Cursive – Devourer | Album Review

Run For Cover

A fucking brick tied to a hammer through the windshield at 100 miles per hour. This was the very first thing I felt hearing “Botch Job” for the first time, the blazing opener from the tenth Cursive album Devourer. It’s an apt title for the way the album kicks off, swallowing you whole in the midst of sharp, syncopated rhythms without stopping to chew or hydrate. The song is a full-force rocker that transitions into a lovely chorus section spotlighting Megan Siebe, the most badass cellist in alt-rock, churning with the rest of the band behind the dark and distinct frontman Tim Kasher. We’re only a few months shy of list season, so I feel confident calling “Botch Job” one of the year’s greatest opening tracks. The nearly three-decade surviving Nebraska band is no stranger to intensity, a facet that sold me on their music in the first place, although I’m still a bit of a stranger myself to most of their catalog.

Sometime in the early 2000s, my cousin showed me “Sierra,” the classic track from Cursive’s emo opus, The Ugly Organ. I held onto that anthem for a handful of years as my personal greatest hit of the band, a song so rad that I somehow refused any notion of listening to anything else they’d done, including the rest of The Ugly Organ. In 2009, I caught wind of their sixth album, Mama, I’m Swollen, and that album’s opening track, “In The Now,” became the second Cursive song I fell in love with. Things stayed that way for a full decade: just me, two Cursive songs, and an inexplicable lack of desire to further investigate a band who, by my account, had at least two incredible songs.

It was my girlfriend who made the final sale for me in 2019 when she took me to their co-headlining tour with mewithoutYou, supported by The Appleseed Cast. I was prepared for that show by being 1) a longtime Appleseed fan who had never seen them in concert, 2) a less than lukewarm mewithoutYou fan who became vehemently against everything that band was about after seeing them play a dreadfully boring set, and 3) a curious Cursive fan who loved exactly two songs. They must have known I was coming, like they had a secret band meeting backstage and went, “Oh shit, that kid that only knows and likes two of our songs is coming; let’s convince him we have more than two good songs” (a brief aside: I went through this exact same scenario with Dashboard Confessional as well a couple years prior). They opened with “Sierra” and did not play “In The Now,” but then played a lot of other songs that I came to enjoy very much, and I asked their merch seller for a recommendation on which vinyl I should buy since I was now a Cursive convert. He recommended the third album, 2000’s Cursive's Domestica.

I brought that record home, played it, and thought, “This rocks but sounds nothing like the live show or those two songs I’ve loved forever.” So I began to educate myself on the ever-stylistically-mutating band known as Cursive, whose first three albums exist in the classic emo canon alongside legendary bands like Elliott, Mineral, and Texas Is The Reason, before transitioning into sort of a goth-rock Yellowcard or a steam-punk Modest Mouse on The Ugly Organ. I would go on to sell that copy of Domestica, then after the pandemic, see them perform all of Domestica in concert, buy the 20th-anniversary reissue version at that concert, and then sell that copy of Domestica. This is no shade to Domestica; it’s more reflective of the fact that I buy too many records.

So this is the state I enter Devourer in, where I’ve heard at least some songs from most of their albums, have a general idea of how to describe their post-hardcore-meets-art-rock sound, and have enjoyed enough of that idea to be interested in this new album. To my surprise, the first half of the album felt like my musical picture of the band had been punched through like a $10 Million Monet. As a non-expert, it feels like something totally off the wall for Cursive, yet in their wheelhouse of pushing their own sonic boundaries. Throughout the Devourer tracklist, I hear notes of artists like At The Drive-In and Biffy Clyro, much more than I hear more traditional emo or alternative influences. The band hits a run of tracks on the first side that fall into a very particular space that I think few bands are able to get into: structured, emotional music that relies more on riffs and energy than it does twinkly guitars or moaned vocals. Cursive’s new labelmates Citizen nailed this on 2017’s fantastic As You Please, or the more space rock-leaning Thrice material showcased on their latest album Horizons / East in 2021. Cursive’s aforementioned killer opener is followed by “Up and Away,” a bit of a contrast to the ferocity of “Botch Job,” built around a more melodic verse and chorus but keeping up a noisy, off-kilter riff in between.

