The Sonder Bombs – The One About You | Single Review

“Where did your mind go, Slice?” singer Willow Hawk asks, gently cutting through dreamlike instrumentation as they guide you along a stargazing walk through an enchanted garden late at night. “The One About You,” the newest single from Ohio’s Sonder Bombs, is a song with the same lush illustration of two slow dancers at a homecoming dance as depicted in the music video for Japanese Breakfast’s “Boyish.” This song is the perfect soundtrack for two lonely lovers finding their way towards each other under the night sky and looking up at the moon for some answers. A gentle tune for when the sparks of a new fling carry the conversation into the wee hours of the night. For when nothing else matters but right here, right now, caring only about one person and one moment. 

With “The One About You,” The Sonder Bombs deliver an anthem for the hopeless romantic with the most tender of hearts. It’s a soothing melody that evokes a midnight walk through an enchanted garden. Produced amidst quarantine by Joe Reinhart (Hop Along, Beach Bunny), the track is hypnotizing and magical, but also playful and loving. It is a song full of blissful melodies and lingering phrases that wrap around the listener and slowly consumes them. The Sonder Bombs are best known for defiantly standing their ground, penning bops perfectly fit for screaming into your hairbrush on a lonely Friday night spent dancing around your room. Bringing in a whole new sound with this single, the band shows their ability to craft a gentle, romanticist song complete with guitar lines that carry you through like a walk against the shoreline. 

Showcasing the delicate side of Willow’s vocal techniques and writing style, this single is just a sneak peek into the boundless dynamics and talent featured on the band’s upcoming album Clothbound. Yearning for a perfect night to not be cut short, “won’t you stay up with me” is a delicate but pressing request embedded in tropical guitars and atmospheric bass courtesy of Jimmy Wilkens and Kevin Cappy. With this song, The Sonder Bombs have proven, once again, their ability to write songs for every mood. Featuring a delicate array of horns that carry you back down to earth towards the end, this song transports you into an enchanted paradise and softly back home again. Stream it here and share it with somebody you love.

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Ashley is a disabled, queer music lover living in Denver, CO. She can usually be found with a record spinning, head buried in communist theory, with cats on either side. As a sociology major with a never-ending love for the DIY scene, Ashley enjoys discussing accessibility and accountability in the scene to foster spaces where every single body belongs. Follow her on Twitter at @emomarxist.

In Defense of Illuminaudio: The Forgotten Chiodos Album

When I say the name “Chiodos,” it likely evokes black floral pattern Myspace backgrounds, swoopy emo hair, and songs like “Baby, You Wouldn’t Last A Minute On The Creek.” If you had a scene phase between the years of 2005 and 2010, it’s likely that the band’s output during that time was nothing short of formative to your post-hardcore upbringing. If you were born after the year 2000, it’s likely the band exists more as an emo curiosity and oddball collaborator than anything foundational. Still, Chiodos quickly became a symbolic staple of the Warped Tour scene that now lives on in Emo Nites and throwback high school playlists the world over.

Despite this widespread influence, the band maintained a relatively modest discography of only four albums. Within this collection of records lies a wealth of middle school bangers, soaring falsettos, and enigmatic song titles. While most of the band’s well-known tracks can be found on their first two records, All’s Well That Ends Well and Bone Palace Ballet, the group’s best work also happens to be the one people discuss the least: 2010’s Illuminaudio.

Essentially an orphaned step-child of the band’s discography, Illuminaudio is the only Chiodos album to not feature Craig Owens on vocals, giving both fans and the band themselves a reason to write it off as a one-off collaboration that happened while the lineup sorted itself out. Owens’ replacement, Brandon Bolmer, not only did the band’s legacy justice but elevated the group into a new plane of post-hardcore creativity that existed slightly above the cartoonish gothic imagery of their previous output. 

Even given Brandon Bolmer’s previous work as the lead singer of Yesterday’s Rising, he managed to hone his craft as a writer, performer, and vocalist. Indeed, Bolmer was able to rise to the occasion, meeting Chiodos on their level and quickly building off it. Quite frankly, it’s a shame that this release will probably never get the justice it deserves simply because it will always be viewed as “that album” without Owens. 

