Empty Heaven – Laughing | Album Review

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Self-Released

Machine Gun Kelly goes pop-punk, Demi Lovato goes metal, Beyoncé goes country. (Taylor Swift goes… pop?) The lines of genre are constantly being blurred, even by some of the industry’s most prominent superstars. But digging into the underground, you’ll find plenty of bands who incorporate multiple styles on a single album or even within a single song that are usually filed far away from any mainstream recognition. Back in January, I reviewed the beautifully radical plastic death by glass beach, an album I commended for its risks, but unfortunately, I don’t see them having a shot at being the opening act on Post Malone’s grunge tour anytime soon. Now I find myself again with a piece of music so freeing, so intense, and so hard to pin down, that I wonder why it can’t be a King Gizzard-level sensation. I don’t think fame is the desire nor the intent of Anthony Sanders, the composer, lyricist, and multi-instrumentalist behind Empty Heaven. What I think the intent might be is to push his personal artistic boundaries until they snap, and in that regard, he made a seismic accomplishment with Laughing.

After a smattering of one-off singles and collaborative tracks, like the forgotten friend ballad “Ozzy” or the almost eponymous “Heaven Is Empty” featuring Jennie Lawless, Empty Heaven’s debut album Getting The Blues came out in 2021. Similarly to those early singles, the release was performed almost entirely by Sanders, save for a few additional vocal appearances. Whether or not it meant to, that album felt like a reflective collection as the world began its first steps out of the COVID-19 pandemic, lo-fi in moments and musically sporadic in others. Two years later, Sanders locked himself in once again while working on a cruise ship. Using the minimal gear he had with him, he recorded  Enjoy Like A Pro, one of my favorite EPs of 2023. It was impressive and inventive how much he was able to convey from the confines of a cabin room, even going so far as to make a music video for the single “Don’t Worry, Be Happy 2” from his digs.

The premiere singles for Laughing, “End Times” and “Hauntology” made two things extremely clear: firstly, that this album was going to be Sanders’ most sophisticated release so far. Tricky time signatures, multi-faceted composition, and hyper-dynamic vocal delivery are key elements to both tracks. And secondly, there would be a noticeable throughline exploring laughter from all sides, as the idea is mentioned in the lyrics on both tracks and three more on the rest of the LP.

“End Times” laments, “I acted like a king, stood atop a mountain, convinced I had a kingdom that had somehow reached the thousands. Now I’m laughing… I’m not laughing” while “Hauntology” declaims, “Every particle’s a ghost of my life in slow motion. Some are every potential that I wouldn’t allow. Some I hurt for glory, and they’re laughing now.” Whether it’s laughter from power or via shame, Sanders thoughtfully journeys the concept from every possible entryway all throughout the album. I love how unrelentingly brash “Hauntology” is displayed, and it pairs well with the prettier presentation of “End Times.”

After the teaser introduction of “We’ll Never Laugh That Way Again,” the record properly kicks off with “We Don’t Want The Same Thing,” a post-genre tour de force with a Liturgy-inspired burst-beat drum performance that leads into a spoken word rock opera. Its challenging presentation could fall anywhere between the Coheed and Cambria to mewithoutYou spectrum of progressive-leaning emo music. There’s a delivery at about two and a half minutes in that is borderline rap metal and yet doesn’t feel forcefully experimental. The complexities of all the songs on Laughing are pure proof of intensive, methodical practice.

If you’re looking for more knockout rockers, Empty Heaven thankfully don’t stop with “Hauntology” or “We Don’t Want The Same Thing,” the album’s second half opens with “The Pattern Is The Pattern,” an anthemic, energy-building, arena-pop-punk showstopper. Sanders’ execution of the chorus could have been taken right out of a Dashboard Confessional track, and even the added guitar solo by guest vocalist Mark Jaeschke (Kittyhawk, Party’z) that finishes it all off reminds me of Matchbook Romance. This song could have easily been a third single, but it having it appear as a killer B-side moment was particularly exciting.