Cursive released four advance singles to the album, which I personally think is far too much. Spoiling 25% of an upcoming release, especially when three of those singles make up the first four songs in the tracklist, seemed like a bit of an odd choice to me. Between those songs, “Imposturing” is certainly single-worthy, landing firmly in Cursive’s classic wheelhouse of frenetic yet catchy art rock. Kasher’s delivery on the lyric “If it works to be hurt you could be a piece of shit / Leave your house and your spouse like a great escape artist” is expertly calculated and performed, with a large crop of other spitfire quotables throughout:

Ain’t that the reason you write your hangdog and forthright songs?
You make ‘em up as you go along

An even odder choice to me was the band skipping the opportunity entirely on priming “The Avalanche Of Our Demise” as one of those initial singles. Personally, I think if you’ve ever been a fan of the band in any era, this seems like it could be regarded among their greatest and long-lasting cuts. It has everything you want out of a Cursive track: the angular, anchoring guitar riff, Kasher’s signature storytelling, and a creative chorus presented with the guitars, drums, and cello working in unison to accent the tale. Kasher hits another knockout vocal performance on this song with “What’s going to stop it anyway? Rogue waves and hurricanes / Isn’t that what a checkbook’s for? Disaster relief du jour.” Any moment of Devourer’s first quarter is enough to keep you locked in for the album’s remainder, although it’s my feeling that Cursive did frontload quite a bit this time around.

Things slow down on “Rookie,” which frankly is a nice moment after the no-punches-pulled run at the top of the album, and then a bit of a surprisingly upbeat number, “Dead End Days,” follows. It almost feels like a +44 track to me with the prominent keyboards and driving rhythm, which doesn’t feel outside of Cursive’s abilities at all. Kasher gets in another cutting lyric with “Life is like a bowl of grapes, stomped on until bitter wine is made.” He has always been extremely good at making lyrics stand out, and the writing on Devourer is no different.

Those synth flairs show up again on “Dark Star,” a danceable darkwave cut reminiscent of Matt Skiba’s post-punk passion project Heavens, a band I think of on “Consumers” as well with the distorted background vocals boosting Kasher’s leads. It’s in Devourer’s back half where things seem to pale compared to its strong beginning, but isolating those tracks, including the classic-Cursive-sounding “What Do We Do Now,” prove that the record isn’t as top-heavy as it feels. It just happens to have an extremely strong opening sequence that’s ripe for repetition.

“The Loss” is a quiet closer; not bad, but nothing on the level that the rest of the album is operating. Thematically, I understand its place, but the intensity of “The Age of Impotence” would have made a nice compliment to “Botch Job” if it ended the record instead. Even if Kasher’s screaming of “motherfucker!” in the refrain comes off a bit cheesy, but at least it’s much more succinct than “What the Fuck” which closes out the album’s first half on a very weak note.

Despite their stylistic evolution, Cursive feels like a very consistent group even this long into their career. These new songs from Devourer were very well received at the band’s recent Riot Fest performance, shuffled in with other catalog classics. Whether it’s Central American emo or apocalyptic art punk, Cursive can take on any sound without jeopardizing the message at the core of the band, and Devourer is the next great installment.

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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.

Origami Angel – Feeling Not Found | Album Review

Counter Intuitive Records

In case you haven't heard, it's pretty much impossible to remove the looming shadow of the Internet from the current state of music... Well, the current state of everything really, but this is an album review, so, music. In fact, the tangibility of the Internet has never felt more salient: public streaming numbers are turning music listening into a prizeless competition, artists with one viral song are getting Grammy nominations, and meme culture dyed the Internet lime green for a summer. It’s all making the way people interact with life and art weird. 

Sure, the web is a tool to connect music to listeners and audiences to artists, but the relationship between music and the ‘Net is complex. It’s a place for buzzing discussion just as much as it is endless discourse. It’s a way to DM secret show addresses and document music scenes, but also a place where artists have to scrape by in an uneasy relationship with companies who have monopolized the technical side of things without considering the music side of things. Much like existing, The Online can be emotional and overwhelming and loud and cruel and intoxicating and real. Over the last few decades, we've watched it build and build until one day, it feels like everything will finally just be blue screens. Shrouded in this blue glow is where we find Origami Angel’s latest album, Feeling Not Found.

On their third album, buried between the 0s and 1s, Ryland Heagy and Pat Doherty dive deeper into familiar (certifiably Gami) territory while simultaneously breaking into exciting new realms. Through their discography, the band has always been driven by a handful of specific themes and tricks, and Feeling Not Found is no exception – but this is their brashest and boldest project yet. After years of experiments within the emo sound, their third full-length catapults Origami Angel into another echelon of expertise as they experiment with even more genres, deliveries, and emotion. They're combatting information overload with information overload. 

