Abacot – Songs About Problems | Album Review

Abacot and Many Hats Distribution

It’s been almost three years, but I still remember where I was when I first heard Abacot’s EP Promo 2023. I had just hiked over a bridge for a mile in direct sunlight, and it was only getting hotter as I tried to get through my dreaded commute. I made the mistake of wearing a cloying polyester dress, and mosquitoes were tearing me up as I descended the endless Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan escalator. Ultimately, it was just a regular Tuesday in July. I waited for the train, squeezed in, and, naturally, the A.C. was out. I checked my phone while crammed between two businessmen and saw that Swim Into The Sound had reviewed a new EP from a band in the DMV, so I listened to the whole thing through the rest of my commute. I was late for work.

It’s been a couple of years and change since I was sweating it out on that train, and Abacot has returned with a follow-up to that EP today — Songs About Problems is here in all of its bright and bitter glory. For those out of the loop, Abacot is a project helmed by Claudio Benedi, the former frontman of D.C.’s beloved Commander Salamander. Abacot always feels like a true puzzle piece to understanding the larger regional rock sound: this album was produced and engineered by Ryland Heagy, and better yet, when they perform live, their shows are stacked with familiar faces from the world of DMV music (think Combat, think Origami Angel).

Songs About Problems picks up where Promo 2023 left off. While it still features the three songs from that initial EP (with some rerecording), the concentrated misery underpinning all of Promo 2023 is expanded into a rounder emotional release. Benedi totally recontextualizes the initial project – one born out of grief, betrayal, and banality – and transforms it into an examination of difficult personal growth after these dark moments have passed. Beyond the inimitable ear of Ryland Heagy, this album was mixed by Drew Portalatin, the mastermind behind Origami Angel’s mixtape The Brightest Days and Combat’s instant thrasher classic, Stay Golden. It was also mastered by Will Yip, fresh off his Grammy win for Turnstile’s NEVER ENOUGH —a combination that instantly pushes Songs About Problems into an echelon of undeniable ragers.

Sonically, Songs About Problems starts somewhere in 2001 or maybe 2003; I’m still debating the exact year, but it was definitely when you could buy checkered wristbands at Hot Topic, guys in emo bands wore collared shirts, and it was mandatory to spike your hair like Deryck Whibley. The lyrics of “Remember When” match this nostalgic sound as Benedi reflects on the distance between him and a former friend. What starts as something The Starting Line-adjacent switches up mid-song, and Benedi shows off his guitar prowess, a sound distinctly reminiscent of that early ‘20s emo sound he helped popularize, across the bridge.

The frustration of “Remember Me” softens into “One Way Street,” a daringly optimistic song. Benedi is a very talented musician, and one of his undeniable strengths is his ability to create absolute earworms. After just one listen to the chorus, I caught myself singing along to that helplessly catchy, “And I’m yours / are you mine?” on the second spin. The song chugs along, evoking a kind of Fountains of Wayne-style build before opening into “Check Engine Light” and “Vertigo” from Promo EP. 

These songs have lived on my shelf and in my playlists for three years, and they are still just as electric as they were when I first listened to them on that Metro ride. I’ve thought about “Check Engine Light” every time I can’t get my car engine to turn over when it gets a bit too cold out. “Vertigo,” devastating yet unafraid to get a little King of the Hill-theme song with it, has been perpetually stuck in my head since the first time I heard Benedi sing “I see all your lies / I see through your disguise!” 

After revisiting these tracks from the Promo EP, we have some songs that totally reorient the Abacot project from something wrought with nausea and exhaustion into a broader, more pop-bent with begrudging positivity. “Vertigo” launches into the anthemic, arena-rock “Show You,” molding Benedi’s shapeshifting agony into a single question: “I freed my heart / what about you?” On “Iridescent,” he flexes his Bowling For Soup-y humor over a song that could easily soundtrack a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game, and the synths on “Drifter” take the whole album to Saturn and back.

