Flycatcher – Stunt | EP Review

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MEMORY MUSIC

Flycatcher’s newest release, Stunt, shows an emo band that’s comfortable playing with fire (i.e., melodic pop-punk) while exploring sounds and emotions still distinctly theirs. Their explosive, sharp drums provide a canvas for the band to explore nostalgia, yearning, and real feelings without ever swerving into cheeseball territory. This is a pop-punk band for 2023.

With Stunt, Flycatcher summons the ghosts of a dozen early-2000s rock predecessors and holds court with them in a modern context. For a brief second in the chorus of “Always Selfish,” I caught a whiff of the Foo Fighters’ classic “Everlong” in frontman Greg Pease’s vocal down-turn over piecey guitars. But more often, his melodic singing makes me wistful for anthemic pop-punk acts like The Starting Line or even 2010s British indie like The Kooks. Regardless, there’s something roundly nostalgic about his singing that’s both welcome and well-executed. That’s not to say Flycatcher are stuck in the past: they experiment with a variety of guitar tones that feel mostly contemporary. 

The opening track, “Games,” introduces Stunt with choppy strums that open up by the time the choruses roll around. On “Rust,” the EP’s loudest song, prominent bass carves a path for the chorus’ grungy power chords. But on the final track, “Quitter,” the band’s lead guitar acquiesces to full-on nostalgia. They kick the song off with hazy, plucked guitar notes that feel like they’re straight from the early 2000s but remain grounded in pounding drums that feel like they’re straight from the present-day East Coast scene. 

Their introspective lyrics touch on self-reflection without overindulging. EP standout “Sodas in the Freezer” precedes the first chorus with the lyrics “So I’ll keep leaving sodas in the freezer / Hanging clothes out in the rain,” admitting the futility of self-pity. It’s not easy to address real emotions in a way that’s both sincere and salient, but on Stunt, Flycatcher—just like the best of their pop-punk predecessors—have accomplished it.

Katie Wojciechowski is a music writer and karaoke superstar in Austin, Texas. She is from there, but between 2010 and now, also lived in Lubbock, TX, Portland, OR, and a camper. Her life is a movie in which her bearded dragon Pancake is the star. You can check out her Substack here and some of her other writing here. She’s writing a book about growing up alongside her favorite band, Paramore.

Mystic 100's – On a Micro Diet | Album Review

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SELF-RELEASED

How do you know when an artist has rebranded or simply taken a step that is a natural evolution in their journey? It can be hard to tell. When Vampire Weekend put out Father of the Bride, they rebranded their image and, somewhat unsuccessfully, their sound. It was their first album to not feature founding member Rostam Batmanglij, and the group decided to shift from their Ivy League coolness to a looser, crunchier, and dare I say, vibier outlook that was expressed in both their sonic and visual presentations. Good on them for trying something different, but the results were underwhelming because their new direction seemed so calculated and forced.

This is not the case for Mystic 100’s, the Olympia, Washington band formerly known as Milk Music. While they have undergone a name change, the band’s new (or should I say debut?) album, On a Micro Diet, feels like a natural next step for the group. Both Milk Music and Mystic 100’s worship the guitar, but the ways they practice their devotion are different. Milk Music’s sound was hard-charging riffs and rapid solos in the vein of Dinosaur Jr, while Mystic 100’s take on a much more exploratory sound that is elongated, jammy, and improvised at times. To put it in the dumbest way I can think, Milk Music is the bouillon cube, condensed and pungent, and Mystic 100’s are the broth, expansive and warm.

On a Micro Diet is a long album, spanning seventy-five minutes over nine songs, but it never feels like it overstays its welcome. I’ve listened to the album on walks with my dog, while I was cleaning the kitchen, chilling in the hot tub, and even at the gym, never once feeling as though the durations of the songs were testing my willpower. In fact, it was the loose and almost unstructured feel of the music that kept pulling me back. When I wasn’t listening, I often found myself humming bits of melodies as I went about my daily tasks. These timestamps grounded me each time I returned for another listen, allowing me to find new details in the band’s wanderings.