In Feeling Not Found, there’s always another layer, another lyrical twist, another reference, or another unpredictable change around the corner as Origami Angel contends with the tensions of tangible reality through digital metaphor. With earlier song titles like “ROM Hack,” the story of how Origami Angel broke Minecraft and their rise to Emo Fame via online DIY circles, it’s impossible to separate Origami Angel from their existence within the Internet—and no one is more aware of this than the band themselves. 

This concept-album-type-thing is not new to Origami Angel. Their first album, Somewhere City, imagined an escapist town filled with backyard roller coasters and endless refills of Dr. Pepper. To give you an idea of how much this band commits to the bit, physical copies of their debut came with a map of the city, and the album rolled out through a now-defunct augmented reality game. They continued the conceptual thread when they recorded their sophomore double album, GAMI GANG, in Heagy’s bedroom during lockdown. While that feels like a lifetime ago, Origami Angel hasn't stopped releasing music since. On a random Friday in 2022, the duo suddenly dropped re: turn, a gentle acoustic EP, and on the following Monday, they uploaded DEPART, a twin, body-slamming hardcore EP. On the back half of their latest, The Brightest Days, they dealt with the excruciating inner turmoil they feel towards the treatment of their hometown through the sunny confines of a breezy, Weezer-influenced mixtape. All of this makes the new album’s digital framing a natural and even necessary perspective for this particular project. It also gave the band an excuse to send Nintendo DS cartridges of the album to fans, which I bet they have wanted to do for a very long time.

Feeling Not Found is a pointed conglomeration of all the sounds and themes they experimented with over the past few years as they ascended to emo stardom. Release after release, album after EP after mixtape, Origami Angel have always stuck to a pronged emotional core with general ideas like longing, grappling with betrayal, pinpointing the authentic self amongst the weird, and breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to their audience. This consistency is one of the band’s most underhanded strengths, a common center that the duo can always ascend from, revisit, adjust, and reaffirm. Feeling Not Found comfortably continues these established concepts while newly remembering that the opposite of 'want' is 'take.'

The album begins with its thesis, “Lost Signal,” a soft synth track laced with grief. Heagy’s vocals digitize slowly as if suddenly engulfed by the computer screen he imagines. He ends the song solemnly with the suggestion that “maybe there’s a way out that nobody sees, In the static displays of our old CRTs, The sounds of the universe being created, And most people hate it.” This song sets the tone of Feeling Not Found and opens the window into the digital landscape: the hope for hope amongst numbness.

The album starts to quite literally rip from there, zipping through the circuits and directly into the electrifying introduction of “Dirty Mirror Selfie.” If “Lost Signal” sets the tone, “Dirty Mirror Selfie” sets the pace. In three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the song touches on hair metal, power pop, emo, pop-punk, nu-metal, and something that reminds me of the build in a 00s singer-songwriter’s ballad before it's all blended into a hardcore breakdown that reminds you that their home, Washington D.C., invented this stuff. While this album fairly solidly pushes Origami Angel out of any stagnant “emo” descriptor and beyond the 5th wave ingénuity they contributed to, it’s not not-emo. For example, as the tracklist plays on, “Viral” trades in the melancholy realizations of “Where Blue Light Blooms” for dejected vulnerability, with lyrics pivoting briefly back to the more somber days of Quiet Hours amongst the squeal of a guitar and click of drumsticks. 

After “Underneath My Skin” softly shuts the door on its way out, “Wretched Trajectory” kicks it back open. Between descriptions of a building sense of panic and a private need to see someone again, this song slides closest back to the Somewhere City and Gami Gang of it all. Specifically, it could even be a callback to similar emotions expressed in “The Title Track” or later in “Self Destruct.” But that’s not all, because it's also just as loud as those predecessors. 

Pat Doherty’s drumming style is one of incomparable precision and intensity that glows throughout the entire album (and the band’s entire discography, for that matter). “Wretched Trajectory” is primarily driven through Doherty’s heartbeat of a kickdrum, a moment showcased best in the bridge as the rest of the music drops out and he powers all momentum. It’s impossible not to think of how these songs will translate into Origami Angel’s riotous live shows, where the circle pit never stops circling, and the crowd surfers never stop surfing. 

The final gang vocals of “Wretched Trajectory” arc down into the anguished ballad “AP Revisionist History” before leading into “Living Proof,” which begins with a beachy pop-punk beat that bounces along, grating against the simmering ferocity of the lyrics. As Heagy singsongs a reminder that “I don’t think that that’s how you’re supposed to talk to people you say you love,” the song slowly grows more sinister. Formerly boppy guitar riffs start to slice between Heagy’s words, matching their acerbic strikes. Suddenly, without warning, the floor falls out from underneath the song, revealing a pulsing beatdown. After years of releases, it’s become abundantly clear that Heagy is not afraid to get mad as fuck — in fact, he screamed across an EP about it in 2022. For the DEPART-heads out there, “Living Proof” picks up where “JUDGE” left off, and it’s even meaner. 