In Swim Into The Sound’s initial review, Taylor Grimes aptly diagnosed how “When people think of ‘emo music,’ they tend to think of sappy, tappy, whiny bullshit. That’s all well and good, but it’s SUMMER, and the people need something light, something they can sing along to with the windows down.” That’s what “Horror,” the third song from Promo EP, does. While the other two carryover songs are visceral in their anguish, “Horror” is hauntingly hopeful. Benedi soars into the song as he sings, “If we’re going to make it / I know we’re gonna make it to the end.”

“Horror,” in this new context, provides the perfect aerial arc for the album’s ending on the titular “Songs About Problems.” I wouldn’t call it a positive or even a helpful song, any more than I’d call this album particularly optimistic, but it’s honest and self-assured. Benedi doesn’t necessarily regret these difficult years, but that doesn’t mean that the outcomes don’t still hurt. Instead, he diffuses what frustrates him the most and recognizes it in others. We will get through this together.

I don’t live in D.C. anymore and no longer have to do that long commute, but for one day, I wish I could do it one more time, listening to Songs About Problems.

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Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

It's You! It's Me! And There's Dancing! – Tell Me All About It | Album Review

Self-released

There are a few things that are guaranteed to set off my “hell yeah” meter. One of them is bands from Portland, Oregon. Even though I haven’t lived full-time in the Pacific Northwest since 2018, I’m still a Portland native who feels a strong sense of pride for any cool art coming from my hometown. Second is short-ass albums. The shorter the better, honestly. I recognize 40 minutes as the standard, but if you can deliver an equally impactful experience in 20-some minutes or less, I’m all for it. Third is emo music, which feels pretty self-explanatory, especially if you’ve ever talked to me in person or read this site before. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Portland band It's You! It's Me! And There's Dancing! dropped a 14-minute scorcher of an album on Valentine’s Day, I ate that shit up like it was a gourmet meal. 

Though the band is named after one of the most famous Los Campesinos! songs, the music on Tell Me All About It isn’t really emo in any traditional sense. Instead, the songs tend to lean into a more shouty punk direction. Maybe a touch of Orgcore, a hearty helping of screamo, and a dollop of post-hardcore. But fuck that, these labels are all just marketing terms anyway, right? Instead, I’ll just sum things up with the group’s bio on Bandcamp, which labels them as “Some kind of guitar music from Portland, OR.” Once again, I say hell yeah.

Introductory song “II” kicks off with a tempo-setting guitar lick; essentially a 30-second acclimation to get the listener up to speed before the triumphant bombast of “Work Hard or Suffer Every Day of Your Life,” which itself is only 49 seconds long. The lyrics offer glimpses of beauty to be found out in the world, but these natural blisses are tempered with the knowledge contained in the song’s title that we’ll be stuck either working or suffering for the rest of our lives. As vocalist Cxh barks about trying to be a better person in all walks of life, the guitars point upward in a riff that feels like an angelic counterpoint to the scratchy punk vox. 

The immediately following song, “Tenderness,” shows no signs of slowing down, opening with a chuggy circle pit riff that slashes forward as the band articulates the pain of letting down someone that you love. “It’s harder for me, to throw a punch, than take one,” goes one line in the first verse, mirrored by a brief scene in the following verse, “I admire the way you’ve learned to fight / And I’ll be standing at ringside to wrap your hands / With tenderness.”

On the two-part “Ruminate // Ward,” the band plays up their minimalist side, giving the listeners slight breathing room as Cxh spins witchy imagery in their Ian Shelton-esque bark. The 24-second “For Whomever” acts as a sort of mid-album epilogue before the ascendant guitar theatrics of “Softer Sympathetic” bring us up to the stars. There’s another moshpit riff to keep the restless energy coming, almost like they have to pack as many notes into their allotted time as they possibly can, but maybe it’s just because they know what’s coming next. Penultimate track “Great Collision States” offers gruesome car crash imagery as a means of depicting the desire for change and only being met with stagnation. It’s a frustrated and honest song that grapples with much more than the lyrics first let on. 

The album’s best moment comes in its final track, “Here Comes the Hurrah,” where every couplet offers a goosebump-inducing morsel of prose as the band spins up one of their more pop-punk-leaning instrumentals. After all’s said and done, the sweat and beer and blood have spilled across the basement floor, It's You! It's Me! And There's Dancing! send the listener off with plenty to think about, including a kiss-off to bad friends, misplaced trust, and the innate power of New Jersey. 