Mystic 100’s do an excellent job of mixing things up, something that is not always guaranteed in this realm of music. “Message from Lonnie” is a mid-tempo expression of love that grooves like waves lapping against the beach at sunset and perfectly showcases Alex Coxen’s melodic soloing. The nearly twenty-minute centerpiece “Have You Ever Chased a Lightbeam?” is just begging to be played at this year’s Desert Daze festival. The song requires patience as it shifts back and forth from a “Cortez the Killer”-style seance limbo state of guitar feedback, but is rewarding if you are willing to trust the band. Amidst all of the sunburnt daydreaming, you can still see traces of their former selves in “Windowpane,” a straight-ahead strummer that acts as a moment of clarity before descending further into madness.

This is who Mystic 100’s was born to be. By shedding their Milk Music skin, they have given themselves the freedom to explore their interests fearlessly. If you are willing to let go of your inhibitions, you will find something to enjoy in On a Micro Diet. 

Connor lives in Emeryville with his partner and their cat and dog, Toni and Hachi. Connor is a student at San Francisco State University and is working toward becoming a community college professor. When he isn’t listening to music or writing about killer riffs, Connor is obsessing over coffee and sandwiches.

The New Pornographers – Continue As A Guest | Album Review

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It’s been 23 years since The New Pornographers’ breakout debut Mass Romantic in 2000. Since then, the band has earned their right to be called one of indie rock’s greatest supergroups… “Supergroup,” in this case, means a group of multiple knockout singer-songwriters who have years of output, either on their own or as a part of side projects, but still get together every few years to collaborate. Think of Sleater-Kinney (Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker) or Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo). The influential and iconic sounds of these bands would not have been possible without the creative input of each songwriter.

Spearheaded by A.C. Newman and Neko Case, The New Pornographers have achieved indie rock canon across all eight of their albums up to this point. Their most notable tenure was released on the legendary Matador Records before moving to Anti- in 2017. That year’s Whiteout Conditions was their first without founding member and the trifecta-completing Dan Bejar, who is most well known for leading the band Destroyer. Despite his absence, the band proved they could still release one of their best albums yet under a new permutation. That formula was shown to be inconsistent with the 2019 follow-up In The Morse Code Of Brakelights, their weakest crop of tunes all around. Apart from the outlier hit “Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile,” the album featured a general lack of energy and immediacy that was a hallmark of their previous albums.

Continue As A Guest is the band’s ninth LP and their debut for Merge Records. This label feels like a natural home for The New Pornographers; Merge has shared many artists with Matador over the years and boasts just as iconic of a back catalog. Newman and Case also dug into the archives and have worked in some unreleased Bejar material, which appears as the lead single and album opener “Really Really Light.” The track feels like a New Pornographers family reunion, containing fragments that date back to the Brill Bruisers days and very well could have sat comfortably in its tracklist. On the whole, Continue As A Guest is a notable improvement on its predecessor but still exists in a more low-key presentation, leaving behind the up-tempo power-pop that defined their most celebrated works.

In exchange, the band locks into some surprisingly groovy cuts, like “Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies,” where Newman and Case share vocals on one of the most unique lyrical subjects for a Pornos tune in a long while. “Now you’re clearing the room just like Pontius Pilate when he showed all his home movies. All of his friends yelling, ‘Pilate, too soon!’” It’s sort of the band’s exploration of oblivious ego like Ben Folds Five’s “Steven’s Last Night In Town” or Ted Leo’s “The Little Smug Supper Club.”

Just as danceable, the song “Angelcover” is a borderline disco biscuit. The New Pornographers are no strangers to electronic elements– they’ve been incorporating strong keyboard lines into their songs on every album –but this might be the danciest they’ve ever gotten. The band muses, “Melody ain’t got nothing on the delivery,” but luckily, on this track, they’ve got a large dosage of both. Additionally, the title track, “Continue As A Guest,” is backed with a tasteful horn section that blissfully sways into the album’s second half.

While A.C. Newman is the primary vocalist, Neko Case compliments him as she always does on his tunes, but she also continues the tradition of leading a few of her own. Case’s “Crash Years” from 2009’s Together is my all-time favorite song in the band’s discography. Unfortunately, this time around, Case’s contributions are the weakest moments across the tracklist. The batch starts with “Cat and Mouse With the Light,” an underwhelming ballad that may have been better suited for a solo album. Case, who generally is an extremely bright lyricist and vocalist, completely misses in both categories on “Marie and the Undersea” in the second half of the album. “Marie, as the undersea calls out your name. Next thing you know, you’re flicking your cigarette out the window.” This song doesn’t strongly evoke the character, who’s presented in the middle of a crop of mermaidian clichés. It feels like she’s oddly playing below her strengths, and these moments only slow down the pace of the album.

For longtime fans, there’s still a handful of moments like “Really Really Light” that unmistakably fall into the band’s classic sound. “Bottle Episodes” could have come right out of the Challengers album with its focus on acoustic-based chamber-pop, with every member of the band clearly audible in the group vocals and strong instrumental performance. Newman warns, “when you’re dancing with the Devil, you don’t get to pick the song they play.” The album’s closer, “Wish Automatic Suite,” employs the same compositional techniques, with a melancholic tone shift at the end that’s expertly transitioned into from the strong refrains before it.

Both “Last and Beautiful” and “Firework In The Falling Snow” are the second to last songs in their respective halves of the album, which coincidentally seem to be Continue As A Guest’s dead zones. The two most forgettable songs here with nothing standout to latch onto, but also nothing too troubling to criticize. This effect is truly the Achilles heel of …Brakelights, but thankfully only carries over in a small way across the runtime of Guest.

I don’t necessarily think The New Pornographers’ best days are behind them, especially since the highlights of this album, like “Pontius Pilate…” or the title track, are genuinely great songs. Newman and Case are songwriting veterans, and it would be foolish to assume their muses are totally fading. Continue As A Guest just happens to be a bit of a mixed bag. The moments where they’re stepping outside their musical comfort zone, to mostly pleasurable results, sound a little inconsistent paired with the more typical sounding tracks. The album advert describes it as “10 new, explosive, genre-defying earworms.” While I can’t dispute the descriptor that these songs are new, not everything is explosive, and in those less powerful moments, the earworms are not always to be found. At the very least, it makes it more interesting in some respects than their last effort. With Continue As A Guest, I’ll still continue as a fan.

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.

M83 – Fantasy | Album Review

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The ‘Midnight City’ Band is, unfortunately, not a forgotten funk group from the ‘70s. This shorthand actually refers to the French electronic group M83, who formed almost 25 years ago. Their 2011 breakout album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming spawned the “indietronica” mega-smash “Midnight City,” which finds itself in playlists alongside other anthems of the same ilk. See “Walking On A Dream” by Empire Of The Sun or “Little Secrets” by Passion Pit.

M83 garnered much blogosphere praise in the years leading up to Hurry Up becoming a modest household sensation. Pitchfork awarded their coveted Best New Music distinction to their sophomore LP Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts in 2003, with a 9.2/10 rating. 2008’s Saturdays = Youth was revisited by Stereogum in its 10th anniversary year, calling it “lush, overwhelming synthpop… more complicated than the handful of new wave and dream-pop giants everyone compared it to.”

So, the band had their longtime celebrators, and by 2011 they had amassed tons of new listeners. The long-awaited Junk appeared five years later in 2016, which writer Ryan Leas calls in that same Stereogum piece “zonked-out.” Between the album cover and title, I’ll take his word for it. And aside from 2019’s DSVII – M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez’s second installment of video game-inspired ambient music – the band hasn’t released a proper album in seven years. Fantasy scratches the itch instantly.

M83 approaches the idea of “fantasy” from beautiful and strange vantage points, both in the music and the imagery. Gonzalez explained further on Twitter, “I want to keep having fantasies about worlds that I don’t know and creatures I don’t understand, and that’s the story behind this record.”  The album cover spotlights a strange alien figure and juxtaposes it with shiny neon lettering, giving an unsure first impression of exactly what type of fantasy the listener is about to be taken on. The serene introduction of “Water Deep” leading into the first single, “Ocean Niagara,” is a prog-rock adjacent couplet that suggests a more positive trajectory out of the gate. An odd choice for a first taste, as “Beyond adventure!” is the only lyric sung across its four-and-a-half minutes of steady electronic bliss. If patient fans weren’t satiated by that first track, maybe they were when M83 released the entire first “chapter” of the album, six songs altogether, to stream on February 9th.