The next outside contribution on Laughing appears as “The Zero With 1000 Faces,” where Sanders’ wife, Nicolette Van Dielen, sings the chorus with him: “Hey, you feel a world away, but there's no world today; I woke up, and the sun was gone. I lost you to space and time, but I think you were a friend of mine, maybe my favorite one! But now, you're gone.” Other than this touching moment, Jaeschke’s solo on “The Pattern is the Pattern” and a flute guest spot from his sister Audrey Belliveau on “Pure This Time,” the album was otherwise performed exclusively by Sanders. Considering the intricacies that lie within every song here, as a fellow creative, his frustratingly high level of talent continues to sideline me with every listen.

“Someone Else’s Song,” begins like a shoegaze track on shuffle before moving into a tender folk verse, not far off from some of the latest Mountain Goats material. It lies in a time signature I can’t quite place, but it’s a wonderfully dizzying ride. Once the drums kick in, it becomes a bit more of a straightforward math rock rager, with Sanders pleading out: “I wanna feel like somebody else / I’m in the tall grass, in the tall grass; squint your eyes and see. / I’ll feel like anything, anything, just not like me.” His balance of aggression and melody on every piece of the album feels so perfectly assembled, like a Voltron of song-structure dynamics.

In 2022, I became fascinated with the idea of the “indie rock musical.” Two of my favorite albums of that year were Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road and angel in realtime by Gang Of Youths — artful, sprawling records with plenty of non-corny, musical theatre-adjacent moments. Laughing fits right into this distinction, and “Laughing Again” is exactly the finale that you’d expect to wrap the experience up. Sanders mentions “laughing” in all of its derivatives a total of 36 times across its seven-and-a-half-minute runtime, most of them anchored by the somewhat sinister refrain: “When I first died, I was laughing, then not laughing. Now I’m laughing again.” Despite it being the album’s longest track, musically, it doesn’t take quite as many turns as tracks like “We Don't Want the Same Thing” or “Hauntology.” The closer remains at a steady pace while leaning into some meta lyrics: “I’ve been altered by results of aborted cuts. I was born in Empty Heaven five years back. I’m what the demiurge could sculpt.” Mentions of “Heaven” run just behind “laughing” as the album’s core subject, but I believe this lyric is a direct reference to Sanders stating via his YouTube series that he plans to fully retire the project upon the album’s release. At least it will have to be after Empty Heaven’s only two slated live performances for the end of March 2024 in Sanders’ second home state of Texas.

Laughing is the culmination of five years of work for a band that had its ending written even long before I wrote this review. It seems borderline impossible that fans of any subgenre couldn’t find something to enjoy about it. I dream of the day more bands can be as unabashedly outgoing on an album as Empty Heaven is on this one. And if this truly is the ending of the project, I’m not laughing.

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.

Josaleigh Pollett – YKWIM (Pacing Remix) | Song Premiere

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Self-Released

Josaleigh Pollett’s In The Garden, By The Weeds was one of my favorite singer-songwriter albums of last year, excitably detailed in my glowing review on this very blog. One of the project’s standout elements is its embrace of quirky, semi-electronic production by Pollett and bandmate Jordan Watko, aka Crowd Shy. It’s the type of record that perfectly lends itself to being re-imagined, and today, Pollett reveals the debut track from an upcoming yet-to-be-titled remix album. We’re pleased to share a version of the original album opener, “YKWIM,” reinterpreted by Katie McTigue, aka Pacing.

“YKWIM (Pacing Remix)” showcases exactly what lengths can be reached with these already fantastic songs. McTigue preserves the lo-fi energy of the original while giving it a fresh indietronic spin that sounds like It’s Blitz!-era Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It keeps the integrity of Pollett’s original vision intact and is enhanced with McTigue’s personality, as she explains here:

“I basically just dug through the stems, picked out the sounds that I thought were interesting and had fun playing with them. There was this big, noisy, distorted "chop" happening on a loop that I thought was super cool, so I turned it way up and added a bunch more noise. And I used my mountain dulcimer to make a bunch of droney stuff. This song is conveniently in D, which is the only key I know how to play dulcimer in! For the vocals, I had fun trying to sing like Josaleigh to blend with them. I love singing with my friends so much. I wish we could sing together in person!”

Pacing is a largely acoustic project, but McTigue makes a seamless transition into digital producer with this remix. The track was mixed by Dylan Ganz and mastered by Andrew Goldring. There’s no release date for the entire remix project yet, so in the meantime, listeners have the opportunity to venture into Josaleigh Pollett’s brilliant In The Garden, By The Weeds in its original form while we eagerly await to hear more takes on these songs from other artists.

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.

Cut Apart, Pieced Together Again: The Handcrafted Music of Truman Finnell

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Ask anyone, and they’ll probably agree that being online constantly isn’t good for you: it’s all too easy to waste hours scrolling and switching from app to app. However, there are a few things that make the internet worth it, especially if you’re a music nerd like me. One of those things is exposure to artists and musicians so underground it’s by pure luck that you ever come across them. That’s how I discovered Truman Finnell, a creative based in Portland, Oregon. My bandmate sent me Truman’s profile on Instagram to show me his brilliant collage art. I was immediately drawn to his work, but as I scrolled his page, I noticed he also made music. ‘Cool,’ I thought and made a mental note to check him out later. Later came around, and I put on his most recent album, Fischer + Agnes, to discover that it was incredible. I was enchanted. Truman’s music is much like his artwork: a collage of magical riffs, toy-instrument synths, and fuzzed-out guitars that create a rich landscape full of depth and secrets.

And it begins to tear, by Truman Finnell

Prior to releasing his two albums, Truman started to compose his dream world with a series of delicately evocative singles. His earliest song, “Carpet Patterns,” was released in 2020, and this track proves from the very beginning that Truman’s art and music are inexorably linked. A variety of samples, instruments, and textures pull the listener in like Alice through Truman’s looking glass – we are in Wonderland, and every song is a delightfully eerie creation. Haunting imagery adorns the dioramas of his songs: in “The Black of the Geese,” Truman quavers through layers of his own voice, “Go out ye fisherman, I’ve strung five hearts to a fractured ring tied twice to trees appendages.” We, as the listener, are hesitant – scared, even – to step into the scene, but cannot stop ourselves from looking.

Finnell’s first full-length album from 2021, The Mountains and the Lake, is a haunting ode to sadness - wistful vocals reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens grace tracks with heartfelt acoustic guitar and warm layers of synth. Truman has created a melancholic yet cozy record that feels like staying home on a snow day with a mug of tea that somehow never gets cold. “Milktooth,” my favorite track on the album, is a bizarre experience that reminds me of how it feels to wake up at 2 am, half-dreaming and fully disoriented. The track begins with eerily distorted vocals, and as it progresses, things feel more and more like a dream as pitch-bending lends instability and a sense of dread: “Little train / slithering snake / shed your scales / in the union station / and I will try mine / in the hollering woods / of Abruzzi Italy” screams Truman, over rhythm so thunderous and eager that it trips over itself in a surge of emotion. Later in the album, he examines grief and remorse in “Bill.” On the song, Bill, Finnell’s uncle, asks him, “Nephew, don’t you think of me so often? Or / was my impression but as deep dug as my coffin? / Aren’t the roots below / just a reflection of the branches above? / Don’t the nightingale / sound a bit like the mourning dove?” 

Pressed Between Pages Unread, by Truman Finnell

Truman continues to tenderly construct a delicate collage on his next album, 2022’s Fischer + Agnes, soaking his soundscape with darker hues and gentle riffs that skip across the ear. If his first album felt like staying in, this one feels like having the courage to step out the front door and take a walk in the woods. “Shaved Head” is an aching and painful breath as Truman murmurs softly to himself, 

The mirror that held the self begins to melt
beneath the cleaners constellation
that I spread in hopes to disinfect
the oils from my fingers gathered
thick enough to linger through the
mornings measured nothing
once they’re preened
of all their smudges.

I’m reminded of the seminal scene from The Royal Tenenbaums where Luke Wilson faces himself in a mirror and, stricken with heartbreak, shaves his head while Elliott Smith plays in the background. While much of this album is calm and dark, the final track, “Pliers,” is reminiscent of the indie scene of the 2000s. The song is instrumentally exuberant like Regina Spektor and full of heavy pain like Bon Iver. “I know there’s a night like a key / on a ring you rely on to guide your thumb / to the right one to get you inside the house / And the pull that you felt for a life overrun by the songs that you hum never left / It sits chirping on your office desk.” We are left wondering, ‘Is this song about me? What night is my own key on a ring?’ while lush strings shimmer around us and fade into darkness.

To bring his discography current, Truman ushers in springtime with his latest song, “Palm of Thorns,” a gorgeous single in anticipation of an EP to be released later in 2024. Compared to his previous work, “Palm of Thorns” feels more experimental and avant-garde. Truman paints a picture of a lonely orchard, misty and damp, backed by the ambiance of crashing waves and murmuring frogs. “In the garden the apple is starting to move on its own / fallen, writhing with larvae / now clusters of mammals approach but don’t dare to push snout to the fruit, / bring a flame to its candle.” We are not alone here, for in the next breath, another joins us in the orchard: “But you / with drool on your face / and a bushel of apples pressed into your waist / just laughed […].” As I listen, it feels as though I’m watching cloudy memories through a View-Master, moving from snapshot to snapshot with erratic fingers. While the song begins with sparse instrumentation, it quickly builds through layers of synth and guitar, and Truman’s signature skramz vocals lend searing beauty to this melancholy landscape. I am loath to abandon the orchard, but dusk is upon us, and we must leave the figures here in silence. 

While I can’t always travel to the forest or the rocky coasts of the Pacific Northwest, Truman Finnell’s music is the next best escape. It will transport you to a quiet meadow, spotted with mossy groves of redwoods and deep, damp shadows. Wander through his elaborate collages of sound and part the branches to spot spirits of the forest, dancing in groves strung with bleeding hearts and haunted by the call of the mourning dove. Magic is real, and it lives forever here.

Britta Joseph is a musician and artist who, when she isn’t listening to records or deep-diving emo archives on the internet, enjoys writing poetry, reading existential literature, and a good iced matcha. You can find her on Instagram @brittajoes.

Sunday Cruise – The Art of Losing My Reflection | Album Review

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Lauren Records

The first time I got my heart broken, I was thirteen. I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, purple mascara flooding my cheeks, and cried to whatever sad breakup songs came up on YouTube. This would not be the last time that I felt agonizing pain after indulging in love, nor would it be the last time music became my only comfort. There is something empowering about having a soundtrack to your suffering, an energy that is difficult to pin down. Chicago indie-rock band Sunday Cruise confidently deliver that energy in their latest album, The Art of Losing My Reflection - a surf-inspired collection of pining love letters with dreamlike guitars and hooks that stick for days on end. Across twelve tracks, we are blessed with anthems of desperate adoration that convey one central message - there is an inevitability in longing, one that is ageless and incessant. At every turn of this album, I found myself faced with a million past selves, confronting the loneliness of heartache I felt from ages 13 to 25. If you’re looking for a generous rhythm section, dizzying guitars, and vocals as ethereal as the words themselves, Sunday Cruise packaged it up and tied it together with a silk bow for your consumption.

On the album’s first single, “Oh Lover, Why?” the quartet firmly established the dancy heartache that would act as the album's emotional throughline. Despite the heavily emotional topics the group explores throughout the record, the delivery is melodic and energetic enough to keep you grooving along. Everything about the music warrants jumping, dancing, and swaying. Lyrically, it begs, it pleads, it’s wrought with merciless abandonment. In spite of itself, by the end of the song, the affliction subsides into acceptance. It’s time to let the lover go and say goodbye.

Later on in the album, “Bitter” proves to be an instant classic. Lead singer Zoe Garcia dives in with deliberate exposition that seems to recall my own experience from high school - I dated a boy who lived thirty minutes away, and neither of us could drive. What the fuck do I do? “Maybe we’ll fall slowly. Maybe you’ll stay, and I won’t get so lonely.” The hopeful and dreamy lyrics are relatable beyond nostalgia - seventeen or twenty-seven, driver's license or not, sometimes you just crave ceaselessly for another person, the lingering cologne forcing you to the brink of insanity. “Bitter” delivers the waltz of wanting to run away with your lover both lyrically and musically.

