Star 99 – Gaman | Album Review

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Lauren Records

I have pretty lofty ambitions for my life, but if you asked how I plan to accomplish them, I wouldn’t have a clue what to tell you. I actually don’t know how to make a plan, to tell the truth. If I don’t have an external stimulus pushing me toward a goal, I’ll stay motionless and stagnant. I’ve sat on a health scare for two years because I think I can make my appointment tomorrow. The fact that I moved across the country has nothing to do with my long-standing desire to live in New York; instead, my life here is owed to my driven girlfriend. The first time I read Conversations With Friends, I put in my Goodreads review how much I identified with the apathetic Francis. When I started rereading it, I hoped I’d prove that read to be foolish, but when I got to the end, I just felt ashamed of how much more like her I was after four years. No, I don’t like that about myself either. 

The lyrics on Gaman, Star 99’s sophomore album, aren’t that self-disparaging, but the sense of longing for love and hope for a better future they evoke is apt for someone in their mid-20s to belt along to while driving through a suburban town they dare to dream of escaping. That’s how I felt driving through my Kansas suburb, screaming along to Sunchokes, a clear Gaman antecedent that I had on repeat after I moved home in the wake of COVID. Lest you think I’m being dramatic, it’s all in the title. Gaman, the term, comes from Zen Buddhism and refers to enduring the worst with dignity. Gaman, the album, encapsulates the feeling of discontent I get from The Worst Person in the World; unbearable dissonance between external expectations and your internal world. This isn’t new ground for the band; after all, their debut, Bitch Unlimited, did have the lyric “but I don’t know how to talk to / people that buy houses.”

The first time I heard the lead single “Kill,” my brain instantly connected the track with the opening sequence of Legally Blonde. Something about the melody or that opening line sparked a connection with the brilliant decision to pair a montage of Elle Woods with Hoku’s perfectly ironic “Perfect Day.” The character of Elle Woods is even fit for a Star 99 song, as she is determined to make her own place within a structure that doesn’t want her. 

The most I ever felt disconnected was during my freshman year of college. I’d decided to go to the community college, a 20-minute suburban drive from my parents’ house, in the midst of struggling with my assigned gender, while all my closest friends went to state schools together and made fun of my fake college experience. The only one who I felt like loved me unconditionally during that time was my dog, Stevie. When I hear “Brother,” I’m filled with that desperation again in the chorus recounting commonly aired ads “for work injury lawsuits / turn cash into gold.” At the time, I was terrified of turning into the “hometown beauty now that everyone’s gone,” as described in “Emails.”

A lot of those friends are back home now with mortgages and spouses. I know that lifestyle would never work for me, but I still feel uncertain when I consider the fact that they spend less a month to own their home than I do renting my closet of an apartment. That’s why my favorite lyric from the album is on the song “Pacemakers,” the simple and efficient cry, “I don’t know how to be happy, I just / know how to make it work.” 

I’ve thought all my life that escaping home would be enough, but making peace with yourself is an everyday struggle that requires hope you’ll do it right and grace to accept you’ll fuck it up sometimes. That acceptance is all over Gaman, most notably in the beautiful chorus on track two: “Every time we go to bat / we perpetuate ourselves / again and again.” It’s a beautiful reminder that we’re all just like “trees trying to be a forest because / that’s all they know,” it’s only natural to feel discontent when we fail to make our forest. 

Gaman isn’t just wallowing though, these songs are fucking fun. “Pushing Daisies” charges forward like the best pushpit starter and then dips into a tension-building bridge as Thomas Calvo repeats “If calling back is too hard,” before launching back into the roiling verse. “Gray Wall” may have some of the most nostalgic lyrics, but the trip-hop drums, harmonica, and acoustic guitar refuse to be mournful of what’s past. 

What makes all the unbearable mental turmoil worth it, when “they won’t build statues of me” and when “my life won’t be biographied,” is those small moments. That love between a girl and her dog. Seeing a pack of cigarettes that makes you remember those quiet moments smoking with someone who’s not around anymore. Biking to a friend’s house without telling anyone where you’re going. Put more simply, “But I love you so much, and I am so lucky.”

Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on Instagram and Bluesky @lillianmweber

The Casper Fight Scene – S/T | Album Review

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PNWK Records

One of the hardest parts of being alive is that one day, you sit down, and everything you have ever lived through punches you in the face. Suddenly, you’re forced to reckon with every sin you’ve indulged in, every person that has hurt you, and every mistake that you’ve ever made. In their self-titled debut, Marquette-based emo punks, The Casper Fight Scene face these missteps, losses, and spoiled relationships with a loud, guitar-laden sound across ten tracks. 

The album consistently delivers engaging and intricate guitarwork from Kenny Quick, who utilizes a tone that sounds as though it is spinning in a circle around your head. The band uses this guitar-forward approach to wade listeners into the depths of this release, starting with the one-two punch of “Summer’s End Smoke Out” and “Young Neil, He Lives Here.” This prickly guitar tapping blends well with the rhythm work from bassist Peter Hart and drummer Michael McGaffigan. Over each song, vocalist Jason Swallow switches things up, at times deploying a loud, emotional wail where you almost hear his vocal cords vibrating. Other times, he uses a more toned-down mumble that allows him to do some good old-fashioned singing.

While this album may be a bit of an instrumental showcase, the place it shines the brightest is in Swallow’s lyrics. In songs like “Young Neil, He Lives Here,” he presents the concept of a bad day becoming a bad week and does so through the presentation of his room falling further and further into disrepair. It creates a space that anybody who has struggled with mental health can understand, as hygiene and room care are the first things to go when mental illness rears its head. A similar theme appears in the penultimate track, “Rookie Card,” in which lyrics about doing laundry and then never folding it hit far too close to home for me as someone who has a pile of clothes sitting on my bed right now. We all have the tendency to say that we are okay while ignoring the obvious issues in our lives, such as not eating or never following up on our promises.

There is also a common refrain that appears in the album as both “Interlude” and “Motorcycle” feature the repetition of “What a shame, what a shame, what a goddamn shame” in their closing moments. “Motorcycle” is a powerful track about facing your own self-hatred and realizing that we all fall victim to our own self-destructive behavior if we’re not careful. 

One of the songs that hit me the hardest when listening through was “Callous.” I am someone who has struggled a lot with addiction and self-loathing, and hearing this track brings me to tears every single time I listen to it. I remember sitting on the floor in my parent’s kitchen saying things much like the lyrics, “I wanna be a little cleaner this time next year / I wanna be proud of myself / I don’t wanna be the sum of all my flaws / I wanna be the picture of health” and then putting that off until I no longer could anymore.

Two of the strongest recurring topics throughout the album are making mistakes and self-loathing. The song “Cadillac Death Trap” features imagery of drunk driving and repeated requests from Swallow to “just stay until you’re sober.” The track begins with the lyrics “I don’t want to be an asshole anymore,” which is the perfect start for a song that sounds like a note to yourself to keep moving forward despite what is happening in your life. It also might be a Menzingers reference, but who’s to say? Occasionally you will find yourself in a dark place, and even though you could run now and potentially put yourself or someone else in danger, it is better to stand tall and let yourself sober so the feelings process and pass in a good way.

The song has an immediate transition into “Geezer,” which begins with imagery of crashing a car that lines up well with the drunk driving references in “Cadillac Death Trap,” however, the song brings out another important theme on the album, which is relationships ending. Lyrics such as “Even if things changed, there would be no point anyway,” leading directly into “We’d get fucked up on Fleischmann’s / and you’d dance with the cat,” paint a portrait of being stuck in a cyclical relationship. There is a lot of pain in recognizing that hope is fizzling out, and we’ve all made the mistake of holding on when it is, in fact, better for everyone involved to just let go. 

Two of the most powerful songs featured on this album are “Flesh Wound” and the closer “Digital Spliff,” which both hit on a theme of trying to find love and attention in a way that you just aren’t getting. “Flesh Wound” takes a more direct route to this as it muses on the concept of falling out of love and letting go of a strong relationship that’s begun to die. We always look at how hard it is to maintain a loving relationship, but we don’t talk about the process of walking away when that love fades.

“Digital Spliff” approaches this concept in a much different way as a tear-jerking song about the nature of being alone. The slow build at the start of the song has a lone riff accompanied by a buzzing as Swallow comes in with the lines “I started hating myself, just as much as you” and paints an image of being alone in the aftermath of an ending. He sings about seeing the house he used to call home and how it all changed: the garden out front has died, and there are cracks all over the sidewalk. The song builds as Swallow is singing about a very specific memory that locks into place with the lines “I have broken every window / in this whole goddamn place / just to see if you would hear me.” From there, a cacophony of sound erupts and carries the album to a close. In this moment of closure, as the sound surrounds you one last time, a warmth leads to the thought, “I am not alone,” as the music dies and you are left with your thoughts again. 

The Casper Fight Scene have created a diverse emo rock sound that is highly danceable with soaring hooks and incredible guitarwork that features some of the most emotionally crushing lyrics you are likely to ever hear a crowd scream back. This album is highly relatable and deeply vulnerable, as Swallow’s songwriting puts many of his past relationships and mistakes into the light. It is in this light, however, that each person who listens to this album will be able to find the face of someone to remind them that they aren’t the only one out there struggling and that there is so much life to be had after your worst mistakes. 

Ben Parker is an emo kid from a small town in Indiana who has spent a little too much time reflecting on life. Ben is a poet and has written about topics ranging from death to addiction to that feeling when you meet someone, and once you part, you realize you’ll never speak again. Ben can be found at @Benyamin_Parker on all social media.

A. Lee Edwards – Interpreting Heart Sounds, Vol. 1 | Album Review

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Self-Released

The first 30 years of A. Lee Edwards’s career took place partially behind a sheer curtain of enigma. His first project, Lou Ford, was named after a fictional character in a book but served as a makeshift persona for Edwards himself. His next project, The Loudermilks, was named after two gospel singers from the 50s (who themselves were using a stage name). Both Lou Ford and The Loudermilks were sonic brethren with The Jayhawks, The Old 97’s, and Uncle Tupelo—twangy indie rock with pedal steel guitar.

On Interpreting Heart Sounds, Vol. 1, Edwards finally pulls back the curtain.

It’s stripped back and mostly simple. The instruments lean more analog (acoustic guitars, banjo, fiddle) with some virtuosic pedal steel guitar and brushed shuffle drums for good measure. Where Lou Ford was a beer-soaked wood floor and a neon Rolling Rock Sign, Interpreting Heart Sounds is a screened-in front porch, a mug of Darjeeling, and the newspaper. The music is slower but more deliberate. It’s gentler but more tender. It’s not quite as urgent as the gritty alt-country tracks of yore, but there are times Edwards shows he can still swing. This is music to dance with your honey to, sometimes cheek-to-cheek slow dancing and sometimes twirling and toe-tapping.

Changes which some may attribute to age, Edwards attributes to wisdom. He’s sober now, and he lives in the mountains. Where he used to write about the great unknown chasm of life, Edwards now stands on the other side, clear-headed and with the experience of a road-tested traveler. Edwards’s career is so full-circle, in fact, that Interpreting Heart Sounds includes a re-record of a song from Lou Ford’s second album, Alan Freed’s Radio. While the first version of “Move Up to the Mountains” (recorded in 2000) is an upbeat board-stomper of a saloon tune, this new version is sweeter and more reflective. On the former, one hears in Edwards’ voice a longing to leave the chaos of life behind. On the latter, he left long ago. He shakes his head and chuckles at his younger self.

There is a real warmth to these recordings. On tracks like the opener, “Ride On,” and mid-album cut “Get Out, Get In,” one can sense the players making music live in the room together, perhaps all gathered around the same cluster of microphones. The collected decades of experience of the musicians on this record are on full display. The musicianship is tight, but the arrangements are playful. This speaks to an artist who has no interest in proving himself to anyone anymore but rather wants to tell stories and make a statement about his career—take it or leave it.

As if Edwards’s songwriting and the band’s musicianship weren’t enough, the album was mixed in Aberdeen, Scotland, by the legendary John Wood, who produced albums by Nick Drake, John Cale, Fairport Convention, and Richard and Linda Thompson. Whatever special sauce Wood used on those records can be heard here.