So, how have these past few years of emo celebrity and indie darling-dom treated Origami Angel? Thanks for asking. Past lead single “Fruit Wine” sits “Sixth Cents (Get It?),” one of the record's final singles. This song digs very openly at the uglier parts of being a working musician: the pay, the falsified enthusiasm, and the empty promises. A restless rhythm complements the song’s sardonic condemnation of The Music Industry, as the band seems to mimic the demands they’re receiving – specifically, the notion that artists have to constantly change themselves to be noticed by any kind of algorithm-based popularity machine. It’s funny, it’s rude, it races at a 2:15 pm-Warped-tour-mainstage-metalcore speed, and it resonates.

This song is immediately followed by the breathless “secondgradefoofight” and the two share an incredibly fun music video. Origami Angel has always worn their references on their sleeves, from proudly championing sidelined bands like Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! to instantly name-dropping DC’s The Obsessives when asked about their duo structure. As a band that does the most (haha) at every juncture possible, their references are endless – they're very clearly geeks with a deep appreciation for lots of music, and that makes it pretty easy to be a fan of theirs. However, the joint music video is the most they’ve ever referenced other artists as they step into their shoes and recreate the videos that made these stars famous, from Taking Back Sunday’s VH1 Top 20 Video Countdown-ready “Cute Without the 'E' (Cut From the Team)” to Phoebe Bridgers’ highly-parodied “Kyoto” to that one frame of Modern Baseball’s “Your Graduation” that probably has a fan base of its own. But despite the perhaps therapeutic airing of grievances in “Sixth Cents (Get It?)” and the threats of the anxiety-riddled “secondgradefoofight,” there is still an emotional toll to it all. The stretch of anti-industry, semi-self-motivating tracks ends on “HM07 Waterfall,” a Pokémon-referencing song that cracks the screen Gami carefully placed between the digital and the real as it starts to apologize for the personal impact of these conflicts.

In Ian Cohen’s Pitchfork review of the comparatively hopeful Somewhere City, he concludes with the suggestion that “Origami Angel would be wise to explore the darkness on the edge of town.” It seems that in the tumultuous five years since that release, the band has found themselves in that exact fading light. On that album, Origami Angel ended with a repeated refrain, “The city never lets me down,” a sweet conclusion to a very sweet project. A couple of years later, the band ended their second album with the repeated confirmation, “This is goodbye.” Now, on the title track for Feeling Not Found, the band marries the two sentiments into the bittersweet affirmation, “No matter how much the world wants me to change.” It’s a conclusion that they could have only gotten to now. Suddenly, the anxiety of the blue light fades away.

After all of this, can you even look at the world around you without seeing the junk and firewalls? The digitalscape is woven into the reality of Origami Angel, not only in the music listening but in their lyrics, musical references, song titles, and conceptual outlook. In their own words, “When the cycle is over, and all the circuits are broken, you won’t be fighting resistance in spite of existence.” So log off, close this review, listen to the album, and remove yourself from the Internet. Just know that when you look away, there will be a split second where the brightness of this exact screen will still be burned over your vision, momentarily blending your digital life into your physical reality.

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Caro Alt’s (she/her) favorite thing in the world is probably collecting CDs. Caro is from New Orleans, Louisiana and spends her time not sorting her CD collection even though she really, really needs to.

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild | Album Review

Darling Recordings

The kinetic power nature can hold for us physically, emotionally, and spiritually is nothing short of a miracle. The energy we absorb from the natural beauty of our surroundings can center our minds, heal us, and even inspire us. In a post-pandemic world, Merce Lemon felt a sense of aimlessness with her music. She used life around her for a personal and creatively reconnective experience. When she unveiled her new record Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, Merce explained in a press release, “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time, I just slowly accumulated songs.” On her latest LP, the Pittsburgh native sings sweetly about an abundance of the earth's natural resources. Blueberry trees, birds, and rivers all coexist, with Merce tying these wonders together with a certain tranquility, acting as a reassuring voice through the stormy circumstances that life presents. 

