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.
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.
There’s nothing like straight-ahead stoner rock played with energy and accompanied by a funny video. This is Wires by Red Fang, a Portland band with a history of this kind of thing. Some of their songs hit and some don’t—I tend to gravitate to their earlier stuff—but it’s all good and on the Spotify playlist. And even more appreciated, it knocked Wanna Be Starting Something out of my brain, which had been stuck there like tape to the bottom of a shoe, all day Thursday.
Somehow I got this tune stuck in my head the other day and the guitar riff has been banging between my ears ever since. My sister bought this album when it came out and had it on heavy repeat for a summer; I wasn’t into the other tracks but Blue Light stood out. It’s a very ’80’s song with an even more unfortunate ’80’s music video, which is why I’m posting the reissue instead. At this point in time all of the musicians from the 70’s were releasing AOR-friendly, overproduced solo albums dripping with horns and reverb (see: Pete Townsend, Steve Winwood, that toothy guy from Chicago). This track isn’t bad, although he leans on the horns way too much and it sort of dies out before he starts jamming; the song fades out on the guy who soloed on Comfortably Numb and Time, which is baffling.
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.
Blind elevated their ethereal sound into a more mature exploration of the imperatives of existence. It’s more subdued, at least from a production standpoint, but finds its niche in luminant melodies and the band’s elegant yet spare musical arrangements.
I’ve written about The Sundays before; they are one of my favorite bands of my college years. This is a thoughtful retrospective of their second album, which came out in 1992 with a different vibe from their first record. Melancholy, yes, but still beautiful and inspiring. I wish they’d continued making music together, but we have three excellent albums to look back on.
I’m happy to see Mogwai have released a new album, and happier still to see Pitchfork (yes! they still exist) gave it a good review. Glad to see my favorite Scottish post-whatever band still going strong, and from what it sounds like, pushing some new boundaries.
Where they once reveled in disrupting ominous quietude with explosive outbursts, these days, they’d rather redirect tense energy into uplifting expression. As such, a band that once offered apocalyptic mayhem has become a source of comforting consistency as the real world turns evermore turbulent.
I was happy to stumble on a $5 copy of Come On Die Young at a secondhand CD store this summer, and definitely need to update/complete my discography.
First, let me say I have NO idea how this song got stuck in my head this week. This is by a prog/thrash rock band called Dream Theater, and it came out way back in the late 90’s, at a time when I was most adjacent to hair metal. I remember the metalheads at high school speaking reverently about the shredding skills of the lead guitarist. It’s the only song I know by this band, and it’s their only song that reached Top 10 charting position (which is probably how I first heard it). It’s got some good ideas but like most prog/thrash bands of the time, the songwriting never coalesces into something complete. It starts and stops and every time it settles into a groove they switch time, switch the beat, or leave the phrase for something completely different in tone. I’m irritated to even admit it’s stuck in my head, but here we are.
Maybe I can offer a chaser to wash that out of our heads. I was watching a video the other day that used a track for background music which I really liked, and tracked it down. It’s by a band called Cigarettes After Sex, and the track is called Apocalypse. This band is all vibe; it’s slow tempo, surf-tone guitars and moody keyboards drenched in reverb.
As usual, this album is six years old, but I’m just getting to it now.
This week’s entry I blame solely on a podcast I was listening to the other day, which was reviewing A View To A Kill, one of, if not the worst of all the James Bond movies, featuring an ancient Roger Moore. As my contemporaries might remember, the theme song was composed by Duran Duran, who were on the downslope of their popularity at that point. This was right after they recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas and several members of the band spun off into the Power Station (which yielded two very good singles).
Anyway, here’s a cheesy video for your viewing displeasure: