Swim Camp – Steel Country | Album Review

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Self-released

Air travel has become a consistently more terrifying endeavor as I’ve grown older. With each passing year, I find myself increasingly anxious at the prospect of stepping foot on the massive metal machines that have reinvented global travel—both domestic trips and international ventures are now mere footnotes in the great span of time that constitutes our lives. The world’s longest nonstop commercial flight, which goes from Singapore to New York City, is nearly nineteen hours. And somehow, while my time in the air usually tops out at three hours, the takeoffs and landings nearly break me. My chest tightens, I get shaky, I drown everything out as waves of noise course through me until the plane has fully stopped on the runway.

Even then, for all the fear it’s started to cause me, aviation has its moments. Sometimes, a stroke of infinity has painted itself across the earth, and the windows of an aircraft are the best viewing place. Sometimes, sunlight crosses the sky and cuts through the exhausting, hopeless odor of seat 23D. These silent moments of salvation shine our neverending modern headache, undeniably bright even in their quiet entrances into our lives.

On Steel Country, Tom Morris’s third full-length under the Swim Camp moniker, passages of brilliance are impossible to ignore. A far cry from sleepless plane rides where the slightest slant of the sun’s rays is the only suggestion of joy, this album is a bountiful harvest of musicianship overflowing with a soft certainty, and is a perfect follow-up to 2021’s superb, washed-out, slow burner Fishing in a Small Boat. Steel Country sees Morris somehow manage to sharpen his already near-flawless songwriting instincts, constructing giddily addictive tracks with hooks swept up in waves of fuzz and distortion and tinted with electronic dissonance. It’s an album that leans into a delicate warmth only furthered by Morris’s gentle vocals, which provide the foundation for each track. The record forges a careful balance between rippling noise and quiet steadiness, and through this, Morris connects the threads of an existence in which, above a harsh sea of fears, questioning, and struggle, day breaks into bliss. It’s a quilt of friendships, memories, living rooms, half-thoughts, windows, lazy days, quick glances, empty streets, collective joy, and all the love in between, an ode to possibility in a life that’s full of it. 

credit Sarah Phung

Steel Country is a record straight out of a sun-washed afternoon in the grass, and its opening track, “Line in Sand,” is like waking from a midday dream. Morris’s voice rings lightly over as he starts singing, “The money’s gone, I tried to tell you / His face was wrong, I couldn’t help you / People change, I’m not the same now / On my way, he had a breakdown” over warm acoustic tones, until everything kicks in. An enchanting central riff that reminds me of some of the foundational lightness of 22° Halo’s Garden Bed is interjected with playful electronic passages until the instruments are washed away and make way for “Dougie (For Sharyl),” an addictive meditation on unhealthy relationships. It’s hard to think of anything catchier than when Morris realizes, “Oh shit, he’s aiming at me,” followed by a rush to the head of spaced-out guitars, hard synths, and relentless drums that operates as a sugar-high-esque moment of musical synergy. 

The album doesn’t let up in the slightest as it moves to “Pillow,” a gazey track built on a starry-eyed synth line that converges with guitars soaked in reverb and a plentiful helping of heavenly effects. It’s hard to think of a better way to lay the groundwork of an album’s soundscape than precisely what Swim Camp manages to accomplish on Steel Country’s first three tracks. Imagining a world of its own that simultaneously feels ours to live in and one which we must witness through windows, an eerie reckoning with the existence we dream of, the back-to-back-to-back from “Line In Sand” to “Dougie (For Sharyl)” to “Pillow” captures the heart. I have a feeling that’s exactly what Morris wants it to accomplish. By the time the last moments of “Pillow” sparkle away and the fugue-state passage that is “cLotine” takes over, you’re fully wrapped up in the record’s undeniable humanity. 

The dream only grows clearer as Steel Country moves forward, taking us further into the skies above. “Everything” elucidates the consuming yearning of cold nights, envisioning the solitude of a walk past the house of a lover’s parents. As questions surrounding that person’s feelings bubble up inside, guitars blare, and drums crash while Morris is subdued to incomprehensibility, replicating the internal uncertainties plaguing the heart. The blushing warmth of “Cherry” is built on bright guitars and hypnotic drums that move into periods of growling electronics reminiscent of Alex G’s recent crushing synth passages on “Blessing.” Songs like “No” and “is this the plan” present an evolved version of the slow, sugary sweetness that characterized 2021’s Fishing in a Small Boat, giving lots of space for Morris’s tender voice. “Apple” wants you to believe it’s going to be a crashing, heavy track, coming in with fierce drums and dizzying crests of noise, but it’s only a lead-in to a song that truly embodies country sensibilities with its drawn-out guitars moving at an infectious, heel-tapping pace. It’s an embrace of distant adoration and care, the way that we reconnect with our feelings toward the joys and loves of our past, and is one of the record’s most emotionally potent ventures. “hevvin00” is a dive under the ice on a frozen-over lake in the hollow core of winter—everything feels submerged and out of reach, but the possibility within the washed-out sounds is tangibly exciting.

The final three tracks strike a different tone than their counterparts among the first three, bouncier than the rest of the record. Morris’s ear for a strong chorus emerges on “Heat Makes Cracks in the Bones,” which moves into a refrain that feels so effortless you wish it could last forever, and “Say Hi” comes in like a washing-machine-whirlwind that’s built for the pit, moving with a dancy, tumbling liveliness. The album feels complete by the time Steel Country closes out with “what I saw,” which begins like Etiquette-era CFTPA track and gradually sinks into washed-out lo-fi waves.

Steel Country’s completeness is the consequence of many factors—a thoughtfully curated tracklist, addictive riffs, thoughtfully placed thematic crescendos, extensive sonic diversity, a willingness to challenge expectations, as well as the sheer talent and musicianship of Tom Morris. At the heart of its successes, though, is the coherence of its array of soundscapes. Even when it moves from tracks that lean lo-fi to electronic passages, or from its gazy stretches to lighter ballads, the album presents a foundationally raw and stripped-back revision of historical effects-showered indie music. 

That mesmerizing reinvention is best captured on my favorite track on the record, “Puddle,” a song that goes further into the territory of heaviness than anything I had expected to hear. The track begins with a headbanging riff that sits on layers of distortion and pure noise, all while a muffled recording plays, ending with a killer breakdown deserving of all the feedback loops in the world. In between those two points, the song builds with precision: at first, after letting its initial noise die down, we get clarity through the vocals, but then the instruments make their way back. Drums push the track forward as Morris drags out his words and begins to repeat the trance-like phrase “The puddle’s gettin’ deeper” until, in the utmost of parallels, his words are drowned out in the ocean of guitars, drums, bass, and even synths, all culminating in the aforementioned breakdown. It’s a decisive moment on the record—everything falls apart in the end, but you’re left with a beautiful view all the same. That’s exactly why I found myself writing about airplanes at the beginning of this whole affair; there’s something magical that courses through the veins of this album. It’s something as unreal and dreamlike as watching the world from forty-five thousand feet above the ground, and if this is what flying can feel like when we let go of our fears, then get me on the next plane. 

Spencer Vernier is a student in Boston, Massachusetts who also happens to enjoy the process of writing and editing. He loves to talk about cats, poetry, his friends, and of course, music. He is a managing editor at Melisma Magazine, a student publication which you can find here!

Paramore – This Is Why | Album Review

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Atlantic Records

When frontwoman Hayley Williams, guitarist Taylor York, and drummer Zac Farro decided to start writing music again as Paramore in 2021, the first thing they created was “Thick Skull,” the final track on their new album, This Is Why. It answers a question I’ve been asking for a long time, and something I think more people frankly should have been asking too: what if my bloody valentine, but with a good singer? It’s my favorite song on the album, and I think it’s perfect: the brooding guitar builds underneath Hayley’s verses like a storm, breaking around the 3-minute mark right as she jumps up an octave for the final incendiary chorus. I’ve seen people call it “Paramore’s shoegaze song,” and it’s true, but “Thick Skull” is also urgent in a way that most shoegaze isn’t. It’s the feeling of the three bandmates surrendering, perhaps for the first time in decades, to the inevitable draw of writing rock music together.