Fantasy has quite a few moments of songs blending into each other, enhancing the seamless feeling of a fantastical trip throughout the listening experience. Tracks three and four, “Amnesia” and “Us And The Rest,” are M83 doing what they do best, an emotive mix of dream pop and dance music, making an instantly comfortable listen. “Amnesia” is sung from a fantasy skeptic’s perspective. “I believe in the darkness, it’s just a sound. I’m in love with some sadness, it’s just a sound.” Later, on “Earth To Sea,” Gonzalez takes a more Seussian lyrical approach: “Where will you go? Just say it, you can let go.”

Chapter Two opens with “Deceiver,” a groovy, sparkly disco-tinged number that sounds like it could have been a b-side to the Daft Punk & Panda Bear collab “Doin’ It Right” from Random Access Memories. While I dig this song, I believe it serves better as an ending to the first chapter as opposed to the start of a new one. Especially with Fantasy’s title track up next, serving as a statement of intent just as “Oceans Niagara” did at the start. Tracklist placement aside, this song is an absolute dancefloor smoker. “Shout it! Fantasy! Into a fantasy, into a wasteland, living in a fantasy,” Gonzalez refrains throughout. It’s an outstanding centerpiece of the album’s core themes.

“Laura” is a very pretty ballad that has one of the many mentions of traveling with another soul in this fantasy universe. “Take us on a ride, I’ll take you on a voyage through the night sky.” In the previous “Deceiver,” this character is a “distance driver;” similarly, “Amnesia” pleads to “Ride with me, slipping through my virtual magnet.” Throughout the album, Gonzalez channels classics like Elton John’s “Rocketman” or David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” through a more millennial lens. It’s lonely out in space, but he finds his companions within the great wide open. One of these companions is “Sunny Boy,” the crown jewel of the album. It’s the punchiest dance number with the strongest and most overt spatial fantasy lyrics. With an almost ABBA-like phrasing, Gonzalez swoons, “Cosmic adrenaline, she’s young and fierce. / Such a radiant queen.” Its reprise towards the album’s end is a welcome callback after the eight-minute, blissed- and blipped-out, almost-all French “Kool Nuit.”

This all leads up to the Fantasy finale, “Dismemberment Bureau,” suggesting the fantasy we might all be living in is one of televised overload. Gonzalez repurposes the legendary Gil-Scott Heron mantra, “Do you miss the day of human revolution? What a good way to learn from the hand of a legend. An illusion on color television.” Musically, I love the synth tones being laid down and think the track’s pacing is a strong compositional wrap-up. But it’s a bit of a ham-fisted topical ending, being the only moment on the album where fantasy and reality interweave. Maybe unexpectedly facing reality was M83’s intention after an hour of electronic sonic escapism.

I love any record that takes you on an otherworldly journey that presents you with things you don’t get in typical radio or supermarket music. On the whole, Fantasy delivers that journey, with the exception of a few curious elements regarding how it’s segmented. However much of the seven-year gap M83 took to put this together, it was clearly worth the wait. Maybe fantasy, reality, and the cosmos are all one and the same. If they are, a band named after a galaxy 15 million light years away certainly has the authority to say so.

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.

Full of Hell & Primitive Man – Suffocating Hallucination | Album Review

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Closed Casket Activities

Finding comfort in expressions of grief, anger, pain, and disgust has become commonplace in the modern era. It isn’t a comfort that evokes feelings of peace, necessarily, but more so a sense of understanding and even community. The world we’ve been sentenced to inhabit has been gutted by capitalistic greed, and society is being consumed by corporate, political, and religious zealots. Bigotry and hate flow freely from the mouths of these cretins, often to roaring applause, and any sort of resistance is violently snuffed out by militarized cops who stand for property over people. It’s difficult to trust your own blood these days, let alone your neighbors or a stranger. Metal bands Primitive Man and Full of Hell capture that tension and the overwhelming dread of modern life within the pummeling walls of disquieting noise and aggression on their collaborative album Suffocating Hallucination.

It’s easy to let the noise of it all wash over you and not dig deeper. That’s a lot of what I love about it. That overwhelming wall of noise is part of the comfort. It’s all so massive. Experiencing it live, really feeling it, is like immersion therapy. But to leave it there is to miss the bleak, poetic despair of the lyrics. You won’t be able to decipher what’s being said without having the words in front of you. However, following along as the album unfolds truly enhances the experience and allows for that understanding, or commiseration, to be reached.