Illuminaudio recently celebrated its tenth anniversary on October 5th, and I saw not a single peep of it online. There was no tweet from the band account, no retrospective articles, no reddit discussion posts, no nothing, which made me sad. I get why the band would disavow this record as the one odd-man-out of their discography, but that’s so unfair to the songs because there isn’t a miss in the bunch. 

While the band eventually welcomed Owens back into the fold for 2014’s Devil (along with Thomas Erak of The Fall of Troy), Illuminaudio is an oft-overlooked chapter of the group’s history that has not only aged better than most records of this era, but stands alone as one of Chiodos’ best. It’s unfair to both Bolmer and fans that these songs are left to rot away in obscurity because they are deep, rich, and worth digging into, even if you aren’t a fan of the genre. Unlike the rest of the band’s discography, Illuminaudio is not a relic of the mid-2000s but a genuinely great collection of metal tracks that exist as a completely standalone entity.

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The album kicks off with the scene-setting “Illuminaudio,” a spellbinding journey into the ethereal world of the record. On this track, we hear Brandon Bolmer easing fans into the group’s new era by doing his best Craig Owens impression, mirroring the previous singer’s style over a simplistic instrumental that adds a disarming layer of comfort and familiarity. 

After this swirling two-minute intro, the track begins to disintegrate until a single whispered “stop” pauses the music. That interruption makes way for a solitary heartrate monitor-like note that flows seamlessly into “Caves,” the record’s bombastic lead single. Featuring a sing-along chant and slow-building drumbeat, the song hypes the listener up to a powerful and explosive scream about 30 seconds in that immediately sounds better than anything Owens ever belted. A chuggy guitar line bowls the listener over around the 1-minute mark, paving the way for the band to throw directly to the chorus, an effect that swept me off my feet on my first skeptical listen. 

From there, the band adds an air of scene cred with the Vic Fuentes-assisted “Love Is A Cat From Hell,” essentially legitimizing this era of Chiodos as an official continuation of the band. Meanwhile, “Modern Wolf Hair” beat Kanye to the long-form wolves analogy by about a decade and culminates in a piercing, distorted scream that hits the listener like a punch to the face.

The biggest bummer of Chiodos rewriting the history of this record is that there’s no good reason for it. These songs are as structurally sound, creative, and heavy as anything they’d done before. It’s just that once the group lost their boy band appeal that Owens brought to the table, they found that their songs didn’t connect with their audience in the same way. It’s funny how far something as simple (and non-musical) as a band’s “look” can go in the era of 2010’s post-hardcore. It meant that something as over-the-top and cartoonish as “Baby, You Wouldn’t Last a Minute on the Creek” could succeed because it combined a unique musical style with something that was hyper-marketable. When your band can comfortably exist on an 11x17 poster from Rise Records, that was practically a guarantee you’d sell at least a few thousand records without even trying… but that’s beside the point. 

The instrumentals on Illuminaudio are all as proficient as ever, but Bolmer’s range of both singing and screaming offered something that Owens never had. On top of this, the studio effects they used on Bolmer’s screams made them land better than anything else in the scene at the time. I’d never heard such visceral and propulsive unclean vocals outside of Austin Carlile, but they work on this record because they’re used so sparingly and with such restraint. The screams come either at the climax of each song or are seeded throughout to make individual moments more impactful. It’s really an artistic approach to a genre that was very prone to overusing elements like that at the time. 

Not only that, the band is able to create this sense of cresting emotional impact without even using screams on some songs. Just look at “Notes In Constellations” which begins as a music box-like lullaby which slowly works its way up to a ferocious and biting instrumental attack that resolves with the payoff of a feature-length film.

Songs like “Scaremonger,” “Hey Zeus! The Dungeon,” and “Those Who Slay Together, Stay Together” tread the familiar gothic horror ground as the band’s first two albums, but still do it in a way that feels more artistically elevated and complete than, say, “Is It Progression If a Cannibal Uses a Fork?”

In an album filled with fantastic performances, Bolmer’s best moment comes in “Stratovolcano Mouth” where he works a hypnotic repetition of “Let it all out / Let, let it all out / Let, let it all out / Let, let it go” into a (literal) explosion as he works up to a seconds-long scream of “EXPLODE!!” which sounds downright world-conquering. This passionate delivery is guided by a driving guitar line and a gorgeous string section with a piano thrown in for good measure. It’s textbook Chiodos, and the fact that this song has barely over a half-million plays on Spotify is a flat-out shame. 