For many fans, Hayley could sing the phone book, and they’d eat it up, but that’s never been good enough for Paramore. With This Is Why, they pay their rent with change to spare: each of the ten songs has something to say, with style statements in equal measure to substance. The band draws from Bloc Party, British post-punk, and the “indie sleaze” dance-punk of the late 2010s to augment their signature melodic rock sound. They are making music on their own time and on their own terms, and the assuredness comes through. Paramore are right where they are supposed to be. 

The album’s lead single and title track reintroduces the band in the only way that’s fitting: as a trio. Guitarist Taylor York and drummer Zac Farro have said they worked more collaboratively on the album’s instrumentation than they’ve ever done in the past, and nowhere on the album is that alchemy more obvious than on “This Is Why.” York’s guitar crashes in on the choruses, pounding along with Farro’s kit like an extra snare. Williams’ voice builds and breaks on the bridge, formatting the three friends’ treatise on agoraphobia with the explosive vocals the world has always craved from her.  

Not every moment on This Is Why is perfect, but all of it adds to the Paramore extended universe, and it will be interesting to see what sticks. There’s something I like to call the “Ain’t It Fun” Effect: the Paramore songs that genre-bend to a bit of a ham-fisted extent often end up beloved. Plus, the band’s curveball songs—often dismissed by critics—have historically been the ones that reach a new corner of music fans. Many Black Paramore listeners cite “Ain’t It Fun” as an important touchstone in their fandom. 

There’s such a vital spot in the Paramore ecosystem for the tryhard songs—I mean, have you listened to them? They’ve been not-exactly-subtle for going on two decades now. In that light, “The News” and “C’est Comme Ça”—two of the album’s three singles, and the songs with the heaviest post-punk touch—may overreach a bit. But I say let ‘em cook. 

The second half of the album, though, plunges relentlessly into the strongest writing the band has ever done. “You First” kicks off the run with a punky bite reminiscent of Riot! or Brand New Eyes. Williams plays out an internal battle, where she wrestles with the energetic cost of resentment on her inner peace. Ultimatley, her spite wins out on this one, landing her at the vindictive conclusion that, “Karma's gonna come for all of us, and I hope she comes for you first.” Then “Figure 8” starts off like the start of a roller coaster, rushing into the first moment of the album that gave me real chills: Hayley’s howling harmonies over the pre-chorus, confessing “I don’t know how to stop / I don’t know how to stop.” 

Track eight, “Liar,” isn’t just a good song; it’s a momentous one. As much as Williams has historically evaded media conversation about her dating life, it’s always been a center of gravity for Paramore: her romantic endeavors have been the source material for much of their best music. The vulnerability of “Liar” is as hard-won as it is sacred. The track plays out as the guarded singer (she’s a Capricorn) serenades guitarist York, her partner of a few years. As longtime Paramore fans know, York was a founding member of the band (he, Farro, and Williams have been friends since middle school) and, according to interviews, supported Hayley through the darkest time of her life in the mid-2010s. The addition of this song to Paramore’s canon is a gift, and its lovely guitars and wistful vocals underscore its quiet significance.

What the band has to say on the final two songs, “Crave” and “Thick Skull,” feels like two sides of the same coin. Life is long, much longer than we’d imagined when we were stealing boyfriends in high school, and the time starts to play out in patterns when we tread through enough of it. Layers of Hayley’s power vocals (some of the prettiest of her career) and unresolved seventh-chords drench “Crave” in longing: she tries and often fails to live in the present, but the honesty in her efforts tethers her to life’s sweetness either way. The dark mantras of “Thick Skull” usher in the opposite side of the years’ unraveling: 

Thick skull never did
Nothin' for me
Same lesson again
Come on, give it to me

The foil to “Crave’s” soaring harmonies, Williams’ musings on “Thick Skull” are just as impressive vocally, but play with a more sinister tone. It’s an album closer that denies us resolution, reminding us that yang belongs just as much as yin and that the angst that fueled us as teens might still have a thing or two to teach us. This song exemplifies the kind of delicate depths that decades-long bandmate relationships give you the sanctuary to explore.

This Is Why triumphs in its confessions, in its breadth, in its generosity. In the first Paramore album with the same lineup as its last, Williams, York, and Farro’s hard-won love for one another and their fans lets them carve creative new paths into post-punk, shoegaze, and dance rock. For a band that so easily could have gotten stuck in the past, Paramore shows us that no matter how dark the world feels, we can always find our way back to each other.

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. 

Growing Pains – Thought I Heard Your Car | EP Review

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SELF-Released

Slowcore, shoegaze, and indie rock are genres rich with tradition. Prospective new heads all look back to the chords, pedalboards, and vocal chops of the revered forebears such as My Bloody Valentine, Ride, or the Drop Nineteens, seeking to emulate the cult successes of a past era– but much of the appeal of these mythic albums comes from nostalgic warmth created by tape hiss and squealing feedback. When these young musicians speak of their influences, they mention things about the marks of time on them. Melted tape legends and woozy pitch-bent loops are products of the early-90s experimental attitude towards music making and production. In today’s digital frontier, very few bands choose to actually capture the spirit of the ancient texts. There’s some debate as to whether it can even be done, but that debate can be put to rest. By leaning into past and future traditions of shimmering pop-rock, Portland’s Growing Pains have brought us Thought I Heard Your Car. 

This fuckin’ EP is unreal. From the moment you press play on lead single “What Are the Odds?” you’re greeted with a classic Duster-style slowcore arpeggio. The muted drumbeat and dreamy synths float by, calling to mind hits like “Topical Solution” or “Bedside Table” before exploding into a sonically rich 3/4 groove. The tight guitar tones, which appear across the record, find a foothold with the rhythm section in a hard-edged move not commonly found among the band’s contemporaries. Kaila Storer’s vocal approach, ever ethereal, presides over shifting dynamics and moving sections from a comfortable place in the center of the mix as she sings: “Crush me in the dark / Fill my head with stars.” While I’m sure this prose conjures images of the horde of slacker-rock wannabes, the group takes great pains not to repeat the fatal mistake of sonic sameness that plagues lesser songsmiths. Layered into the vocal tracks are touches of Auto-Tuned warbling, a distinctly modern texture, and the guitar tone feels stiffened with compression. An off-kilter tremolo guitar plays a scratchy lead line as the dynamics duck and weave to make space. Though easily missed by the casual listener, these modern production touches take elements of dream pop and shoegaze sonics and blow them up into modern pop choruses. 

The energy continues down the tracklist– “In Effigy” boasts a drum part that indieheads will recognize as classic Grandaddy, shuffling along as Jack Havrila and Carl Taylor’s spindly guitars buzz by one of Storer’s most memorable hooks. Catchy melodies are buried under layers of noise, every instrument prompting you to sing along to its repetitive and zany riff as chords contextualize these phrases into hopeful and melancholy passages in equal measure. “Lemon Lime,” another standout, boasts Great Grandpa-like fuzz as pounding drums evoke classics by Ride and even the Smashing Pumpkins before shifting into a twee-pop vibe that calls forward the sonic image of the Elephant 6 collective or Plumtree. The production takes a front seat on this track, with distorted vocal overdubs and squealing feedback samples rhythmically injecting themselves throughout its back half and only continues to shine in “Pretend to Sleep,” a high-energy pop-rocker with the most radio hit potential on the album. Blending long, distorted reverb trails with tight pop harmony and clockwork instrumentals, the fusion of old shoegaze legend with the present indie-pop movement’s urgency and hooks turn what might have been a derivative slog into an inventive and eventful masterwork. Closing track, “Memory from Last Year,” is equal parts Modest Mouse, Portishead, and Feeble Little Horse– its uptempo trip-hop beat breezes by as guitars gnarl and tangle through snippets of audio and swelling reverb trails. These songs are deceptively deep– though at first glance, they’re an appealing pop-rock package just waiting to be devoured by arty college scenes.

Lyrically, the songs are indecisive and weird– neither in the pejorative sense. Everything is stuck or sticking, detailing staircase wit, stained walls, and menthol cigarettes. The sleepy imagery on “Memory from Last Year” recalls the faded and decayed way experiences often float back to the front of one’s mind, and the refusal of "In Effigy" to grasp for a subject sends listeners into a confused mess of pronouns and images. It’s a highly personal affair, but an abstract one– you kind of get the sense that the band, in their lyrical process, have boiled away excess phrases to leave only the gnarled core of the experience rattling around your mind as a listener. Storer’s indistinct and placid delivery, however, relegates the poetics to the liner notes. It all snugly fits into place under the masterful production, which makes the lyrics blow by in the most compelling way.

Growing Pains seem to have an innate artistic understanding of how to make this particular style of nu-shoegaze more than just the sum of its parts. Beyond just a crisp mix and master, the production feels as much of an instrument in many of these songs as the bass or guitar. Adept little shifts– a drop in volume, a tone change, a panning movement– all contribute to the songs in ways that look back on the storied history of the genre. Much like how the production techniques of past shoegaze bands led to the musician’s chase for the perfect recorded tone through effects pedals and studio tricks, Thought I Heard Your Car plays in their digital audio workstation like it’s 1996 and the technology is still new. 

THE COFFEE CORNER

I listen to all my albums in the living room of my cramped Pittsburgh apartment. My roommate, Nick, enjoys eavesdropping on my sessions. Nick is six-foot, with close-cropped blond hair and bright blue eyes. He is an avid Phish fan currently wandering around in a pair of ball shorts and a garish tie-dyed T-shirt smoking a joint. He contributes that "these guitars sound like vacuum cleaners" and asked me "if Phil Spector had anything to do with this."

Mikey Montoni is a nonfiction writing student at the University of Pittsburgh, originally hailing from New York. When she's not writing, she's bruising herself attempting skateboard tricks, playing with her punk rock band, digging through bookstores for '70s pulp sci-fi paperbacks, and wandering Pittsburgh in search of good coffee.

The Run For Cover Shoegaze Canon

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We’ve all heard about the Heavy Music to Shoegaze Pineline, and the math checks out there, but there’s another, just-as-important shoegaze repository that we don’t talk about often enough: The Emo Music to Shoegaze Pipeline. Okay, I promise I’m going to stop saying “pipeline” now, but this is a very real phenomenon with one highly-influential label at the center. But first? Let me take you back in time.

It’s spring term 2014, and you’re just at the onset of your emo phase. You found this cool label from Boston named Run For Cover. They had just released this album called “You’re Gonna Miss It All” by Modern Baseball, and you were digging it quite a bit. Through forums, message boards, and various online chatter, you discovered this other album with a pizza on the cover by a band named Tigers Jaw and found out that the same label put it out. Damn, two for two. You decide to check out a few more albums the label has released, and soon enough, you have a pretty solid foundation for decades of dorky emo admiration. If you couldn’t figure it out, that person was ME.

In retrospect, Run For Cover has always been my favorite record label for a reason. They put out (conservative estimate) a few dozen highly influential, respected, and revered albums since their humble beginnings in 2004. A decade into their existence, they’d already brought us Title Fight, Fireworks, The Wonder Years, Tigers Jaw, Man Overboard, Koji, and Seahaven. If you have any affinity for this specific sound or era of indie rock, that list probably got your heart rate up. 

At this point in 2014, I was just beginning to find my footing in school. I was halfway through college, settling into my major, and discovering a host of music that felt unique and uninformed by my peers or friends. This felt like music that was speaking directly to me and that I could fully own. Run For Cover was offering music from some of the most exciting and important bands in my life, and pretty soon, seeing that Run For Cover Triangle Logo was as good as a stamp of approval in my eyes. 

In 2014 specifically, we were post-Youth, but pre-Peripheral Vision. This was a time when many of these bands were either revving up or actively dropping their best material. Seahaven had just released Reverie Lagoon, and Tigers Jaw were just beginning to roll out singles to their much-awaited Charmer… Sorry that this has been a lot of “remembering guys” up to this point, but I’m just trying to paint a picture here. If these names mean anything to you, then I promise I’m building to something. 

Just over the horizon was a little band from Indiana called Cloakroom. They were about to drop their debut album, Further Out, and cement themselves as Run For Cover’s first earnest foray into overtly heavier music. At some point in an early part of their career, the band openly described themselves as “stoner emo,” which sounds exactly how you would expect it to. On Further Out, the trio fully realized their powerful potential, combining the heaviest parts of Hum with the shreddiest parts of Earth. That Hum worship also materialized in a very real way after an album delay led to an apology 7” with a song featuring Matt Talbott of Hum. 

One month after Cloakroom’s ferocious first album came another debut from a Pittsburg band called Adventures. Much like Further Out, the first record from Adventures was a shockingly developed realization of the band’s sound. Titled Supersonic Home, this album was the payoff to two EPs and two splits; it was a fresh batch of ten new songs, all without flaw. For just over 31 minutes, the band hits you with one lightly distorted hook after the next. “Dream Blue Haze,” “Your Sweetness,” and “My Marble Hole,” one by one, the band unleashed these incredibly simple yet endlessly addictive tracks. The end result is an uplifting collection of songs that sit somewhere between Sunny Day Real Estate and the Brianna-led side of Tigers Jaw. It’s also an album that I only checked out because Run For Cover was releasing it. 

While it’s hard to call Adventures a shoegaze band in the classic definition, they were certainly indebted to a specific style of fuzzy 90s/early-2000s alt-rock. Regardless of what you’d label them, Supersonic Home was one of the coolest things I’d ever heard in my life. The crazy part is how much that record still holds up almost a decade later. The magic is still there, and its status as a one-off side project makes that perfection sting all the more. Oh, that’s right. Did I not mention that Adventures was comprised primarily of members from the metalcore band Code Orange? Because that’s a crazy fun fact that I decided to bury at the very end of this paragraph. That almost makes them a prototypical member of the heavy music to shoegaze pipeline. 

One year later, I would stumble ass-backward into Psychopomp by Japanese Breakfast, thanks to a transcription of an absolutely manic and hilarious string of text messages posted to the /r/indieheads subreddit. That album would go on to become one of my favorites of all time and soon lead me to Little Big League, a gritty Run For Cover band that Michelle Zauner sang and played guitar in. This was before becoming the published author, Dead Oceans-signed, music video and movie directing Michelle Zauner that we all know today, but the music was just as good.

I wouldn’t personally discover them until years later, but around this same time, Pity Sex was releasing their iconic one-two punch of Dark World and Feast of Love, rounding out a dreamier side of Run For Cover’s gazey lineup. Similarly, Superheaven was rocking the 90s grunge worship years before anyone else would get there. The fact that one label was at the epicenter of all this music is, quite frankly, mind-blowing.

To this day, a Run For Cover co-sign is still a seal of approval. Seeing this label involved means a guaranteed listen from me. Sometimes it’s not my shit, but more often than not, I’ll discover a new obsession or favorite artist.

In recent years, the label has brought us Anxious, Sadurn, One Step Closer, and Glass Beach. Run For Cover’s involvement got me in early on bands like Camp Cope, Field Medic, and Pinegrove, in addition to everything listed above. This label has ushered me into the sprawling discographies of artists like Advance Base and Alex G, and they’ve even released one of my favorite albums of the last decade with Fiddlehead’s Springtime and Blind. 

Last week, Run For Cover dropped Narrow Head’s third album, Moments of Clarity. It wasn’t until I was listening to this record that I put all this together. At first, my reaction was “another great record from Run For Cover,” which is a relatively predictable response from me. Then I started looking through my music library and realized this label’s pedigree with these shoegaze-adjacent albums. Run For Cover was instrumental not just in my emo music fandom but also acted as my introduction to this specific heavier scene of music. 

From the dreamy wisps of “Dogwalk” and saccharine sweetness of Adventures to the stoner crush of Cloakroom and grungy blaze of Narrow Head, Run For Cover has always been there.

There are a ton of bands playing at this “grungegaze” intersection right now; Fleshwater, Soul Blind, Glitterer, Dosser, Drug Church, and Prize Horse, just to name a handful. Each of these bands are carving out distinct corners of hardcore and heavy music, pulling from the grunge, nu-metal, and the 2000s alternative rock I heard all the time growing up. This sound feels extra crystalized on Moments of Clarity, but to some extent, is just the latest in a long string of Run For Cover Records knowing what I need to hear exactly when I need to hear it.