Funeral Homes – Double Vision | Video Premiere

As an artist, you can’t always choose what people’s first impression of you will be. This is the logic behind singles and music videos: to try and craft an intentional string of encounters that build off each other, transforming someone from a prospective listener into a fully-fledged fan. In the age of streaming, TikTok, and instant access, this experience is harder for artists to have any control over. Even in the ever-splintered media landscape of 2023, a good music video has the power to give viewers an understanding of what makes a band unique. Funeral Homes know this and have put their best foot forward with their new video for “Double Vision.”

Funeral Homes is a Jacksonville-based Shoegaze band that started as the solo project of Sofia Poppert. After a string of singles and contributions to compilations, Funeral Homes released their first long-form articulation in 2019 with Lavender House, a seven-song collection that leaned more towards the heavy end of emo than overt shoegaze. Fast forward a few years, and 2022’s Blue Heaven is a fully-fledged LP with some of the most beautiful, catchy, and haunting shoegaze songs I’ve heard in years. 

The album’s lead single, “Double Vision,” is the rare case where a shoegaze song is able to rise out of its own genre trappings into something completely unique. Even within Blue Heaven, “Double Vision” comes after the lovelorn midtempo trod of “Before You Leave,” a sad song about heavy topics like separation and abandonment. Then, one song later, here comes this bounding, thumpy track that deploys a vicious amount of whammy bar and a riff that makes you want to catapult into nearby concertgoers. “Double Vision” melds shoegaze and noise pop with just a little bit of pop-punk pep, charging forward for an unrelenting two minutes before dumping you back into reality.

The video for “Double Vision” is a dizzying spin around the band’s practice space as a fisheye lens rotates through every member rocking out (and getting different fits off) until the song’s final moments. Since the group previously consisted only of Poppert, this video acts both as an unveiling of the full lineup and as a way to package up one of the band’s best songs into an entry point for prospective listeners. 

For those that journey into the rest of the album, you’ll be treated to hypnotic dream states, twilight musings, and hypnagogic revelations. The 44 minutes Funeral Homes have laid out on Blue Heaven ring out with sticky riffs, dense fuzz, and far-off vocals disguised in an alluring shroud of haze. The whole thing merges into this dreamy blue wall of noise that positions Funeral Homes as part of a promising wave of Florida-gaze bands like Rosewilder and Gravess. With any luck, the video for “Double Vision” will lead hordes of new fans into Funeral Homes’ gorgeous, humid, and heavy corner of the world.

Dim Wizard – X-Games Mode | Single Review

Self-Released

I cannot tell you the last time it was that I picked up a skateboard and popped an ollie or landed a shuvit. Now that I’m 30 and it truly means nothing to me, my memory wanes as to whether I actually landed a kickflip like I bragged to some attractive women in college. Not to kill my ego, but I probably didn’t. That being said, I would’ve burned a hole in the flash memory of my iPod Nano listening to Dim Wizard’s “X-Games Mode” on repeat while slamming the deck into my shins.

The latest collaboration from Bad Moves’ David Combs and illuminati hotties’ Sarah Tudzin features garage power-popper Mike Krol and Ratboys’ Julia Steiner on vocals. Distorted and compressed to a chaotic hell, “X-Games Mode'' is just plain fun. Combs and Tudzin’s earworm songwriting and musicianship are complemented by Krol and Steiner’s cool deliveries to create a track that evokes nostalgia while also feeling new. Because of that, “X-Games Mode” immediately feels timeless in the best way.

Although my skating days are well behind me, the single’s catchy chiptune elements and swirling guitar riffs make for the perfect soundtrack to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (or, for a true X-Games mode, Skate) with your friends. If we play at your house, I’ll bring the forties.

---

Joe Wasserman lives with his partner and their dogs in Brooklyn. When he’s not listening to music, he plays bass in bands, writes stories, and releases music as After School Special. You can find him on Twitter at @a_cuppajoe.

Sinai Vessel – Tangled | Single Review

Self-Released

Wednesday… MJ Lenderman… Indigo De Souza. Within the last few years, the Asheville music scene has been absolutely overflowing with incredible art, and it’s time we talk about it. Having been to Asheville exactly once in my life, I’m sure it’s always been that way, but it wasn’t until recently that the town has found itself on the lips of every music blog and indie kid with a penchant for twang and slide guitar. Beneath the Dead Oceans/ANTI-/Saddle Creek tier of rising rockstars are lowkey hidden gems like Sluice and Broken Family – somewhere between these is Sinai Vessel.

Sinai Vessel is the formerly emo, now folksy indie rock band of Caleb Cordes and an artist that I’ve personally brought up in conversation with some of Asheville’s best. The project first wound up on my radar back in 2020 with the jaw-dropping LP Ground Aswim, which wound up being one of my favorites of the year. Even as an election and the pandemic suspended the world into a dizzying stasis, I found time to sit with Ground Aswim and find peace in its calming shores. Cordes, in turn, took the time to give his album the love it deserved. One Bandcamp Friday, fans were treated to a solitary track-for-track demo version of the album and, later, a 2019 live performance showcasing early versions of select songs. Both of these collections rendered the original album in a new light and, when played in proximity, let the listener in on both Cordes’ creative process and the evolution of these songs. Ground Aswim was immortalized on vinyl, cassettes, and a zine, all released independently, nothing short of a feat in the increasingly monopolized music landscape. One year later, Cordes made his final statement on this body of work with “Swimming,” a single-song coda that marked a definitive end to this sprawling collection of songs. 

At the end of 2021, Cordes released a handful of tracks on SoundCloud plainly labeled “LP4 Demos.” Expectantly sparse and surprisingly stark, these five songs offered a workshop-like glimpse at what was coming next for the project. By releasing these songs publicly, Cordes also continued the trend of letting the listener in on his songwriting process, this time seemingly as it was happening. Now, a year and a half later, we have “Tangled,” the first real taste of what the future holds for Sinai Vessel.

The track begins with a bouncy acoustic sway that feels like a natural extension of the guitar-based LP4 Demos we’ve already heard. The first thing this instrumental reminded me of was the bright, sunny tone of the last Hovvdy album, which wound up being an apt comparison when I learned that the song was produced and engineered by Bennett Littlejohn, known for his recent work with Hovvdy, Katy Kirby, and Claire Rousay.

Cordes wastes no time jumping into things, singing, “sitting around and waiting / waiting to get fired.” Whether fueled by self-doubt, the worry we’ve done something wrong, or just anxiety from the increasingly unstable teeter-totter of capitalism, this is a looming sense of dread we’ve all probably experienced at some point in our professional careers. It’s funny and apropos because this is something I’ve felt acutely in recent weeks as my day job has slowed to a crawl, and I’ve felt less productive than I have all year. Perhaps it’s just summer doldrums, but to hear such a specific worry reflected back at me felt very cosmic and well-timed.

The lyrics go on to depict the relationship between mind and body, talking about how one informs the other but can sometimes relay or retain the wrong thing. From there, the third verse delves into the messiness of modern communication and misinterpretation, while the final lines articulate a unique brand of self-inflicted paranoia. The back half of the song touches on this rush of topics and wraps up mid-beat in a way that leaves you on the edge of your seat, waiting to hear what comes next. Cordes offers no solution to these problems, at least not on this song, but “Tangled” sure does an excellent job of making the listener's worries feel heard. 

By depicting this messy web of concerns, both real and imagined, Cordes lets them all float out of his mind and into the ether. We live in an era of intersecting apocalypses, and sometimes it can feel like tearing yourself apart just trying to figure out what to focus on. No one person has all the answers, but we do have each other, and while these aren’t all problems that can be “solved,” the first step towards tackling any of them is to lay them all out, just as Sinai Vessel does over the course of these three minutes. We’ll figure out what comes next together.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds | Album Review

Self-Released

Pop music is limitless. It’s how Phoebe Bridgers can open Taylor Swift concerts or how Slash can revamp a Demi Lovato song. Somewhere at the center of that limitless energy is where In The Garden, By The Weeds exists. Josaleigh Pollett’s third album is an emotional and experimental pop record that could be aligned anywhere from Hop Along to HAIM.