Interpreting Heart Sounds, Vol 1. is a product of what came before. We don’t get the measured tenderness of A. Lee Edwards without the raucous youthfulness of Lou Ford. We miss out on the breezy harmonies of Heart Sounds if we don’t first have the dual-lead vocals of The Loudermilks. The record is an ode to reflection, paying homage to past lives by giving the listener both space and grace to contemplate. It’s a fun listen that soothes. It’s a perfect companion to a summer drive, whether you’re coming or going.

Caleb Doyle (St. Louis, MO) is a music writer and dive bar enthusiast. He would love to talk to you about pro wrestling, your favorite cheeseburger, and your top 10 American rock bands. You can find Caleb on most social media @ ClassicDoyle, or subscribe to his music Substack, Nightswimming, HERE. (nightswimmingblog.substack.com)

Art d’Ecco – Serene Demon | Album Review

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Paper Bag Records

2025 marks a handful of anniversaries for iconic British albums, including 1975’s Young Americans by David Bowie, 1985’s Meat Is Murder by The Smiths, 1995’s Different Class by Pulp, and 2005’s Silent Alarm by Bloc Party. Canadian artist Art d’Ecco seems to pull influence from all of them, in addition to the great British-influenced New York albums like 1970’s Vintage Violence by John Cale, 1980’s Remain In Light by Talking Heads, and 2005’s self-titled debut by LCD Soundsystem. The cross-sections of art rock, new wave, and post-punk that make all of those albums memorable are Art d’Ecco’s genres de jour on his fourth album, Serene Demon, playfully finding the balance between vintage alternative and modern indie dance.

I first caught wind of Art d’Ecco via an Anthony Fantano co-sign on his last album, 2022’s brilliantly titled After The Head Rush. I remember enjoying its sonic throwbacks to the dancier side of post-punk, channeling pioneers like Gang Of Four and The Teardrop Explodes. For one reason or another, the album didn’t stick with me for very long, which is an unfortunate side effect of the modern music era–pummeling consumers with albums week after week all year long. When I first heard that Serene Demon was on the horizon for 2025, I hadn’t even realized it would have been three years since his last record, but in that time, the group has grown its sound even further. The post-punk lean is still there on tracks like “The Traveller,” but the bulk of it goes much more alternative disco and glam, similar to Roxy Music and Sparks, signified immediately by the opener “True Believer.” It almost sounds like a gussied-up version of “Moving In Stereo” by The Cars, trading in the plodding synth tones for a tasteful brass section.

“Cooler Than This” has an orchestral synth lead that feels plucked right out of “Lullaby” by The Cure, but its quirky horns and dance groove make it more reminiscent of “The Lovecats” or that weird “Close To Me” remix. d’Ecco delivers a smoky, New Romantic falsetto that really ties the track together in a unique way, capped with funky callback chorus vocals over the outro. This back-to-back with “Survival Of The Fittest” makes up the album’s tightest eight minutes; a driving bassline and drumbeat anchor the track, with d’Ecco absolutely nailing the phrasing on the chorus: “The faster life comes, the shorter it stays / The longer it bends, the harder it’ll break / So c’mon get ready, hold your feet and hold steady / Or you’re gonna get a beatdown.” It’s a rhythmic masterclass from top to bottom, something that he is an expert craftsman at throughout the entire record. “Tree Of Life” doesn’t slow things down at all, going full frenetic indie disco that fans of Scissor Sisters could absolutely get behind.

Side 2 of Serene Demon is just as creative but in a much different way. The dark and jazzy instrumental “Meursault’s Walk” gets into an almost prog-rock zone, with swirling synths over the horns and bass leading into the album’s epic seven-minute title track. Like a classic art rock centerpiece, it goes through different movements and phases, from the tender introduction into a balls-out ensemble bridge, culminating in a disco-fueled coda echoing David Bowie’s “Station To Station” or Donna Summer’s version of “MacArthur Park.” Lyrically, d’Ecco reflects again on the passage of life: “Unruly despair, when life’s precious moments disappear out of view / You say it ain’t fair, I hardly noticed when it hung around.” Contrastingly, the pop-centric “Honeycomb” follows and goes full T. Rex, at first standing out from the rest of the album, but given the context of the ‘70s glam music that he’s pulling from, it isn’t a far cry from the harder-edged dance tracks.

While I do enjoy every song on this thing, the bombastic first three songs in its second half feel a bit disparate from the standout tracks in the beginning, which have much more in common with the album’s final moments of “Shell Shock” and “A Change Of Scenery.” The bass-led closing tracks, if pushed up closer to the album’s first half, maybe would have made the album flow a bit better, with the suite of “Meursault’s Walk” and “Serene Demon” giving the album an unforgettable closing chapter instead of them hanging in the middle. But bold choices are what make Art d’Ecco’s music stand out from his contemporaries, so I might have to put my personal sequencing preferences to the side.

Serene Demon is exactly my kind of album: while its influences are clear, it finds new avenues to take them down, and it’s not just another '80s-flavored indie synthpop album either. Speaking further on those influences, Art d’Ecco channels artists and styles that I’ve loved for years and don’t always hear checked in modern music, especially from younger artists. He’s is the perfect example of what makes new music exciting, by taking what’s preceded him and giving it a new life all its own, a life that may pass quickly but is worth stopping to enjoy.

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.

Rapt  – Until the Light Takes Us | Album Review

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Start-Track

There’s plenty of music that’s designed to pull you into the past, but it’s rare that I find myself truly transported. I don’t mean this as a dig; I’m just saying that pastiche—even when well done by an act like The Lemon Twigs—is identifiable as pastiche. Listening to these kinds of referential artists is a bit like being on an amusement park dark ride; it’s fun to suspend disbelief and let a certain guitar tone conjure up images of the 90s in your mind, but finding out what you’re listening to was actually made in 2023 by some kids in Ohio is usually no more surprising than the lights coming on to reveal that you’re not actually in The Hundred Acre Woods. 

In Rapt’s Until the Light Takes Us, I found something different. Here we have a record that actually does transport me to the past, not because of any sonic hallmarks or tips of the hat, but because it legitimately feels haunted. This feeling grabbed me early on in track two, “Attar Of Roses,” where Ware sings, “The angels wept for a thousand days / For cities of blood had passed by their wings / Attar of roses paved the waving fields / A city was formed when they fell from the hills.” It sounds like the recounting of an old legend by someone who was there for its inception, the kind of tale you’d hear sung by a medieval bard. Even when the stories take a more personal bent, they sound like they’re coming from a village of old, like on “Fields of Juniper,” where we hear, “And there stood a cross in the center of town / It’s shadow lay heavy across the stone walls / You took my hand and said you’d climb / So I’d see you as a martyr that lived in our time.” The conviction with which Ware spins these tales is both eerie and appealing; it had me hanging on his every word. 

As far as instrumentation goes, the nylon string guitar is Ware’s weapon of choice throughout the record, its soft arpeggios the perfect timbre to wrap itself around his yarns. Though the guitar plays well with others, like when the piano joins in on “A Theory Of Resistance,” it really shines when it’s left to stand on its own next to Ware’s voice. In these moments, when the record is at its most barebones, its intimacy reminds me a bit of 70s singer-songwriters like Labi Siffre, a quality that always makes my ears perk up. 

That said, I really enjoy the track “Making Maps,” where we get to see a full-band version of Rapt that is a bit more contemporary in its sound. Its contrast in style from the rest of Until the Light Takes Us makes for a great palette cleanser, and it features what is probably my favorite lyric on the whole record: the devastating line “My cousin died in the morning / He didn’t even feel the sun.” It’s so simple but so affecting, bringing forward thoughts of the coldness of death and early mornings in a way that made me shiver when I first heard it.

The way that everything comes together on Until the Light Takes Us is beautiful. When I say it’s haunted, I want to be clear that I don’t mean it’s the sort of thing that might give you a fright in the night; what I’m getting at instead is that the work feels so timeless and discusses death so intimately that it’s impossible for me to look at it and not see an otherworldly gleam emanating off of the whole thing. It feels like a record made by someone with an actual connection to the metaphysical world, not just someone who philosophizes about it. To have the gift of that connection—be it real or perceived—shared with you through the music is a very special feeling, and it’s one that sat with me long after the last song had stopped playing. 

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. He has a blog about cassette tapes that you can find here. He also makes music under the name Cutaway Car.