The star of this album rollout is undoubtedly the music video for “Pretty Girl.” It begins with a viewer discretion warning that I thought was facetious - no, it was for sure required. It’s shot retro-style with focused lighting and floating florals that look like something Kate Bush would adore. The beginning oozes with femininity in its surface-level forms: white gloves, red roses, silk bows, you name it. The following shots delve deeper into where the video is headed with tape measures, pill bottles, and a friendship bracelet that affectionately reads “DIE.” A ballerina twirls mockingly next to a porcelain crucifix. It’s about to get real good.

I won’t spoil the ending for you because it’s something that must be experienced first-hand. Think worms, think the unattainable beauty standard, think the faceless monolith that threatens deviation from feminine expression. Heed the warning. Hold on to your teeth and fingernails.

As I kept The Art of Losing My Reflection on repeat, I couldn’t help but realize with every spin just how special this album is. It was subtle at first, something I couldn’t quite capture, but as I delved deeper into the album, lyrics, and videos, everything came together. By presenting heartbreak alongside such danceable music, Sunday Cruise perfectly encapsulated the enigma of love: the euphoric rush and the crash all at once. It came to me as I was reminded of my first girlfriend, who broke up with me on a suburban porch. I had purged from my mind the men I dated who, in retrospect, really didn’t like me that much, until the music dropped them at the forefront of my memory. The ongoing struggles of not being pretty enough or cool enough, of trying to prove that you’re even good enough- it’s all there, it’s all brutally honest, a comforting reminder that it’s all too common. The isolating feeling of unrequited love is something every single person on earth has felt. 100% of the human population have dreamt of having that one person, so close but so out of reach, finally in their arms. The extraordinary thing about this album is the way the band turns such longing into a comfortable hug. It’s okay, we’ve all been there. Here’s something to get you through it.

The Art of Losing My Reflection continues Sunday Cruise’s theme of infectious music and dire lyricism. It’s authentic, it’s beautiful, and it made me ache for the girl I once was. If my thirteen-year-old self could have heard it, she’d need a second pint of ice cream. If my fifteen-year-old self could have heard it, she would have probably made a few better friends. If my seventeen, eighteen, and twenty-two-year-old self could have heard it, she probably would have saved some wasted time from some less-than-fulfilling relationships. Until time travel exists, though, I’ll just be thankful I get to hear it now and consider it a gift - sorrow, silk bows, and all.

Sofie Green is an average music enjoyer from Milwaukee, WI. She is your biggest fan. Find her relentlessly hyping her favorite DIY bands from the Midwest and beyond at @smallsofie on Instagram and @s_ofs_ on Twitter.

Bedbug – pack your bags the sun is growing | Album Review

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Disposable America

When you’re on a long drive by yourself, it’s incredibly hard to fight boredom. In the Midwest, in particular, you can drive for hours only passing fields with no definitive qualities other than that some have cows and some don’t. After a while, this sameness can start to feel like an onslaught.

One way to combat this is to get romantic about your surroundings. You tell yourself that each field you pass, each rundown barn, each water tower, has a story. People’s dreams have, at some point, been connected to them. You’re not driving through a boring landscape; you’re traveling through a space where people live and have lived. When you bring humanity to what you're passing, you feel connected to it. It makes things more bearable. 

Bedbug’s new album, pack your bags the sun is growing, is a project that looks at the world through this lens. “I saw spirits on the highway driving home from your house,” Dylan Gamez Citron sings on the opening track “the city lights,” continuing, “built something crazy, could change it all for us, but what if there’s not much more than this.”

Throughout the rest of the album, Citron continues this kind of contemplation, connecting emotionally with abstract ideas and shapes like the sun's reflections, snowbanks, and the changing seasons. Driving, in particular, comes up a lot.

