Camping in Alaska - Turncoat

I first came across the Midwest Emo group Camping in Alaska via a YouTube recommendation. Their mixture of melodic guitar lines and whiny vocals, occasionally punctuated by impassioned shouting, really struck a chord with me. Despite having Alaska in their name, the band is from Huntsville, Alabama, having formed when Austin Davis (lead vocals, rhythm guitar) and Jacob Stewart (drums) were only 15 years old. They released their first album, please be nice, in 2013 when they were still teenagers. In the next three years they released two other albums, BATHE (2014) and WELCOME HOME SON (2016), before dissolving due to the band struggling with drug addiction. Fortunately, the band reformed in 2023 to release a 3 song EP called Hollow Eyes. And now, in the final days of 2024, they have released their latest full length record, Eggbeater Jesus! The name and album art is derived from a mural of Jesus on the First Baptist Church Huntsville, where Jesus’ robes look suspiciously like a whirling eggbeater.

Witch Bolt - The Peace of Wild Things

Dungeon Synth is getting harder and harder to keep up with, as there seems to be a flood of new projects every week. Case in point, the Kentucky-based Dungeon Synth artist Witch Bolt first started putting music into the world in July of 2024, and in that time has released more than 10 albums/EPs (though, this may have been music they had recorded over a few years and just now decided to release). I barely had the time to take in the release of Witch Bolt’s autumnal album Howl in September, before being confronted with a new EP in November, The Peace of Wild Things. Despite just entering the Dungeon Synth scene this year, Witch Bolt seems to have arrived fully formed: not only is the music nuanced and expansive, the accompanying artwork is wonderful, complementing the work and helping to set the listener’s mind to wander. The color choice on each of the album covers is excellent, as is all of the artwork. Witch Bolt is fairly active on the r/DungeonSynth message board on Reddit, and it is from there that I learned that they do all of the artwork themselves. They clearly have a talent for graphical design!

Chat Pile - No Way Out

2024 has been filled with great albums by amazing artists (Micah Schnabel, Man’s Gin, The Jesus Lizard, Lonesome Shack, to name just a few), though the album I was most anticipating was the sophomore release from the Oklahoma noise rock band Chat Pile. I have written about them numerous times before on this blog, including just last month, clearly illustrating my excitement about the band’s work. They have a knack for portraying the horrors of the modern world in a way that does not feel exploitative, but in a way that actually feels unsettling. Much of their work has focused on the suffering of small town America, though their new record, Cool World, has turned their lens outward towards the suffering of the world. In the words of Chat Pile’s vocalist Raygun Busch, “it’s just a big anti-war statement, the whole album – every song is about how much I hate war. Man’s greatest shame.”  

Chat Pile - King

I have now written about Chat Pile, Oklahoma City’s noise rock upstarts, a few times. Their brand of extreme music borrows more from the noisy punk rock of Big Black than it does heavy metal. And much like Big Black, Chat Pile uses their music to examine the decrepitude of smalltown America, highlighting the suffering and the vulgarity that can often accompany life there. Shortly after the success of their first full length album, God’s Country, in 2022, Chat Pile released a split record with Kansas City’s Nerver, called Brothers in Christ. On the split, Chat Pile experimented with sounds indebted to alternative rock bands like Slint and Guide by Voices, while not losing their trademark gloom.

Song Highlight: Timeshares - Bad Hand

Earlier in the week, my brother Eric suggested that I revisit the music of Timeshares, a country-tinged punk rock band from downstate New York. I wrote about them a few years ago after seeing them open for the Menzingers, where I was thoroughly impressed to the point of thinking they outshone the headliners. After Eric's suggestion, I proceeded to listen to their 2018 EP Out There and have had it on repeat for the past several days.

Locrian at The Metro Gallery (19-Jul-2024)

See the black sun rise in the solar lodge. (FUJIFILM X-T4 ƒ/2.8 1/125 55mm ISO6400)

Since becoming interested in heavier and harsher music about 15 years ago, I have slowly gravitated towards its weirder and more unorthodox fringes. I credit the drone metal band Locrian as one of the bands that introduced me to the more experimental side of the metal landscape with their unique combination of brooding drones, beautiful post-rock guitar passages, electronics, and harsh noise. I came upon the band with their 2010 album The Crystal World, named after the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name in which a physician travels to Central Africa to treat leprosy, only to find the jungle there slowly turning to crystal, enveloping everything in its path. The album convinced me to read the novel, and I was amazed how well the album fit the tone of the novel, one of bleak desolation, but a strangely beautiful and hopeful desolation. I have been enthusiastically following the band since, watching them continue to explore the themes of urban decay and humanity’s slow march towards extinction. The band released a new album in April of 2024, End Terrain, and I was very excited to see they had a string of tour dates to accompany the release. I was fortunate to see them play at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore on July 19, 2024. My brother Eric and I were able to take a bunch of pictures of the event, and want to share some of them.

Mono - Holy Winter

Just a few days after writing about Steve Albini and his seminal punk band Big Black in April, he unexpectedly passed away from a heart attack. His music had a huge impact on me and my evolving musical tastes, showing me what sort of terrifying and aggressive sounds could be wrenched from the customary instrumentation of rock and roll. Beyond Albini’s influence on me personally, he had an immeasurable impact on independent music with his career as a recording engineer, recording the work of hundreds of notable musicians, including the Pixies, Nirvana, and PJ Harvey. He specialized in capturing the live sound of the band, with the recordings capturing the harmonics of the room they were recorded in, making it sound as if you were present with the band while listening to the recordings. And while Albini himself played loud and unpleasant music, he recorded music of all styles and sound, striving to make raw and genuine sounding recordings of whomever he worked with. And that brings me to the topic of today’s post, the song “Holy Winter” by the longstanding Japanese instrumental post-rock band, Mono.