This is all on top of the rest of the release’s veiled frustrations at the state of the world. Even from one of the most progressive cities in the country, Portland is still plagued with rampant ICE activity, feckless leaders, and an ineffectual population where some are trying their hardest and others not at all. Tell Me All About It is uniquely Portland, undeniably hard-hitting, and wonderfully emo. 

Even with bellowed rough-around-the-edges vocals, there’s still a lot of beauty, brightness, and consolation to be found here. I think when you live in a place as gloomy and demoralizing as Portland, you learn to look extra for those little outcroppings of light. I think when you live in times as dark as these, you have to harness every bit of strength and community you can find. It may only be 14 minutes, but Tell Me All About It offers an outlet, a shoulder, a fist, a shield, and a parade. 

Ratboys – Singin' to an Empty Chair | Album Review

New West Records

Snowed in. Roads iced over. Trying on New Year’s resolutions and dropping New Year’s resolutions. What else is there to do at this time of year but think about last year? Openly celebrate what went right and privately obsess over what went wrong. Why did that one thing happen? How can you make sure it never happens again? Why did they say that to you? What should you have said back? Why didn’t they talk to you after that? Why didn’t they listen to you? Why didn’t you try harder to make them stay?

Julia Steiner, frontwoman of Ratboys, got the title for the band’s latest album, Singin' to an Empty Chair, from a therapy tool called The Empty Chair Technique. The premise of the exercise is simple on paper: you imagine that someone you want to have a difficult conversation with is sitting right across from you, and you have that complicated conversation. Alone. But this is obviously easier said than done. Actually mustering up the courage to verbalize the words you have kept buried for so long, to even say them by yourself, is intimidating. Gathering the courage to admit wrong, to share a secret, to ask for better, to try again, is an impossible feeling. Ratboys know this well.

Singin' to an Empty Chair is the sixth album from the Chicago indie stars and their first release on New West Records. This album also marks their second collaboration with Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie, who also produced 2023’s The Window. Steiner described their last album as a “dedicated and intentional process,” the product of a meticulous couple years of writing and rehearsing before recording anything officially. Singin' to an Empty Chair offers a different perspective. Bassist Sean Neumann describes this record as a quilt – a collection of songs written in different places and recorded in different spaces. This patchwork approach is pieced together by songs describing half-conversations and one-sided admittances, all sewn together with their signature mind-bending guitar and twangy lilt. 

Photo by MILES KALCHIK

Where were you while we were getting high? Wanna go for a ride? On “Open Up,” Steiner adds to the canon of great rock music questions when she asks, “What’s it gonna take to open up tonight?” She asks this over the confident strum of a guitar, but as the song builds, Steiner’s bright voice is interjected by sparks of the rest of the band, a moment of fuzz here, a kick drum there, before building into a folksy jam. The whole band is firing on all cylinders, and the only place to go from here is the stars.

Ratboys’ greatest sleight of hand is their cosmic bend, and they are very precise with how they blend it into their twang. On their last album, Ratboys took listeners to the brink of the world on “Black Earth, WI.” On Singin' to an Empty Chair, Ratboys avoid their own beaten path but find a new supersonic twist on “Light Night Mountains All That.” The song starts by sweeping you off your feet, sending you into a vortex of Dave Sagan’s swirling guitar and the uncanny rhythm of Marcus Nuccio’s drumming. At first, Steiner’s voice steadies the spinning, repeating an increasingly frustrated accusation that “you didn’t care.” Her voice, while always clear and measured, builds and builds until it’s blistering because “you didn’t care / you didn’t care / you didn’t / care!” This irritation seems to blow a hole in the vortex, turning Sagan’s guitar into something more intergalactic. 

The music video released alongside this single matches its extraterrestrial spin. Styled like a found-footage horror film, some kind of haunting evil forces invade while the band plays their song. The ghouls flicker in and out of the video, almost like they’re interfering with the signal, until they’re playing the song too. This cataclysmic feeling Ratboys spin is one of their most exciting tricks—a soundtrack for the final frontier. 