“Today a cherub, whose hand I held, spit in my face,” opens the record and sets the unflinching tone of what’s to come. For five tracks that span over half an hour, Primitive Man and Full of Hell conjure chaos through vocals, riffs, percussion, and noise. While this sonically feels more in line with the towering doom metal that Primitive Man are known for, Full of Hell’s contributions are undeniable on every track. This is most clear on “Bludgeon,” a 25-second grinder that acts as a perfectly placed centerpiece with the lyrics reading, “Nothing to hold on to that has not been killed from being set free.” The effort to effectively communicate such emotions often goes unremarked when discussing bands of this ilk, but I’d be remiss not to shine a spotlight. I cannot read lines like the ones above and not feel a punch to the gut that forces me to reflect. The world is a horrifying place for a lot of people right now. Someone you once knew and loved is now unrecognizable in their hate and delusions. The government is actively suppressing the existence of trans people. It’s endless. It’s suffocating.

“Undefinable suffering: punishment built for the spiritually blind. Crushing weight of nothing. Now a gift to all his children, the absence of non-existence. Worse than hell.”

My history with both Full of Hell and Primitive Man began in 2017 with the respective releases of their albums Trumpeting Ecstasy and Caustic. At the time, I was engrossed in the emo scene, but I’d cut my teeth on hardcore/hardcore-adjacent bands, so wading into these grindy, doomy waters wasn’t uncommon. While I was open to and familiar with plenty of music I would deem as “heavy,” I can pinpoint my first listen of Caustic as a turning point in my life. I’d never heard anything quite like it. I’d certainly never heard anything that was heavy in that way. The music was ginormous and punishing in a way I’d never experienced before. The vocals were guttural shrieks straight from hell, with the lyrics and artwork matching the barren, dilapidated ruins in which the album exists. This isn’t heavy in a fun way. This is devastation expressed through the loudest, darkest sounds imaginable. Once the door was opened, there was no closing it. I was hooked, and it didn’t take long for me to shed my skin and return to the heavy realm I grew up on, only now it was meaner, bleaker, and heavier than ever before. 

And rightfully so. Caustic, as well as Trumpeting Ecstasy, felt urgent upon their release as a spotlight was shown on the struggles of life that hundreds of thousands of people endure on a daily basis in 2016 with the election of Trump (at least in the States, specifically). Hell, in my personal life, 2016 is the kickoff year for a mountain of strife that would fall upon me and my family. I didn’t intentionally seek out meaner, bleaker, and heavier music, but when I found it, it connected like nothing else. I hadn’t cognitively processed or addressed my afflictions when I dove into modern death/grind/doom/metal, but the feelings it pulled from me were palpable, and the power was undeniable. I was converted. I had found my church.

Primitive Man and Full of Hell have both been at it for over a decade, and they’ve been prolific from the get-go. Since their albums in 2017 alone, Full of Hell has released two LPs, a collaborative album with The Body, an EP, and a split with Intensive Care. Primitive Man released an LP, two splits (one with Unearthly Trance and one with Hell), the Steel Casket demo, and the Insurmountable EP, which is longer than most albums, including Suffocating Hallucination. Through their output, they’ve consistently proven that they seek exploration and collaboration in their work. Both bands began with more of a straightforward approach and have evolved over time to the behemoths they are today by incorporating more harsh noise and experimental soundscapes. The two crossing paths for Suffocating Hallucination is a logical pairing. They’re at the height of their powers and firing on all cylinders making the album tight and ripe for repeat listens. Passages like the hypnotic ending of “Trepanation for Future Joys” and the instrumental “Dwindling Will'' showcase how well their sensibilities meld together and how they’re still able to be a looming giant without utilizing their entire arsenal.

Since finding them years back, both bands have continued to draw from the well of brutal inspiration to exhilarating results, and their first collaboration together is no different. I’m curious to see how this union rubs off of the two bands in their solo efforts moving forward. What’s evident is that connection through dissonance can yield frighteningly compelling results. There’s a lot to be found within all the noise. The anguish is communal, and coming together in shared desperation can produce captivating art if only you take the time and dig a bit deeper to understand it. 

Christian Perez is a member of the band Clot and is always trying his best to exist gently.