Illumiaudio also found the band crafting unique moments that make each song feel different from the ones surrounding it. There’s a heavy-as-shit breakdown at the end of “Let Us Burn One” that’s absolutely skull-crushing. There’s a crazy auto-tuned transition at the end of “Scaremonger,” a group chant/drum roll pairing on “Modern Wolf Hair,” and that aforementioned music box-like technique used on “Notes In Constellations.” This is all capped off with “Closed Eyes Still Look Forward,” a gorgeous piano ballad that ties the entire story of the album up, references previous songs, and loops back to the beginning, all within three minutes. These songs simultaneously stand on their own in isolation and work together to fit into the stark black and gold-hued world of the album. The end result is a collection of 12 songs that all form together into one piece that’s larger than the sum of its parts.

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I know there are a ton of nostalgic Chiodos fans out there who will read this and won’t be able to separate the love for their own mid-2000’s emo phase from the music itself. I’ll admit there’s a TON of nostalgia baked into Illumiaudio for me, but what makes me passionate about this record is how unfairly the band treated it. There are songs here just as worthy of scene worship as anything on the band’s first two records, and I’d argue even more so in some cases. Seeing other bands of this time period like August Burns Red release tenth-anniversary reissues of their early work or bands like The Devil Wears Prada go on tour performing their decade-old albums in full makes me wish Illuminaudio was treated better. 

Regardless, Illumiaudio stands on its own as an album and an artistic statement. It’s punctual, explorative, and walks that fine line between welcoming old fans while still carving out new sonic territories. The instrumentals are finely-crafted, punchy, and creative. Most importantly, Bolmer’s vocals are some of the best ever recorded, and the duality between his piercing high notes and his guttural screams is absolutely otherworldly. 

The way the group meshed all of these instrumental elements together into a wall of sound that’s heavy-hitting yet swirling and ornamental is Chiodos to me. They understood what this band stood for and pushed that creative ethos as far in one direction as they possibly could. The end result was a perfect storm of a new singer and a band at the peak of their artistic ability crafting one of the best, most unfairly-forgotten post-hardcore records of the 2010s. Let us burn one for Illumiaudio.

Thirty Cent Fare - Time To Waste Away | EP Review

I’ve learned many things this year about myself, about the world, and about those around me. One of the many things I’ve learned is to trust Acrobat Unstable implicitly. When they drop new tapes, I cop them. When they update their weekly Spotify playlist, I listen. Most importantly, when they sign a new band, I check them out.

This trust has paid off in spades; my cassette tape collection has grown exponentially, each week I am turned on to some new music, and every once in a while I discover a cool new band to become a diehard fan of. They’ve helped usher in releases from Short Fictions, Carpool, and Ultimate Frisbee, and that’s just in the last year alone. So when they announced they were signing Thirty Cent Fare for an EP, as the kids say, I had no choice but to stan. 

Blindly jumping into an artist can be a rewarding experience, but that feeling is amplified tenfold when their Spotify page has <1000 streams and doesn’t even have any related artists. That’s true blindness, that’s genuinely non-existent expectations, which means you’re forced to trust your gut. 

When I hit play on “Split The Ceiling,” I was met with a bounding instrumental that signaled within seconds that the label had done it again. Doubling as both the lead single and opening track,  “Split The Ceiling” is a dynamic and ever-shifting song that echoes a Title Fight sentiment over a distorted guitar and bouncy country-fried drum beat. It’s a warm and sunny welcome to the project featuring remorseful lyrics and a soulful guitar solo crescendo.

This sense of carefree summer-flavored instrumentation continues on the hypnotic “Falling Around Me,” where a glitchy electronic bed pairs with the far-off swirling croons of lead singer Scott Downes. From there, the band does an emotional-180 with “Counts For Nothing,” which deploys a jaunty Field Medic-like acoustic guitar riff under a twangy vocal for an effect that’s both driving and laid-back.