Right up top, Pollett delivers one of the year’s best album openers in the form of “YKWIM” (“you know what I mean”), a song that begins with glitchy acoustic guitars and a clear lead vocal. But it’s not straightforward for long, with Pollet’s voice on the track’s namesake lyric pitched down abruptly. Crisp Boygenius-style harmonies follow in the pre-chorus leading into an unexpected but badass guitar passage. It’s one of the most compositionally layered songs of the lot, and shows the listener everything Pollett is capable of throughout the album. “I want to cry in the arms of somebody who knows me,” they passionately refrain.

“Empty Things” showcases Pollett’s best Postal Service nod, with the Ben Gibbard-esque phrasing down pat over the minimal electronic backing track. It’s elevated even further by Bly Wallentine’s instrumental contributions, notably the woodwinds that come in after the first chorus. This is one of the very few featured players on the album, as In The Garden was put together almost entirely by Pollett and bandmate/producer Jordan Watko. The duo weave their way through nine tracks that sound like they could have been crafted by an entire indie rock orchestra. Despite how instrumentally dense each song is, the singular vision makes this feel like something only an extremely imaginative singer-songwriter could calculate.

Lead single “The Nothing Answered Back” seems to have many of elements of indie greats embedded in its DNA. I hear nods to Shearwater, Austin’s baroque-folk-rock outfit that took an electronic turn on 2016’s Jet Plane And Oxbow. The sparse, cryptic synth-string section in the chorus recalls “Dilaudid” by The Mountain Goats, a track similarly powerful due to its vocals-and-violins juxtaposition. Owen Pallett, former Mountain Goats and Arcade Fire collaborator, is also a master of the style throughout his solo catalog, and that definitely sounds like a reference point here. “The Nothing Answered Back” is not the most obvious or pop-centric track here, so it’s a bold first cut to release, but it puts forth the entire album's boldness without shying away, and it totally works.

Pollett knows their way around a true blue ballad, creating tracks that are both raw and tender throughout the entire LP. The mostly acoustic “Not Easy, Not Forever” is a prime example, with Pollett keeping their vocals reserved to ensure the lyrics are at the forefront. “I only feel present when I am alone. It’s starting to make me lonely. Can’t get enough sleep when it’s all I do. Why get out of bed in the morning?” they open, a sentiment I know is shared among many people.

The song also has the album’s second mention of a “garden” as a thematic centerpiece, following “cinderblocks.” That track was released last year without being tied to an album rollout, but wound up prophetically giving this record its name. “Everybody thinks they know a fix for what we’ve seen. Take this picture, ain’t she lovely? In the garden, by the weeds.” Gardens, much like the self, need consistent care and treatment, and everyone’s got a few weeds in them that don’t make the garden any less appealing. Between the fuzzed-out vocal harmonies and the swelling production, it’s one of my favorite tracks on the album. It’s easy to hear a parallel to some of the softer moments on Lucy Dacus’ last album Home Video, but I consider it a testament to Pollett’s craft that they’re able to exist in that same space without trying to usurp or replicate it.

Bly Wallentine returns on “Earthquake Song,” this time on pump organ, adding a unique flavor to the track. When Pollett and Watko need to bring an extra player in, it feels like a meticulous choice to lock in just the right addition. This song actually has the largest personnel on the entire album, being rounded out by guest vocalists Nicole Canaan and Aisling. With that in mind, it would be assumed to be the “biggest” sounding track here. That distinction still goes to “YKWIM,” but “Earthquake Song” is a close second.

The big songs and well-placed features don’t end there, but fully culminate with the album’s triumphant closer, “July.” Ryan Shreeve provides the only live drums on the album, and they’re well-placed to cap In The Garden off alongside the synth-heavy instrumental. We also get the final lamentations on the garden theme: “I’m pulling up weeds, and I planted a tree. But it feels like my heart shape has changed. And I know that things won’t be the same. I drink enough water, and I let myself cry. Do you think that’s all right? I hope that’s all right.” Pollett recognizes there are some things about the self that can’t be changed, and it certainly is all right.