Just because we’re singing to an empty chair here and embracing conversations we hesitate to have does not mean that every imagined conversation has to be upsetting or frustrating. It’s hard to admit how much you love someone, too. In “Penny in the Lake,” serene optimism is conveyed through berry pies, Ringo Starr, and the breathless crow of a rooster. “Strange Love” is an earnest confession that conjures slightly sweaty palms, and “Anywhere” evokes a vulnerable, but freeing feeling, like admittance with avoidant eye contact. 

The title of the album appears in “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” the album’s 8-minute bittersweet barnstormer. Across a mournful pedal steel, Steiner weaves snapshots of a past she can’t return to: construction sites, lasagna on Christmas Eve, and Antiques Roadshow. The emotional core of the album is buried somewhere in the sawdust of this song, between Steiner’s aching lyrics and Sagan’s biting guitar. The resonance of the Empty Chair Technique is laid bare as Steiner grimly sings “A couple some odd years ago / You said, ‘Sweetie take your time’ / So now I’m singin’ to an empty chair / Bleedin’ out every line.” It’s a punishing admonishment about forgiveness and time, combined with a cathartic release of finally saying something, even if it's alone.

The album closes with two opposed songs. The penultimate track, “Burn it Down,” while starting syrupy, turns incendiary as the band unleashes a fury they have tamped down for five albums. Steiner gives in to the doom built up by the song’s ferocious sound, just for a moment, saying, “It’s always been this way / It’s never gonna change.” But this anger washes away. The album ends on “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Woods” offering a bookend to the breezy sound that it began with. It’s a swaying, reassuring song, something that is supposed to play softly from a speaker on your patio while you’re talking to an empty lawn chair. 

On “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” Steiner sings, “Well, it’s not what you did / it’s what you didn’t do / I just want you to know the truth.” It was here, as I was caught in my thoughts about 2025 and my weirdest, lowest points, that I understood the Empty Chair Technique. It’s not just about addressing the truth, but verbalizing what you need to get to the truth. Since then, I’ve been thinking about who I want to talk to in the empty chair next to me. The blue one next to the couch I’m writing this on. What truth do I need to be made real? What about you? Who is in your empty chair? What do you want to tell them?

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Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Blackwater Holylight – Not Here Not Gone Review

Suicide Squeeze Records

When it comes to stoner rock, sometimes it feels like there’s little room for the form to expand. So often, bands fall into tar pits as they rehash the same trite lyrics and recycle the same five sludgy riffs. For titans like Sleep, this genre can be taken to bong-ripping heights, but other acts like The Sword iterate until they become parodies of their earlier, more exciting selves. If they are averse to marijuana mysticism, a band might instead go down the path of the thousand-dollar leather jacket and embrace more of a desert rock direction. Queens of the Stone Age make this look cool, but most of the time you’ll end up sounding like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. So how do you inject new life into a style that often reads as riff-by-numbers? You abandon it almost entirely.

That’s exactly what Blackwater Holylight have done. On their first two albums, the Portland, Oregon, group’s sound was dripping in bluesy, chugging 70’s hard rock. They were proficient in their Sabbath worship, but not altogether original. In fact, 2019’s Veils of Winter is so entrenched in the desert-doom sound that it literally has a song titled “Motorcycle.” These are good albums, but it’s clear that the risk was there for them to become trapped in the endless cycle of cannabinoid riffage. The band’s third album, Silence/Motion, was a massive reimagining of their music as the group became darker and more dreamlike, adding in elements of prog and shoegaze. The result is something simultaneously refined and menacing, but what makes it so impressive is that it’s very clearly the same band that made the first two records.

On Blackwater Holylight’s new album, Not Here Not Gone, the group is continuing to evolve their artistry while remaining true to their roots. After relocating to LA and working with producer Sonny Diperri (Narrow Head, DIIV, Emma Ruth Rundle), the trio has cultivated a vicious doomgaze sound that is equal parts punishing and ethereal. The album opens with “How Will You Feel,” which immediately signals that Blackwater Holylight is continuing to push the limits of their expression. The track features fuzzed-out, crunchy guitars that are more akin to early My Bloody Valentine than Truckfighters as singer Sunny Faris’ voice floats serenely above the chaos. 