“This or Something Better” uses a gorgeous arrangement of vocal harmonies to evoke the feeling of watching a sunset from the comfort of your own porch with a cold beer in your hand. Meanwhile, the closing track “Time To Waste Away” sounds like a mix of The Berries and fellow Acrobat Unstable signees Charm, with the end result being a calming and assuring send-off.

For a 14-minute project from an artist I’d never heard of, Time To Waste Away is a marvel. It’s new music in a familiar package that acts as a picture-perfect soundtrack to your late-fall evenings and amber-tinted afternoons. This is an EP that feels designed to appeal directly to your inner hiker and soundtrack your next seasonal adventure. It’s a release that welcomes you in warmly, cradles you for a mere 14 minutes, then sends you off to conqueror the world, or at least some tiny part of it. It’s the soundtrack to wasted afternoons, lost hours, and aimless adventures. However, if anything, Time To Waste Away is just an affirmation that time enjoyed is never time wasted.

The Weak Days – Fabric of Our Lives | EP Review

How do relationships begin? When do they fall apart? Are we able to see that decay in real-time as it’s happening? Is it inevitable, or can we alter the course of changing love? These are the questions that The Weak Days are posing on their new EP, The Fabric Of Our Lives. 

Filtered through a low-fantasy lens, the band’s EP tells the story of a bard and a botanist whose marriage is failing. A far cry from the emo tales and inspirational affirmations of 2017’s Tight, the band’s new EP is a finely-crafted pivot that retains their razor-sharp writing and skilled instrumentation. 

The EP opens with “No One Can Live Forever,” a remorseful duet carried by a catchy singalong “oooh weee ooo ooo oooooo” chorus. As we listen on in this conversation between the two disembodied voices, it’s here where the album's concept reveals itself. Over the course of an impassioned back and forth, one character compares the relationship to wilting flowers while the other explains they’re just “out of tune” with each other. The concept becomes undeniable as an instrumental drop out halfway through the track paves the way for both characters to shout “I want a divorce” at the exact same time. It’s gorgeous, heartbreaking, and unlike anything the band has ever made before. 

“Your Shoulder” is a more hopeful song that still contains elements of falling apart and being a broken human at your core. The song captures that sense of dread and regret that fills you the morning after an awful fight. It captures the shame and sorrow you feel while still circling back to this sense of optimism that things can still work out. From there, “The Seams,” “Intermissing,” and “Til Then” elevate the EP into high-fantasy territory with immortal beings, eternal tasks, and a poetic resolution worthy of a children’s storybook. These songs deploy mellow acoustic guitar, disorienting electronic passages, and gorgeous mallet percussion, all while continuing the beautiful back-and-forth vocal duties of drummer Dustin Reinink and bassist RB Roe. This is all wrapped in gorgeous and airy production courtesy of Chris Teti of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. 

This all amounts to a gorgeous, complex, and detailed 20 minutes of music that sits somewhere between emo, pop, and indie rock, all of which is filtered through a hyper-creative fantasy D&D-like lens. The Fabric Of Our Lives is an EP that feels like an album based solely on the amount of creativity, writing, and care that’s on display. It’s like an episode of Adventure Time brought to life, smelted, and poured out into a swirling world of ambrosial auditory wonder. 

It’s one thing to write about your own life, but it’s another to craft a story that feels just as lived-in and fleshed-out. Just look at what Dan Campbell has achieved with Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties; he’s written a character that’s as relatable, autonomous, and compelling as his main band which “only” takes inspiration from the member’s lived experiences. The same thing is happening here; The Weak Days have shifted the focus away from their own lives and funneled that energy and creativity into this pair of fictional characters that are just as intricate in their own right. 

Doing something like this requires not only imagination and writing prowess, but empathy and compassion as well. It reminds me of the concept of sonder, which is “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” With this collection of six songs, The Weak Days have managed to create two separate entities that we not only identify with but come to care for over the course of the release’s 20 minutes. It serves as a reminder that we are all connected, that we should all care for each other, that we are all in this together, from your friends and family to the bards and botanists that exist in our shared imaginations.