The last record we heard from Merce was 2020's jangly, alt-country-ish Moonth. Since then, the alt-country subgenre has broken into the mainstream, led by bands like Wednesday, Waxahatchee, and MJ Lenderman. Twangy indie rock has never been more in vogue than it is right now. Merce signaled her version of this evolution earlier this year, first with a split of Will Oldham covers with Colin Miller and then with the standalone slow-burner “Will You Do Me A Kindness?” Together, these songs signaled a step away from the quirky indie rock sounds of Moonth and toward something more naturalistic and folksy. On her latest album, Merce dives headfirst into the country-tinged sound, picking at the Wednesday branch with assistance from producer Alex Farrar and Colin Miller. You’ll also hear Xandy Chelmis ripping away on the pedal steel and Landon George, whose fiddle was all over MJ Lenderman’s recent Manning Fireworks.

The best example of the evolution of Merce’s sound would be the lead single “Backyard Lover,” which tugs on the heartstrings, starting with weepy pedal steel that sounds like you’re slow dancing with a partner in a middle-of-nowhere dive bar. A soft-voiced Merce Lemon delivers intimate, raw lyrics on the aftereffects of a close friend passing away, “Now I am falling to a dark place / Where just remembering her death’s / About all I can take.” Then, methodically, the band builds to an epic finish of blown-out guitars and one of the most fiery solos of the year. Throughout the record, the slow build is something Merce excels at; each and every song is a journey that she invites the listeners on, and the catharsis found at the other end makes the finish well worth the wait.

“Crow” is another song with a similar formula, with Merce singing about the “murderous flock” of birds descending onto her hometown like clockwork year after year. Momentum is constantly progressing throughout the track, beginning as a mid-tempo folk song and morphing into a raging distorted wall of guitars that match the energy of the creatures she sings about. On the same note, if there ever were a soundscape that perfectly matches the title of a song, it would be “Rain.” Adapted from a Justin Lubecki poem, the band uses a slow tempo and dreamy guitars to paint with dour grey tones. The mood is somber yet soothing, like staring outside your bedroom window during a summer shower.

Merce’s songwriting has grown with each album cycle; her lyrics have always had a persistent dread but also an idiosyncratic sense of humor, with Moonth delivering us a smorgasbord of songs about sauerkraut, chili packets, and sardines. On Dogs, she sinks further into the despair and isolation of her writing, articulating a sense of pain with beautifully descriptive imagery of people and nature. On the title track, “Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild,” we get loads of sensory references like the old man laughing his teeth out, the smell of bark off a fallen tree, and frozen-over leaves by a creek, all the while thoughts of marriage seem to be crushing her. 

But the songs aren't all doom and gloom here; there's fun to be had, like the opener, “Birdseed,” which imagines what it would be like to morph into a bird. The lyrics touch on how freeing it must be to grow wings and soar through the sky but also how funny it would be to watch unsuspecting folk’s step onto her droppings, which is freeing in a different way, I guess. The pedal steel and fiddle work overtime here, creating an enjoyable, lush experience as the lyrics subconsciously make us more careful about where we walk now. “Foolish and Fast” is a title that Vin Diesel would be jealous of not coming up with; a perfect road trip song for driving through the mountains on a blue skyed summer day. Even on the more upbeat songs, Merce still has lines that will stop you dead in your tracks. Something as simple as “There's nothing like an open road” could be either a passing observation or intensely cathartic when you think about the freedom it implies in being able to choose your destiny.  

Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild encourages you to go for a walk, take a road trip, or even just step barefoot outside your house, so long as you're present in your surroundings. Merce created a love letter to our natural resources, the wonders of what the earth can provide and inspire for us – something we should never take for granted. There's a yearning to be unencumbered like a bird soaring through the sky. Merce has detached herself from the pressures of everyday expectations and channeled her energy into an album on her terms. 

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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.

Bent Knee – Twenty Pills Without Water | Album Review

Take This To Heart Records

You can never go home again. Some variation of this phrase has haunted me since migrating to the opposite end of the country immediately after completing high school in Alabama. It cut particularly deep in the throes of a pandemic while holed up in an apartment in a new city where the only person I knew was my aunt. Even after COVID restrictions had loosened and I visited my hometown a handful of times, the chokehold that phrase has yet to let up. My memories are all I have, but those are just snapshots of a place that is constantly growing at an ever-quickening pace, with new buildings and businesses replacing the ones I know while most of the people who helped me bear it for ten years have made migrations of their own. Even the house I grew up in is wildly different, as anyone who's left home for any extended period will recognize. This inability to return to a previous status quo is a universal experience, albeit one that weighs heavier on some than it does on others. If their new album is any indication, it’s been a similarly heavy load on Bent Knee.