In The Garden, By The Weeds is a poignant indie popera with no emotional holds barred. Josaleigh Pollett lets their thoughts and feelings bloom on every song here, whether in self-reflection or self-deprecation. It’s all presented as one of the most honest and individualistic singer-songwriter albums of the year so far, and what should hopefully be seen as a career milestone for Pollett in the coming years.

This review is dedicated to Rudo. 

---

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.

Abacot – Promo 2023 | EP Review

Self-released

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. After all, don’t the emo kids deserve to have some upbeat jams too? That intoxicating (and almost contradictory) promise of emo sentiments wrapped in a sunny optimism is exactly what Abacot is dishing up on their inaugural three-song promo tape.

Abacot is a Virginia-based emo outfit fronted by Claudio Benedi, the primary songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist behind Commander Salamander. For those who need a bit of a history lesson, Commander Salamander (lovingly referred to by fans as Comma Salad) was a punk-leaning emo trio who were active from 2017 to 2021. The group first became known among the wider DIY scene with Gross October, an EP released on the now-defunct Chatterbot Records. While that label exploded in spectacular fashion, this connection made Comma Salad labelmates and piers with bands like Origami Angel, Stars Hollow, Equipment, and Michael Cera Palin.

After an insanely catchy double, the group released a split with Origami Angel at the start of 2019 that saw both bands plotting an upward ascent bonded by mutual admiration and their shared home of Washington, DC. In the summer of that same year, the group put out their most actualized release, Off the Goop, not even 10 minutes of shouty punk music that came with its own plush toy. 

In October of 2021, tragedy struck both Commander Salamander and the larger DIY community when the band’s drummer, Liam Crone, passed away. Following an outpouring of love and support, the band and Crone’s family set up the Liam Crone Memorial Scholarship through Berklee College of Music. Commander Salamander memorialized Crone by collecting their discography and adorning the cover with his image, essentially putting the project to rest and allowing Crone’s memory (and exuberant drumming) to live on forever through the music. 

After years of grieving and working through the loss of his friend, Benedi has returned to music with three songs meant to represent different aspects from three of the worst years of his life. Everything from the mundanities of car ownership to the complexities of human relationships and mental health are all covered in the project’s scant 10 minutes. 

Even as he presents the worst that life has dealt to him, Benedi swaddles these narratives in breezy swoons and bouncy guitarwork, making each feel like a parable told from the perspective of someone who’s made it through these things and come out the other side a stronger person. 

Opening track, “Check Engine Light,” is a soaring song about the trials and tribulations of owning a twenty-plus-year-old beater, told in the style of Jail Socks/Kerosene Heights southeast emo. Anyone that’s ever had to hand-crank their windows or ignore a dashboard light because they’re already late to work will likely find some relatability here, inevitably sucked into the chorus whenever they see a mysterious yellow symbol light up on their car. 

Things go from annoying to dire on “Vertigo,” a track about the disorienting experience of navigating a relationship with a narcissist. Appropriately, the instrumental jostles the listener around until the end of the song appears like a light at the end of a tunnel, finally presenting a way out. Similarly, “Horror” imagines an anxiety attack as the relentless villain of a slasher flick, complete with slick guitar solos and even some splashes of organ throughout.

Decidedly less punk-leaning than Commander Salamander, the three songs on Abacot’s promo tape showcase an artist metamorphosing into something fresh but familiar. After losing a close friend and bandmate (on top of everything else the world has collectively experienced over the past three years), it’s nice to hear from Claudio again in such a different form. 

While Comma Salad specialized in one-minute ragers, Abacot songs sprawl out into a more standard 3-minute run time. The emo pop sensibilities that poked through on tracks like “Scooter” have been refined and are cast in a new light under the Abacot name. This project also continues the streak of DC collaboration, with Origami Angel’s Ryland Heagy helping flesh these tracks out from their demo form and doubling as the tape’s producer. 

If these tracks present the worst that Benedi has incurred over the last few years, having these songs packaged up and out into the world must feel like a relief. By releasing this three-track tape, it means these events have been weathered, that they are in the past, that they’re finally over. One would hope that this is a necessary part of closure and working these things out of your system, and by listening to them, we’re not just hearing new songs from an artist we love, but we’re leaving all of this in the past too. Here’s to Abacot and whatever comes next.