Sinai Vessel – Ground Aswim | Album Review

Preciousness has become a lost art form. Everything in 2020 has been BIG and loud and important. That’s why when I heard “Guest In Your Life,” the first single off Sinai Vessel’s sophomore album Ground Aswim, it felt like the breath of fresh air I’d been gasping for all year. Relaxing, measured, and unhurried, “Guest In Your Life” provided some sense of pause in a year that has been nothing but acceleration. Over the course of its three minutes, the song wraps itself around the listener and convinces them that maybe, just maybe, things are going to be okay. This sense of calm is continued throughout the rest of the album, cementing it as an infinitely renewable source of comfort, a sacred and invaluable resource in the scatterbrained always-on world in which we currently exist. 

Now, this is not to say there weren’t plenty of things this year that required urgency, but it’s more that taking the time for subtlety, careful consideration, or simply a moment of pause went out the window in favor of immediacy. Sometimes impassioned frenzy works, but it cannot be your default state. After all, if you live life with your hair on fire, how much can you realistically expect to get done? 

Album opener “Where Did You Go?” begins not with a rallying call to arms, but a single meditative electronic note and spaced-out drumline. Eventually, buttery a smooth bass and gorgeous cascading guitar join the fray, slowly and carefully crafting a melody that flows like a brook. Two minutes into the track, lead singer Caleb Cordes makes his presence known with a voice that never rises above a friendly conversation. With a charming twang, he walks us through scenes of childhood memories that build to the loss of a friend. Gentle keys carry us out of the track for the last two minutes as Cordes sings the song’s namesake several more times, leaving us to ruminate on the importance of life and innocence, two things we can never get back. A heavy opener, to be sure, but still a sonically-laid back introduction to the grounds of the album on which you’ve just arrived. 

Track two, “Shameplant,” also served as the album’s second single. Maybe it’s the ‘plant’ tie-in or the guitar line, but this song sounds downright Oso Oso-esque in the best way possible. Despite the sunny and upbeat instrumental, this song finds Cordes questioning whether or not he can care for himself, let alone anyone (or anything) else. “Can’t expect to grow a garden and expect on only rain,” he sings over a brustling emo riff, articulating a beautifully poetic notion on self-sustainability (or lack thereof) that evokes the same sentiments as early Wonder Years songs.

Other tracks like “Fragile” and “George” weave personal tales of relationships and life experiences around instrumental beds that all glisten and shimmer in unique ways. Some tracks like “All Days Just End” feel like hyper-poignant reflections on life in quarantine, meanwhile “Tunneling” addresses general anxieties in a digestible way that feels both accurate yet approachable.

Aside from beautiful writing that effortlessly rises to your level and connects with you upon first listen, almost all of the tracks on Ground Aswim feel unique and contain moments that make them feel distinct from the songs that came before or after. There’s a far-off tunnel-vision projection effect on “Fragile,” a biting hypnotic drumbeat on “Birdseye,” and a wonderfully dynamic build on “Tunneling.” There’s a weird Peaer-esque mathy breakdown on “A Must While So Near” and a lavish steel guitar alongside discretely double-tracked vocals on “Guest In Your Life.” There’s a wealth of sounds to feast upon in this record, and the best part is they’re all still cohesive and fit within the world of the album

What strikes me most about Ground Awsim is the level of restraint deployed on these songs. “Ringing” features only Cordes, his guitar, and a little bit of reverb, yet he’s able to create a piece that’s emotionally-resonant where his words are first and forefront, emotions laid bare before the listener. It’s downright Julien Baker-esque in its economy of instrumentation, and that makes the whole song more memorable and heavy-hitting as a result.

This restraint pays off fully in “Antechamber,” the precious and aching album closer that begins as a slow build but gradually simmers into an affirming meditative repetition over the course of its six winding minutes. Recorded in a single take, “Antechamber” feels ornate and detailed, yet lived-in and authentic. It’s a pitch-perfect note to end the album on and leaves the listener continuing to feel its effects hours later. 

Ground Aswim is the antidote to 2020: it’s precious, careful, empathetic, thoughtful, and sensitive. At times it’s mournful and sentimental, but those are not necessarily bad things to lose touch of either. As the world outside turns colder, more bitter, and continues to tear itself apart, it’s a relief to have the shores of Ground Aswim to point ourselves to as we paddle toward calmer waters.