Few bands in the independent circuit have covered as much ground in the last fifteen years as Bent Knee. Since their 2011 debut, the Boston natives have folded everything from string-heavy art pop and prog to crushing stoner rock riffs into their arsenal in a way that’s made them impossible to put in any one box. The one true anchor is Courtney Swain’s formidable vocal ability, with her bright soprano and mind-melting belts imbuing all their music with an undeniable sense of scale and melodrama. Their previous outing, 2021’s Frosting, saw them push that sound to the limit with their most heavily synthetic palette, yet as they took a plunge into the sounds of hyperpop that would have seen most bands falling flat on their faces. Against all odds though, their commitment to the style’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink maximalism yielded plenty of winners in the tracklist; it’s home to both some of their zaniest and most emotionally direct material to date.

That said, Frosting was also the first time you might accuse the band of biting off a little more than they could chew. It’s a good but flawed record, sometimes feeling caught between too many ideas to coalesce into a satisfying experience. By comparison, Twenty Pills Without Water sees the band scaling back in favor of a more cohesive vision. The impossible desire to return to the way things were courses underneath nearly every moment, something that seems surprising from a band as ever-evolving as Bent Knee. With context though, it’s not difficult to guess why this might have weighed heavy on their mind. While this is their seventh album as a band, it is their first record as a four-piece, having parted ways with bassist Jessica Kion and lead guitarist Ben Levin, both of whom had been with the group since 2009 and left in 2022. Even though the separation was amicable, with the members citing the difficulties of being a touring musician, I can only imagine this was a significant loss for an outfit as creative and ambitious as this one. 

Rather than hide those feelings to prove that they’ve “still got it,” Bent Knee make the choice to soak this cocktail of uncertainty in and share the journey with their audience. After a scene-setting intro full of clinking and clattering, the hypnotic thundering of drums and mantra-like wails on “Forest” signal a triumphant return to a classic Bent Knee sound on the surface, but the foreboding atmosphere that hangs over the track like a fog indicates otherwise. It even threatens to overtake Courtney Swain as she’s consumed by echoes and forgotten voices. This fog rests over every part of the record, only ever lifting when the band can no longer keep in the nagging feeling that something is wrong. Every song plays like a waiting game of how long they can swallow their emotions before they leak or, in some cases, burst out. This is the sound of a group that is lost in the woods and knows it. They continue to trudge forward because within that forest resides not only the most morose and pensive material of their career but also some of the most beautiful and affirming.

Many songs start this search with a distraction. “I Like It” seeks comfort in shared desire between two partners over skittering drum machines and a lush string section courtesy of guitarist/violinist Chris Baum. The song soon underlines that pleasure with a bitter sting as the playful chorus concludes a list of would-be turn-ons with “I like it when you swear that you’re never coming home.” On lead single “Illiterate,” Swain responds to outside criticism and pressure with self-soothing late-night binges that stretch progressively further into the morning. The song’s chopped-up riff and stop-and-start build induce a nervous tension throughout the verses that each chorus has a harder time relieving, with Swain howling about how she’s not sure if she’s crying, “but it’s okay!” by the final refrain. It’s a hollow comfort that I’ve become all too familiar with through my own various attempts to escape into fiction or any art that offers an alternative to my present state. There are well-defined rules and characters you can know in and out as an observer, unlike the chaos of waking life that still waits at the end of an episode. 

Another song whose coping mechanism hits eerily close to home is “Never Coming Home,” revolving around a late-night drive with no clear destination. I often found myself on similar trips when I still lived in Alabama. I would waste gas exploring the twists, turns, and highways that crisscrossed my county with my stereo on blast, driving anywhere but home. At the time, I thought I was just making sure I could finish whatever song or album I was singing along to, but on some level, this was when I was able to most enjoy myself as a teenager. I didn’t have to think so much about where I was or what anybody thought of me; I could just move and sing. The bouncy, light-on-its-feet production courtesy of bassist Vince Welch manages to bottle that freedom in a smooth synth-pop jam while still capturing how bittersweet those rides were, with Swain expressing doubt and a need to escape at every turn in the lyrics. Unlike previous tracks however, she almost finds it, not in her words, but in the music, with the band cruising beyond the city limits and into a spacious horizon by the end. She may not know where she’s going, but it sure as hell isn’t backwards. 

