out the band’s sound even more than the first two albums.

The second song, “Reel EE,” anchors itself to a steady bass riff before angry beehive-sounding guitars explode around the three-and-a-half-minute mark. Their thick tone allows for lots of screeching feedback to compliment the track. From that point on, it’s non-stop, head-bobbing, heavy psych. It’s almost like a slightly friendlier version of The Dead C, another pioneering noise rock outfit known for their elongated recordings.

Finally, there's “Reel EEE,” and at this point, I could see some listeners considering tapping out. Water Damage does not make conventional music for conventional people, it’s one of the things that makes them one of my favorite bands of the decade. But even I’ll admit that is a lot of the key of E to handle in one sitting. I remember the only time I saw Sleep in concert and thinking, “Man, I love drop C tuning, but these motherfuckers REALLY love drop C tuning.” Despite the common anti-melodic structure between each track on In E, Water Damage serves identifiable flavors per reel. “Reel EEE” lives in ¾ time and relies more on that entrancing rhythm than it does squealingly heavy guitars or tons of feedback.

In E is a welcome addition to the Water Damage catalog, as it retains the energy of their first two albums while still trying a new challenge, aiming for an over 80-minute runtime. It may not be particularly exciting to those with short attention spans, but if you’re willing to be roped into their singularly notated world, it’s a high-rewarding listening experience. Here’s to hoping their next record is three LPs worth of entirely noteless instruments.

Logan Archer Mounts once almost got kicked out of Warped Tour for doing the Disturbed scream during a band’s acoustic set. He currently lives in Rolling Meadows, IL, but tells everyone he lives in Palatine.

Kill Gosling – Waster | EP Review

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We’re Trying Records

My first sentence for this piece was supposed to be something to the effect of "I'm writing this review at a Kill Gosling show," but I got too caught up watching the set, and that sentence wound up being the only thing I wrote down. 

So instead, I'm writing this a few weeks after the last time I saw Kill Gosling, a Columbus-based band who are increasingly hard to pin down. A year ago, I would've described them as a pop-punk band; six months ago, I would have said ‘emo riff powerhouse.’ Pulling back to that recent performance, vocalist Chandler let the crowd know that they were about to see 20 to 30 minutes of "normal rock music," and even that still feels inaccurate to me. Over the past two years, I've had the privilege to witness and share the stage with Kill Gosling, and during that time, the scope of their sound has only increased. I walk away from every set positive that they've outdone themselves, and I'm not sure I've ever been wrong about that. 

Today sees the release of Waster, the band's second EP and their most fully realized effort to date. With thick, dense sound recorded by guitarist Violet Eadie and production courtesy of booked-and-busy scene vet Will Killingsworth, this feels like one of the most monumental emo-adjacent records of the year. Not only does this release feel like it accurately captures the qualities I’ve noticed in Kill Gosling after taking in countless gigs, but the whole thing just barely fits under 10 minutes. The band doesn't waste a second, kicking off with a blink-and-you-'ll-miss-it drum fill leading straight into verse one of “Bobby Hobby,” making for a floaty doo-wop-style opener that's in and out with two verses, two choruses, and a solo in less than a minute and a half. 

They don't let up after this, either - highlights include lead single “Cow Tools,” a Far Side-referencing track that, in the same minute and a half, takes a fast punk beat and reflects on friends, sobriety and “talking about the bands we hate” (I’m praying I’m not counted here) before leading into some guitar shredding and screamed vocals. Diversity in vocal performance is one of the biggest upgrades this record brings, from the bratty Billie Joe Armstrong-esque sneers on “Forget” to the chorused, yearning backing tracks on tracks like “Impatient” and “Untitled.” The instrumentals get their time to shine, too - “Forget” sports the tightest rhythm section performances I’ve heard from a rock band all year, and flourishes on “Hobby” and “Selfish” showcase just how talented the group all are individually.  

Despite the modest “normal rock music” tag, Kill Gosling is a band that knows what they’re doing and know how to do it well. With a sound that’s both familiar and hard to quite nail with one description, sometimes it can get hard to explain what exactly you’re in for with them.  Doing my best here, though: Waster is easily one of the best post-hardcore-rock-emo-pop-indie-shoegaze-punk-wave-core records you’re gonna find all year.  

Rohan Rindani is a writer and musician based in Columbus, OH covering DIY music, non-DIY music, and whatever else they want to, really. They’re also in a few bands. You can send them money, job offers, and praise via email, and look at them on Instagram. You can also find them on Twitter or at a show if you know where to look.