On tracks “Bodies” and “Spades,” guitarist Mikayla Mayhew blurts out concussive, mosh-inducing riffs that are backed by airy synth work from Sarah McKenna. It’s this constant contrast that makes the songs on Not Here Not Gone so engaging; just when you think you’ve got them figured out, they shift into a new direction. Single “Fade” finds them branching out into the vast world of post-rock with a confidence that would have you think they’ve been making songs like this for twenty years. Album interlude “Giraffe” is the band’s biggest experiment yet as they jam over a beat from Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio. The collaboration results in a slice of industrial rock that could fit in seamlessly on the tracklist of The Fragile. Despite all of these progressions, Blackwater Holylight hasn’t forgotten that, at the end of the day, they descend from Black Sabbath. This is best heard on the seven-minute closer “Poppyfields,” which weaves elements of black and doom metal and gives Eliese Dorsay an opportunity to truly beat the shit out of her drums. All of this is done in the service of creating a brooding, tension-filled piece that ends the album on a powerful note.

All of this is what makes Blackwater Holylight such an impressive band. Rather than coming out of the gates hot on their first album or two and then fizzling out in attempts to recapture that energy or flailing through desperate experimentation, the group has steadily and deftly adapted their sound. They’re the kind of band that makes you want to continue to follow their career because you’re actually excited to hear what they’ll do next, rather than clenching your jaw in hopes that they stick the landing. While Blackwater Holylight might not be a textbook desert rock or stoner doom band anymore, they fit in at Austin’s Levitation Fest as much as they do at Roadburn in the Netherlands. Blackwater Holylight refuse to be contained by the constraints or expectations of genre, charting their course on their own terms. They're far from the first musicians to do this, and they're certainly not the last, but in a genre that is loaded with copycats, they're a shining example of changing and molting until you reach the truest version of yourself. Odds are, people will recognize that and be drawn to it because when everything else can be found in excess, the things that are actually unique speak for themselves.

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Connor is an English professor in the Bay Area, where he lives with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is reading fiction and obsessing over sports.

Wormy – Shark River | Album Review

Rose Garden

I recently started a new job and have been put in the slightly embarrassing position of new people, normal people, asking me what kind of music I like. Hesitant to ever utter the word “emo” out loud, both out of embarrassment and for fear of being misinterpreted, lately I’ve been defaulting to “indie rock” or “music with guitars in it.” It’s not that those terms are any better, if anything, they’re broad to the point of being unhelpful, but at least it feels like an honest answer.

As I was listening to “Big Loser,” the opening track off Wormy’s Shark River, I couldn’t help but feel some connective tissue to the “emotional rock” that I love so dearly. It’s not odd time signatures or frantically tapped guitars, but the radical self-deprecation found in the lyrics. The song lands among the ranks of self-admitted loser songs, tracks that own the insult and turn that outsider label into a badge of honor. In the chorus, singer-songwriter Noah Rauchwerk whines, “I hate myself so much, you might as well hate me too. I’m a big fuckin’ loser, the best thing about me is that I still care about you.” Hell of a line to stitch into an opening track, but one that will probably land for a certain sect of people fumbling through life trying their best and constantly falling short. 

Over the next two minutes of that track, we flash through a series of sensory memories scored by a banjo and soft drum pattern. Soggy potato chips and nautical kitchenware become stand-ins for the pleasant memories of life that we wish so badly we could return to. It seems unfair; we didn’t even know those moments were the best it was gonna get until we look back and see them in contrast to whatever exists now. A guitar solo whisks the bad thoughts away for a moment until Rauchwerk comes back in with an anecdote of aging dogs before relenting to the chorus one more time. It’s super powerful and a beautiful way to set the tone for Shark River, an album full of well-observed moments and beautiful truths. 