That lack of direction can be just as oppressive as it is liberating. Take “Big Bagel Manifesto,” which sees the band at their most abstract, with Swain letting emotion rather than words guide her voice through a foreboding intro made up almost entirely of strings. The lyrics are nearly nonexistent, with the liner notes reading more like suggestions in the first half and willfully nonsensical in the second. The only clear anchor here is the pitched-up refrain of “Heads up, everybody sucks!” filling out the body of the song along with the rhythm section as the crooning reaches a fever pitch. The elusive nature of the song frustrated me at first, only clicking into place when I let go of concrete interpretation and let myself be guided by the one emotion that comes across clear as day: confusion. Bent Knee have never been ones to make their lyrics especially obvious, so the tilt into a borderline mood piece is an effective one, especially with the cumulative muscle of the band and several guest musicians expertly overwhelming me once the song kicks into gear. It feels like a sister to the despondent “Drowning” later in the tracklist, an appropriately titled song that wallows in uncertainty and frayed lines of communication. It’s far and away the prettiest song on Twenty Pills, with Baum’s violin leading an ever-growing mini-string symphony over keys that glitter like sunlight on water, but also the emotional rock bottom as Swain sings of literally sinking by the end.

One always seems to be right
To swim to survive
But I sank with the tide
So see if I care

As with most rock bottoms though, it’s from here that some resolution begins to take shape. Bent Knee have always sounded mighty and confident on past records, if also a little unknowable, consistently leaving me in a state of awe. Twenty Pills is the first time that hasn’t been the case, but leave it to Bent Knee to turn that weakness into a strength. “Lawnmower” was the first song the band released as a quartet, coming out in May of last year, and pretty transparently addresses a parting of ways.

Seventeen years in the dirt
We ought to live it up
If this is all we got
Honestly I know
We have to say goodbye sometimes

With a stripped-back build reminiscent of many current indie folk darlings, it’s a strikingly candid song from a band that I’m used to sounding out of this world. It was already a high point for the record, but it didn’t click into place how important this song is for the band until seeing them perform it at their Portland concert earlier this month. It was a small venue, not exactly packed to the brim, but everyone seemed to be such massive supporters of the band, with the band shouting out specific audience members and touring partners who made their shows possible. With every added instrument, it felt like a collective weight was being lifted until the song’s explosive finish had everyone around me floating. It reminded me of the penultimate song on the album, the mysteriously titled “DLWTSB,” another synth-led, Prince-inspired romp that stuffs in a host of cliches about overcoming adversity that it can feel a bit cheesy. After an album full of doubt and fear chased with the experience I had seeing them live, I can’t help but feel the band’s earned a fair portion of cheese when the song finds its groove and Swain defiantly asserts that “Underdogs gotta stick together when we can.” Sure, it could be just another coping mechanism, a retreat into easy platitudes, but comfort can lead to healing and, beyond that, growth. I can’t say for sure if the band has made it out of the woods yet, just as none of us can ever truly say the same for our own forests, but they’ve paved a road behind them so that others may follow and a select few already have. That road’s destination may seem unclear, but to borrow from another well-worn cliche, it’s the journey that matters anyway. 

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Wesley Cochran lives in Portland, OR where he works, writes, and enjoys keeping up with music of all kinds, with a particular fondness for indie rock. You can find him @ohcompassion on Twitter, via his email electricalmess@gmail.com, or at any Wilco show in the Pacific Northwest.

CLIFFDIVER – birdwatching | Album Review

SideOneDummy Records

I’m tired. Not just in a “Oh, I didn’t get enough sleep last night” kind of way or even a “This has just been a rough week for me” kind of way. It’s been a rough 29 years, and I feel like the past few have taken more than their share off my grand total. As the years speed along, I find new and creative ways to cope with the trauma of the pandemic, the stresses of growing older, and the horrors I witness on a daily basis through the rectangle in my pocket. Daily tasks feel like a struggle, and despite being a social person, spending time with others doesn’t recharge me in the ways that it used to. This feeling of exhaustion and my inability to deal with it is compounded by the sense that I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I’m almost 30 years old, and I can’t get through a day or two without feeling like I missed something crucial in my upbringing that makes me “less than” my peers. 

However, something I often find myself thinking about is how I’m not alone in feeling this way. Whether it's regarding my employment status, my consistently depleted bank account, general exhaustion and dissatisfaction with my life, or feeling ill-equipped for the world around me, it seems to be a shared trend amongst my generation – and bleeding into the next. There’s a strange, oddly comforting sense of solidarity in that fact, but along with it is an even greater sense of how fucked it is that we all feel this way. Some do a convincing job of pretending these struggles don't affect them in an attempt to push “normalcy,” but it is heartening to see the overwhelming number of people I know uplifting each other and tackling the minutiae of daily life together in the hopes that maybe one day things will improve.

