Local artists are staying busy during the shutdown, which means I am, too. I’ve got three days’ worth of exciting song premieres coming your way starting tomorrow in Triangle First. So today, let’s catch up on some worthy recent releases before they irretrievably slip away.
This one’s a month old, but what is time: SIDEWALK FURNITURE, a self-described “angry-nerd rock band” from Durham, dropped a scorcher of a debut album into the midst of the coronavirus chaos on April 15. Reimagined Thrill is a queer feminist punk record with sci-fi concepts that it wears lightly and originally, staying simple, ferocious, and fun.
Opener “Jadzia” sharks in on a Breeders bass line and chugs around in menacing circles while singer Riley slowly turns up the vocal wattage. You could do a whole album of this, but the group keeps shifting styles, from the tangled, chanting “Tits Out!” to the ESG-style dance-punk of “Anarchist EMT.”
Apparently Riley, bassist Shelby, and guitarist Shante were a folk trio (!) in college before forming Sidewalk Furniture with drummer Lily Fey last year. Sci-fi in music usually isn’t my thing, but these are just good tunes, clad in catchy, volatile riffs. It’s probably the only album with a song called “Stormtroopers” on it that I need in my life:
I guess I should say that sci-fi in rock music’s usually not my thing. Electronic music is a better mold for the future, and TESCON POL is just a few million dollars’ worth of CGI short of being an existential big-screen space opera.
Surely you’ve encountered the duo if you haunt places like Nightlight and The Wicked Witch and Ruby Deluxe. Live, they assemble an armada of synths and rhythm machines to piece together their Teutonic electronic-pop patterns, with vocalist Mic Finger wearing giant wraparound shades against stage-bathing abstract projections.
During the shutdown, he and Ariel Johannessen have been collaborating remotely, and the first result is the 4nineteen EP. In “Vectorcloud,” claps and filter snaps stir up the kind of electronic chords that make you feel like you’re walking over green continents in a Japanese video game, while house music breaks down and winds backward in the dark-hued “Kronos.” Is there such an idiom as the pastoral dystopian? There is now:
If not for the shutdown, WYE OAK would be preparing for its JOIN tour in July, in which the duo would have traveled to select large halls around the country with an expanded band, eerily like Sylvan Esso before them, who slipped in under the wire.
Of course, none of that is happening, but the expanded JOIN group did perform once, in late February, in a Duke Performances show at Baldwin Auditorium. Spencer Kelly was there to film it from the stage, and Merge released a clip of the majestic “Fortune,” edited with an eye for immersive detail. I was there, up in the balcony, but this is a different experience. “Fortune” and the other JOIN singles are all out on Merge.
A few quick things of interest:
On May 12, A DIFFERENT THREAD, the collaboration of Durham expat Alicia Best and the UK’s Robert Jackson, released “Red Is the Rose,” their gracious version of the traditional Irish ballad. It’s the second video, following murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” from their forthcoming folk album, Some Distant Shore, due out May 22:
The young Raleigh-area singer-songwriter ISAAC ANDERSON released an EP, State of the Secretary, on April 24. Anderson’s songs are traditional, earnest, hooky, and well sung. He shows off his rock side in “Charming,” where he puts his own ingenuous twist on the lyric-video form:
SURRENDER HUMAN, which includes members of notable local bands of yore such as Ben Folds Five and The Mayflies USA, released a pert pop-rock record in March. They recently followed it with “Shelter in Place,” a song about the plight of service workers during the pandemic:
Meanwhile, Durham jazz quintet DREAMROOT recently released an accomplished album, the intricate and energetic Phases.
Bloodshot Records is issuing SARAH SHOOK‘s 2012 debut EP on vinyl for the first time.
And AMERICAN AQUARIUM, the subject of a sprawling INDY cover story three years ago, released its heartland-country album, Lamentations, on May 1, but I’ve been struggling to write about it since April. Sometime soon, I’ll tell you why.
(Probably. Like I said, struggling.)
Contact arts and culture editor Brian Howe at [email protected].
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