Pitchfork did a great interview with Turnstile on the eve of their new album release: it’s great to see them repping Baltimore and getting their due. I really hope they are able to keep their feet on the ground and stay connected to their roots—it sounds like it’s working.
Pitchfork did a great interview with Turnstile on the eve of their new album release: it’s great to see them repping Baltimore and getting their due. I really hope they are able to keep their feet on the ground and stay connected to their roots—it sounds like it’s working.
Turnstile, the Baltimore-based hardcore band, just announced a new album by releasing a video featuring the title track. As with their last album, they’re veering away from their hardcore roots and doing something…different. I’m glad to see them stretch their legs, and I hope the rest of the album is as good as Glow On was four years ago.
I don’t know exactly what it is about this song that has it stuck in my head this week: Is it the throwback hardcore vocals circa 1985, the thrash guitar hooks mixed with melodic big muff bass line, the completely unexpected harmonies in the chorus, or the mixture of the whole thing. But it’s awesome and it makes me want to drive my car real fast and break shit. And, shout out to Baltimore!
Don’t ask me what’s going on in the video; it’s bonkers.
Light Design, Turnstile. You’re probably tired of me posting stuff about them, but too bad. This cut off the new album is happily stuck in my head, displacing The Unforgiven by Metallica, which was stuck there for a day (and thus not worth posting about). My only beef with it is that it’s only 2 minutes long, and I feel like it builds up to something without releasing. Other than that, no notes. The rest of the album (released yesterday) is excellent.
I’ve had Turnstile on heavy repeat in my head this past week. The end of this set from the Hurricane Festival in 2024 covers the highlights; they look like they would be awesome to see live.
Update: They played a show yesterday at Wyman Park here in Baltimore.
Drug Church, World Impact. The vocalist gargles with razor blades, the groove is sludgy but fast, the chorus is killer and the lyrics are great. This shouldn’t work but it does. I found this band in an article about Turnstile and the future of hardcore, and it gives me hope. I want more of this to restore my faith in guitar-based rock.
It’s December, so the interwebs are full of Best-Of lists for music by bands I’ve never heard of and TV shows I’ve never seen. Some sites are predictably more niche than others; I think I know three of the top 20 artists on the Pitchfork list, while Stereogum’s list is roughly 50/50 familiar, and Turnstile is their #2 pick. Last week during work everyone shared their Spotify Wrapped playlists, which I also don’t get to see because I’m still using the unpaid version. StatsforSpotify tells me that tracks from Deafheaven, Taylor Swift (I binged Shake It Off last month) Mayer Hawthorne, Hybrid, and Boards of Canada were my top ten from the last six months but I can’t see the yearly list—I’d bet it would skew wildly in a different direction.
* * *
I get a lot of special offers for custom printing every week due to my job, and it’s always fun to take advantage of a good deal. My sticker company sent me an offer for a $9 color printed shirt with free shipping, so I whacked together a version of the Old Line State Binders logo for a black shirt and sent it in. I’ve wanted to do that shirt for a long time anyway. The offers pop up in my social media feed too: I clicked on an Instagram sticker ad the other day, and suddenly sticker ads took over my whole feed. Avery is running a special on 10 vinyl stickers for $10 at any size, so I cobbled together a simple version of the Peer Pressure shirt design and ordered a set of 4″ stickers. If they turn out nice, I’ll use those as my calling card and start trading stickers around with other Scout nerds.
* * *
Our plans for snowboarding are on hold for the time being; Whitetail isn’t open as early as last year (or I’m not remembering the dates clearly) so we’ve got to reschedule. My guess is that we’ll do it in January at some point. I have to do some research into what weekdays are quietest so that we can maximize our visit. I don’t want to wait all the way until March, but I’d like more than one trip this season if we can swing it.
As I mentioned earlier this month, I’ve been listening a lot to the new Deafheaven album, Infinite Granite, and I really dig it. Very atmospheric, excellent melody, lots of energy.
Baltimore’s own Turnstile released a new album, Glow On, which sounds really good on first listen. I really loved their last album, a mixture of powerful vocals, shredding guitar, and pure hardcore energy. This one is more polished but the fact that they’re just going for it with every idea they have is amazing.
And, as mentioned before, Chvrches just released a new album that I haven’t listened to yet. I’m embedding it here to remind myself to spin it as soon as I’m in front of the laptop again.
On the streaming front, I watched the last season of Bosch on Amazon Prime and enjoyed every minute of it. I’d read this was the last season and wondered if they had any plans beyond this, and my hunch was correct: three of the main characters are going to continue in a new series over on IMDb TV (apparently that is A Thing) where Bosch, his daughter, and another character will fight crime in LA. I’ll miss all of the supporting characters I was familiar with from the book and series—Crate and Barrel, J. Edgar, Lt. Billets, Sgt. Mankewicz, etc. but they’ve had seven great seasons.
* * *
In my podcast queue I found a couple of new shows I really like. Strong Songs features a careful deconstruction of a song, spanning multiple genres, as well as careful explanations of basic music theory. I came for his episode on Know One Knows and was hooked. I have two friends currently teaching music history and theory and immediately shot the link off to them. There are three seasons dating back to 2018 so I’m set for awhile.
SmartLess is a podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, and they are always able to get incredible guests to come on and talk about anything and everything. They got Kamala Harris the week she was asked to be the VP; they’ve had Paul McCartney and Megan Rapinoe and Tony Hawk and many more.
I Spy is a podcast produced by Foreign Policy and features stories told by spies about their experiences in danger zones around the world: a CIA agent before the fall of Saigon, the guy who interrogated Saddam Hussein, and a Soviet sleeper agent sent to the U.S. before the end of the Cold War. Riveting and fascinating. This was my binge on the way home from Ohio a few weeks ago.
Cautionary Tales is about mistakes that we make and how we might learn from them. The last episode I listened to was about how we depend on tools like Microsoft Excel, how we often use them incorrectly, and how that can lead to disaster. It’s a better version of Malcom Gladwell’s podcast.
Lining up in the queue to ride the escalator down to the ground floor of Penn Station this morning, I heard someone singing “What a Friend in Jesus” in a quiet, lovely voice amongst the murmur of the crowd. As I got to the bottom, I realized it was an elderly man with a cane, carefully leading another elderly man with blacked-out glasses and a walking stick. They moved slowly, dragging luggage behind them, up to the Metro turnstiles, until I lost sight of them. I thought that was a lovely way to help a blind person find their way, and the sound of his song has stuck with me for the rest of the day.