A BAKER'S DOZEN OF THE ALBUMS FROM 2024

A BAKER'S DOZEN OF THE ALBUMS FROM 2024
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'I got up and danced the disasters.'
William Burroughs, The Soft Machine
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1. Pink Lady Monster: 'Psychic Antennae and a Tinsel Heart'
2. QUITS: 'Feeling It' (Sleeping Giant Glossolalia)
3. Cherry Spit: 'Demo'
4. MJ Lenderman: 'Manning Fireworks' (Anti-)
5. Peter Perrett: 'The Cleansing' (Domino)
6. Kim Gordon: 'The Collective' (Matador)
7. Jack White: 'No Name' (Third Man)
8. The Lovely Eggs: 'Eggsistentialism' (Egg Records)
9. David Lynch & Chrystabell: 'Cellophane Memories' (Sacred Bones)
10. Nick Cave: 'Wild God' (PIAS)
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11. Tropical Fuck Storm: 'Inflatable Graveyard' (Three Lobed Recordings)
12. Jesus Lizard: 'Rack' (Ipecac Recordings)
13. Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: 'Mondo Maleficum'
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The top three were easy though I should, in the interests of full disclosure, mention that I've worked with people from all of those bands at Wax Trax and have a good deal of respect and affection for them. Be that as it may, these are three terrific releases, all local Denver bands, all well worth your time, appreciation and support.
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I wrote of Pink Lady Monster when their album came out:

With grace and guile, and occasional force, and sounding like Nina Simone drifting through a Wes Anderson movie scored by Cole Porter and Dorothy Parker, PLM

create a hermeneutics of sighs, whispers and sly asides, a jazzy, syncopated lounge music at once innocent and knowing - shifting effortlessly if archly from a goofy surrealism echoing Jefferson Airplane at their silliest on After Bathing Baxter's to something that sounds like ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries performed at a Junior High slumber party where the dismemberment of Dionysus is accompanied by popcorn and invocations to Persephone.

So take a table in an out of the way corner at this Dark City Cocktail Lounge, sigh, and count your wounds and your blessings. They will be the same.

Pink Lady Monster
Bandcamp:
Pink Lady Monster Bandcamp
Instagram:
@pinkladymonster
Live at Matchbox, 7-19-2024:
PLM Live at Matchbox, 7-19-2024
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Of QUITS, I had this to say:

At times, listening to the new Quits album I can feel like I've been dropped into a lost chapter of Hubert Selby's Last Exit To Brooklyn. There's a dense claustrophobia, a feeling of walls closing in, of impending violence, of threat, of menace. And then the room explodes.

Selby once said he was 'a scream looking for a mouth'. Quits have found that mouth.

Heavy, sludgy, loud, 'Feeling It' is raw, alive, wary, ready.

Post-Hardcore, it's a sound made out of hammers and elephant glue. It'll eat your mitochondria and spit you out as a slime mold on a dung planet orbiting a red dwarf sun in the Horsehead Nebula.

It will not quit.

Ugly. Rude. Fatal.

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Quits on this album is a four piece: twin-guitar attack from Luke Fairchild (who handles the blow-torch vocals as well) and Doug Mioducki, officially registered as a seismic event bass playing from Cyrena Rosati, and Darren Kulback's deft, deafening barrage on drums that'll make you think you're under fire on the Highway To Hell at the city limits of Baghdad.

Yeah: Ugly. Rude. Fatal.

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In 1665 the Black Plague entered London and killed off a quarter of the population in 18 months. Ugly, rude, fatal. Everyone looked for a way to ward off the contagion. Some prayed. Some moved to the country. Some wore toads strung around their necks.

You go to see Quits: Keep praying and wear the toad.

QUITS
Bandcamp:
QUITS
Instagram:
@quitsband
At Seventh Circle Music Collective:
SCMC
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And rounding out the Top Three, Cherry Spit:

The songs here don't hide anything from you, nothing's concealed or held back -- it's just that nothing is revealed. Everything that's gone into the making of these tracks has dropped below the event horizon and what we hear is the static from an energy being torn apart on its way into the heart of a black hole.

This is, of course, physically impossible - everything is at once empty but every sound, every moment, every move, has a specific gravity -- like walking in the eye of the Red Storm on Jupiter.

The sound is thick, dense, grinding - oppressive in a way that makes you start to struggle for a breath. An unknowable, unreachable turmoil of guitars, drums and bass with sharp streaks of synth like lightning flickering closer and closer.

The voice is far down in the mix, almost a shadow of a voice, a buried signal arriving with an uncertain message hinting at loss, threat, sorrow and defiance.

The sound hasn't been pulled out of the atmosphere without precedent: echoes and shadows of Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth, Ut, Kim Gordon's Body/Head, Mars and DNA are fitful, unstable elements decomposing erratically throughout.

Cherry Spit
Bandcamp:
Cherry Spit Bandcamp
Instagram:
@_cherryspit
Live at D3 Arts 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNbtSbCV2E&t=390s
 

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Below the fold, there is still a lot a great music to check out.

Already well regarded as a guitar player in the North Carolina country-fried shoegazish band, Wednesday, MJ Lenderman is a hard working dude, 'Manning Fireworks' is his 5th solo release since 2019. A fine songwriter and story teller in the vein of 'Well, that sure didn't work... again', Lenderman sets his sad sack tales in comfortable, broken in shoes and an old sweatshirt you wear around the house when nobody else is around. If you listen to Waxahatchee, Angel Olsen or Spirit of the Beehive, check him out.

MJ Lenderman
Bandcamp:
MJ Lenderman Bandcamp
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Peter Perrett, once singer in the Eighties band The Only Ones, is, at 72 years old, an improbable survivor of several decades of self-abuse from the mismanagement of the usual proclivities: sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Oddly enough, it seems he

remembers some of it. The Cleansing is Peter's 3rd solo effort, following 2017's How The West Won and Humanworld in 2019; and like those two, the songs are, in varying degrees, recollections, reflections, confessions, rueful boasts and/or warnings and/or apologies. His voice, which always sounded one wink away from a coma, is more weary than ever. Not quite as flexible as it once was, it still sounds, as Wallace Stevens said in a different context entirely, 'dirty, wet and wobbly.'

Peter Perrett
Bandcamp:
Peter Perrett Bandcamp
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Kim Gordon

Kim Gordon and Jack White you already know and you either like 'em or you don't. By and large, I do. Kim's post-Sonic Youth work has been consistently excellent without even a whiff of sell-out: dense, noisy, articulate, she manages, over and over, to apply just enough form and structure to the wildly fractal and unwieldy din of these songs. Jack, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for me of late but 'No Name' is a corker. Tough,

Jack White

tightly-wound, a little brittle, this sounds like he's out at the end of the diving board bouncing higher and higher over a pool full of sharks and broken glass.

Kim Gordon
Bandcamp:
Kim Gordon Bandcamp
Jack White
Bandcamp:
Jack White Bandcamp
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The Lovely Eggs

The Lovely Eggs is a duo from England with a sound a little closer to the Breeders than to Pussy Riot but definitely incorporating elements of straight ahead Indie Pop and Riot Girl with an occasional smear of shoegaze. Possibly an acquired taste.

 

 

The Lovely Eggs
Bandcamp:
The Lovely Eggs Bandcamp
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What can be said about Nick Cave or David Lynch that hasn't been said a million times. Neither of these albums would qualify as the best or most interesting work either has done: but, hey, they're old geezers and they're still standing, still kicking against the pricks.

Nick Cave
Album Stream:
Wild God Stream

 

David Lynch/Chrystabelle
Bandcamp:
David & Chrystabelle Bandcamp

 

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Rounding this Top Ten list out to a Baker's Dozen are three titles I couldn't quite fit into the upper tier. Tropical Fuck Storm - and, yes, absolutely one of the worst names in Rock 'n' Roll history – a rollcall of shame that includes Abörted Hitler Cöck and Anal Blast – so, by comparison maybe not so bad but still... TFS are an Australian band that formed from the cinders of The Drones, one of the great, unsung in the US at least, bands of all time. Front man Gareth Liddiard writes lyrics that are what might have resulted from Flannery O'Connor raising crocodiles rather than peacocks – a kind of Down Under trailer trash Southern Gothic. 'Inflatable Graveyard' is a fine album but it is a live recording and that just doesn't seem to me to fit into the Top Ten definition – so, we'll wait for next year to see if they crank out a studio set.

Tropical Fuck Storm
Bandcamp:
TFS Bandcamp

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Jesus Lizard. Well, almost. Old as the hills. Still pissed off. Still loud.

Jesus Lizard
Bandcamp:
Jesus Lizard Bandcamp

 

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Finally, the end: Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: I'm definitely cheating with this one. An art rock band from Bristol, UK, they're actually not bad but what I really like is the band name and the song titles, particularly one called, 'Osiris at the Large Hadron Collider.' Yeah, you don't even have to hear it to know it's fucking awesome.

Erotic Secrets of Pompeii
Bandcamp:
Erotic Secrets of Pompeii Bandcamp
'Osiris At The Large Hadron Collider':
Watch It On YouTube
 

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 That's it for another year.