While listening to their latest LP, birdwatching, it’s apparent that eerily similar thoughts are heavy on the minds of Oklahoma-based punk rock band CLIFFDIVER. As a fan of the septet since the release of their last album, Exercise Your Demons, that refreshingly real and uncompromising outlook on life is nothing new to them, especially given what the band has been through in recent years, and I was pleased to discover that this new collection of songs further commits to exploring difficult concepts. 

Opening track “thirty, flirty, and thriving!!!” highlights this struggle of being alive for three whole decades and still having absolutely no grasp of what is going on around you. Desperate, honest lyrics “thirty years and I still don’t know shit” repeatedly hit me over the head, echoing the little voices rattling around in my brain and making me feel like I’m the only person in the world who doesn't have their shit together. The single “dayz gone” further piles on these exhausted emotions, daily defeats, and mistrust in those around us and the systems we live in.

CLIFFDIVER have never been strangers to versatility in their albums, and birdwatching is no exception. Upbeat tracks like “team fight tactics” saunter through with bubbly drum beats, charming back-and-forths between vocalists Joey Duffy and Brianna Wright, and sultry horn tones satisfy the desire for some easy listening. A couple tracks later, “midnight mass” explores themes of devastating losses and dissipated relationships – as gutting to listen to as I’m sure it was to write. The unique beauty of CLIFFDIVER is how both of these tracks are about daily life and human relationships –  the former highlighting squabbles between sports teams and the ever-elusive decision of what’s for dinner, while the latter bemoans the pitfalls of nostalgia and missing friends whom we’re admittedly better off without. Each of the 12 tracks on this album is its own world, its own private story to tell, and we’re given the privilege of being let in, if only for a few minutes apiece. This particular kind of sequencing and formulation on display makes me crave far more than 35 minutes in these worlds. 

It’s not lightly or hyperbolically when I state that there are no bands doing it right now like CLIFFDIVER. The ninth track on the album, “would tho,” stands not only as my favorite track on an already spectacular collection of instant classics but as a testament to everything I love about this band. Seemingly possessed by a hardcore counterpart just one track earlier, "CLIFFDRIVER," sees the group take a page out of Pool Kids's book (or should I say POOL) by throwing down a one-minute hardcore track that acts as an exhilarating mid-album burst of energy. “would tho” continues this catharsis with a danceable rhythm and spacy synth notes ornamenting this infectious hardcore punk jaunt, delivering one of my favorite songs of the year. The feature by Stoph Colasanto of Carpool in the track “goin for the garbage plate” only serves to elevate this album into the greats of 2024 and flaunts how impressive this year has been for the punk scene. Carpool delivered their own essential punk offering, My Life In Subtitles, just a few months earlier, and their inclusion here only proves that birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

I think the knee-jerk reaction when you’re dissatisfied with your life is to torture yourself with what you could have done differently. Instead of dealing with the problem at hand, it’s easier to beat yourself up and pinpoint the exact moment where you fucked everything up. And when the sulking and self-pitying recedes, there’s the allure of nostalgia and uncomplicated escapism to satiate you for a while. The final track on birdwatching, “i reckon you might could i s’pose,” acts not only as a closing thesis statement for the record but a snapshot of these difficult cycles of failure and self-soothing. As a generation trapped by overwhelming nostalgia in the face of unparalleled grief and disappointment, we’re mesmerized by the idea of an alternate universe where these tragedies never happened. The melancholic guitar trills into triumphant brass and chanting gang vocals evoke mixed emotions and open the finale up to interpretation – is this the acceptance of defeat, or is it a rallying cry? 

This latest album by CLIFFDIVER provides something the scene desperately needs now more than ever – brutal honesty. Crisp production, signature vocals, and uncompromising instrumental performances engross from track to track. Joey and Bri continue to complement each other with their unique and unmistakable styles, which are as arresting as their lyrics. Musical prowess and impressive instrumentation are definitely enough to carry a solid record, but the feelings – the raw, unfiltered admissions behind birdwatching – are what make it a truly special experience. Flawless sequencing, just the right balance of songs to mourn to and songs to get into fist-fights to, CLIFFDIVER continues to elevate my hopes for the future of diverse, complex music that always has something important to say.

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Ciara Rhiannon (she/her) is a pathological music lover writing out of a nebulous location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest within close proximity of her two cats. She consistently appears on most socials as @rhiannon_comma, and you can read more of her musical musings over at rhiannoncomma.substack.com.