Throughout the rest of the record, there are pop culture references like U2’s Songs of Innocence (referred to as “the one they put on our iPods without asking”), cheap Gatorade, and the 2023 film Cocaine Bear, each of which serve as totems for connection in different ways. Just like real life, these random pop-culture objects are conduits for so much more. A mediocre late-career record and a goofy black comedy horror film can become a platform for something much deeper; it’s more about when and how these things come into our lives. Those associations are a chief concern of Shark River, as the project explores how these might prove to be either false comforts or accidental saving graces.

Every song is pushed forward with a sort of white boy melancholia you’d find in a Barenaked Ladies song, I’m thinking of tracks like “Pinch Me” and “The Old Apartment” that hone in on hyper-specific mundanities and spin them out into larger regrets. The song “27 Days” focuses on the distance that can strain a relationship, with our narrator desperately asking, “Will you text me when I land / to see if I’m okay?” over a simple drum pat and a clean little guitar bend. It’s all really beautiful and infinitely relatable. As our hero compares himself to more exciting and compelling individuals, it’s hard not to feel like an echo of an echo, the original sound reverberating, growing weaker and weaker, but already long gone. 

Immediately following, “Cocaine Bear” has already become one of my favorite songs of 2026, embracing a more peppy electronic beat and free-wheeling energy. Fretting over an uncertain future and inevitable death, Rauchwerk sings with a Darnellian verve “I don’t wanna be left with the burden / I don’t wanna be dead on the roadside / I don’t wanna be dragged by the curtain / I don’t wanna be there when I die.” Flashing to the earthly pleasures of Cocaine Bear, Costco runs, and Monster Energy, he pretends to “act like his life is hard.” To me, this is the same vein as “getting killed by a pretty good life,” capturing a sort of attitude adjustment that many people like me have felt recently. Things can be good on paper and still hard. You can, and should, acknowledge the advantages you have, but those privileges don’t negate the complicated feelings that can come from a fucked-up brain. Life is hard for everyone in different ways, and you gain nothing from comparing struggles.

Things dip into a woozy pedal steel lilt on “I Am Here,” and I think of ‘alt-country run-off,’ a phrase I heard someone toss out off-handed but meant to allude to a sort of “FFO MJ Lenderman” style of music that has become easy for indie rockers to reach for ever since the success of Manning Fireworks. Even still, I think it’s used tastefully here, and Rauchwerk’s writing is unique enough to stand on its own. It’s not just the proper nouns that poke through the songs, but the way they’re framed and what they all ladder up to. 

“Breakfast Again” captures a specific type of helplessness that’s easy to feel in the wake of everything on every front constantly going wrong and getting worse. Snacking yourself to sleep while it feels like the sharks are circling, only to wake up hungry and do it all again. It’s infinite unfulfilment that sounds just dreadful on paper, but can be surprisingly easy to fall into. While there’s obviously some self-shaming in an observation like “pants too tight from just stayin’ in,” I think it’s important to focus on the silver lining presented in the lyric “Hardest things that you ever try / make you want to try again.”

After all this, the media consumption, the gorging on snack food and energy drinks, the bad decisions and expired relationships, Rauchwerk paints a truly vulnerable and compelling image of a slacker mid-redemption arc. There’s absolutely loneliness, devastation, regret, and sorrow, but there’s also recovery, reclamation, and the hope for reconciliation. Rauchwerk’s writing is filled with self-reflection, and that makes it easy for the listener to see themself in his work. The little nods to movies or food can sometimes feel like funny distractions or frivolous extravagances, but one could also argue they’re part of the journey just as much as the Big Feelings and Real Decisions. 

In the final moments of the record, our narrator finds himself questioning what he really wants. While the concept of “true love” feels a bit too daunting to break down into anything digestible, Rauchwerk opts to find comfort in a small show of affection. It’s nothing too intimate, just a gentle cradle and the hope to sort things out. It’s that sort of singular connection, the one between two individuals, that can make all the difference. It’s not that you expect the other person to solve everything (or anything) for you, but that the possibility is there, even in the face of feeling angry, ugly, and cosmically unlucky. If you’re really fortunate, maybe you and this other person can help you learn things about each other until you learn things about yourself. God knows there’s still lots to figure out, but knowing who you want to do it with, and, more importantly, that you yourself want to do it, is a pretty damn good start.