On “the great bonfire” they call dibs on shotgun before singing, “We were slow dancing cross interstate lines, we’ve done it for miles and hours pass and heaven abandons us.” In both this line and the one quoted earlier, driving is treated as meditative. It’s an act through which you can see spirits or feel a shift in the way the cosmos relate to you. 

Leaning so heavily into driving as the mode for this type of reflection is an interesting choice. We more often see feelings like this inspired by looking up at the stars or taking in the vast ocean. These more traditional catalysts for introspection can also be found in places throughout the album, but they’re never elevated as more powerful than the reflections that come from something as seemingly mundane as a drive home.

This is made even more explicit on the album’s lead single, “halo on the interstate,” where we hear the line “light refracts on the dashboard of my car, gives me halos on the interstate, the turnpike looks like heaven.” To be able to view reflections on your dashboard with the reverence one views the stars in the sky is something special. It takes an uncommon type of emotional literacy, and it’s this quality that is one of Bedbug’s biggest strengths on the record. 

Because the album is so lyrically rich, it is tempting to continue with just this type of analysis. There are so many themes that repeat throughout this record, exploring the emotional impact of living in a city and the use of sleep as a way to pass time more than to rest. To focus solely on the lyrics, though, would do pack your bags the sun is growing a disservice, as there’s so much beyond them deserving consideration. 

“the city lights” is a great opener for this record because it introduces us to Bedbug’s new sound. The track opens with Citron’s vocals over clean guitar arpeggios and pronounced bass, and while we’ve certainly heard all these things together on past Bedbug records, we’ve never heard them come through with such width and clarity. At around thirty seconds, there’s a cymbal swell, and then at around a minute, we’re hit with a prominent, real, full drum kit. 

This is the first record that Bedbug has recorded in-studio with a full band; as a whole, it feels like a step towards indie rock and away from bedroom pop (a genre Citron recently wrote a eulogy for) and a big part of this is the drums. In past Bedbug releases, the rhythm section has largely been filtered drum machines that ride along with softer vocals and guitar. That’s not the case here, with many of the songs featuring an unfiltered full kit sound from drummer Minerva Rodriguez that drives tracks forward, becoming an essential part of the mix. In particular, “The Great Bonfire!” features some great fills, and on “postcard,” it feels like a fuse has gone off when the drums kick in. This is still Bedbug; there are still the lo-fi bedroom pop qualities and great songwriting you’ve come to expect, it’s just bigger and clearer like you’re looking at Bedbug for the first time after cleaning off your glasses. 

The change in sound feels like a natural progression for Citron, who, in interviews, has made clear their love and admiration for Modest Mouse. This influence has been more lyrical than sonic on past Bedbug projects, but here, it shines through in the production, particularly of the vocals. There’s definitely some Isaac Brock, especially in spots like “Postcard,” where the full band is propelling the songs to a place where Citron can let loose and sing with an intensity we didn’t see when they were working with just fuzzy acoustic guitar over lo-fi drum machines. 

There’s a section in Citron’s genre eulogy where they talk about the newer music that apps like Spotify serve up to those searching for “bedroom pop.” This music often has the aesthetic of the genre without the ethic, sounding like, as Citron describes “studio-produced, groovy alt-pop, curated for Instagram stories and vibes TikToks.” This is a summation I don’t disagree with. There’s something uncanny valley-like about how the genre’s lo-fi qualities, largely born out of necessity, are now being mimicked by people purely trying to match a certain vibe. 

Ultimately, this sort of thing is almost inevitable as any genre evolves. From an optimistic standpoint, these developments speak to the impact that earlier bedroom pop has had on new artists who feel inspired to take parts of the genre and move in a new direction. One thing that I like about pack your bags the sun is growing is that it represents a different way that one can take these influences and evolve. It’s a record where the intimate feel and introspective lyrics of bedroom pop are expanded with grander instrumentation and higher-res production. There are certainly some fuzzy/lo-fi elements throughout the record, but the pursuit of these qualities is not what’s driving things. It’s this purity of approach that sets this album apart from a lot of the other music in this space, making pack your bags the sun is growing an impactful work worth listening to.  

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. You can keep up with his writing on music and sports on Twitter and listen to his band Cutaway Car here.