By 2010, indie music was looking like it was turning away from a series of regrettable choices; dead bands walking, basically. Then Halcyon Digest came along and reclaimed the joyous nostalgic highlights of the decade that had gone before in a captivating sonic capsule of subdued celebration.
This album still reaches out to me from the slumber of an era in tentative transition - a beacon from a pea soup fog. The youthfulness of old was suddenly paired with the magnetism of experimentation and the result was a scintillating salute that tore the banality surrounding it to shreds. It also contains some of frontman Bradford Cox’s best compositions: the molasses memory stick “Earthquake,” the deceptively jaunty “Revival,” the almost-Vampire Weekend old/timeyness of “Helicopter,” Cox’s tribute to the late Jay Reatard “He Would Have Laughed” and the band’s best song and bid for pop greatness, “Desire Lines.” Cox described the LP’s title as “a reference to a collection of fond memories and even invented ones, like my friendship with Ricky Wilson or the fact that I live in an abandoned victorian autoharp factory. The way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that's kind of sad." The past is still with us, just in re-remembered and sometimes wholly invented form. A masterpiece that I wish more people immediately tagged as such. 10/10, no notes.
Dec 11, 2024
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December is such a tragically dead month for new releases that it’s a rare gift to get an album this fucking good this late in the year. My friend Marcos sent me a link to Heavy Metal out of the blue a few days after it was released – I don’t always listen to what he sends me, and he knows that, but I’m so glad I went into this with a clear mind and open heart. It’s been ages since a first listen of an album hit me this hard.
Lyrically Heavy Metal feels like what I always wanted from Dan Bejar but never quite got, and musically it almost feels like John Cale tried to rerecord Paris 1919 from memory with a single microphone and a cracked Ableton rip. Or something like that? Mostly, it feels like a wholly original statement that can’t be contained, like someone finally letting go of any inhibition and confessing every private insecurity without fear. His lyrics teeter from darkly hilarious (“like Brian Jones I was born to swim”) to bizarrely visceral romanticism (“you were born to break my big hairy football arms/like clean windows kill birds”) while regularly returning to the ultimate questions life has to offer: love, desire, purpose, God, you name it. It’s self deprecating without being self indulgent and immensely wise without ever feeling like an intellectual exercise.
It’s an album that feels like too rich of a body of work to even properly engage with on the first several listens. Winter’s emotionality is so deep, so personal and so bizarre that it becomes universal – so relatable yet so exaggerated and disjointed that it borders on psychological horror. I’m going to be picking up on new things within these songs for a long time to come, and I suspect this album will stand out to me as one of the absolute best when I look back at the year.Â
Dec 30, 2024
Rarely am I so captivated with such an odd album. Here's my review:
Like some Star Wars fans think you should watch the movies out of order for the best storytelling of the overarching canon, I have a proposal for you before you dig into this baddie.
Start at the title track "Supermarket Woman", Track 9. One condition to proceed past this song is that you have to like it. If you don't like Track 9, then just don't bother with the rest of the album and save yourself an hour.
Now for the rest of you that are onboard, go from Track 9.
Best put by a friend, "it sounds like they told ai to make an album that sounds like 1950s commercialism and island music had a baby". I'd go to add that this supposed AI was a fan of Wesley Willis, too.
From this dystopian lo-fi bop (bop used sparingly in my dictionary) to the top of the album is like the whiplash from a double-shot of whiskey directly into snorting a line of blow...if whiskey was a liminal space fever-dream and the cocaine were the Balearic Islands.
You might also find yourself in the downtempo post-post-punk boogie woogie you dreamt of DJing for your one (1) friend that would tolerate it and the four (4) other bystanders hanging out at the record shop at 2pm on a Friday.
After a Spanish influence brings us into the first two songs of the album, we pivot into a dance track at Track 3, "9 Moons" (a remix release was put out as well), and onward through a gentle, rhythmic and interesting ride down to the "Lambrusco Party" (Track 5).
My energy keeping consistent, yet meditative, "Six Am" (Track 6) is exactly how I want to wake up after a molly bender on a pale-sand beach. It would motivate anyone for a mushroom-spinach omelette after a night like that.
I sank into Tracks 7 & 8, understanding the definition of an album-cut here, desperately edging on the story arc of how-in-the-fuck we get back to Track 9 through this album's story. I need a snack.
Like a cold-handed caress after a slap to the face, Track 10 & 11 wind me back down.
"In a State" (Track 12); Thom Yorke as fuck. What can't Lemonade Market do?
The proverbial needle hits the proverbial run-out groove on this record and it has me longing with questions in the music's absence. Questions about who these three white figures on the album cover are, where the chairs in which they're sitting were photographed, and why on god's green earth they used that font along the bottom.
Album Rating: 10/10
Feb 14, 2024
22° Halo’s Lily of the Valley is a collection of songs written by Philly-based songwriter Will Kennedy during his wife Kate’s treatment for a very rare brain cancer. For full transparency, Will and Kate are close friends of mine – Kate’s treatment was a tremendous weight on my chest, and the news of her cancer going dormant was one of the high points of recent years for me. This album hit me hard as hell knowing the people behind it. But the more I listen, the more I marvel at the specificity and universality of what Will achieved here.
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What makes Lily of the Valley such a remarkable album is the graceful confidence Kennedy presents these delicately intimate moments with. It’s incredibly difficult to write confident, commanding songs about such immense uncertainty. My jaw would drop at the sheer chutzpah of the recurring lead guitar on album opener “Bird Sanctuary” – it sounds like This Heat playing Thin Lizzy! And these are somehow the first notes we hear to set the stage for Kennedy’s recollections of some of the most precious, intimate moments of his relationship? It’s incredible.Â
This propulsive feeling sustains throughout the album. “Orioles at Dusk” is anthemic and climactic in an almost literal drive-into-the-sunset sense, and the closing, titular track could throw a crowd makes me want to beat the air with my fists. That an immense tenderness can remain at the forefront of songs with such electric energy, rather than something masked by the music itself, is a big part of what makes this album such a wonder.Â
I hate to use a word like “juxtaposition” but it really is this juxtaposition that got under my skin the first time I heard this album and has kept me coming back for 3-5 listens per week since then. If I heard this album without knowing the backstory, without paying attention to the lyrics or knowing Will or Kate, I would still place it as a new high point in the jangle pop canon. It’s how effortlessly Kennedy can get you to sing along with a song about the terror of watching the person you love most endure chemo that makes this a truly transcendent record.Â
The lyrics are bracingly beautiful and generously specific. The songs sometimes take on a stream of consciousness quality, as if Kennedy is remembering moments both painful and uplifting in the same thought and listing them out as they arrive to him. The moments where Kate accompanies him vocally are among the most moving I heard this year. Kennedy has an uncanny ability to shed off self-consciousness in his music without ever demanding the listener’s attention. He is beautifully articulating a truth too deeply, painfully human to present as anything other than that; the truth.
Dec 30, 2024
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Hey tyler hopefully this doesn’t violate some PI.FYI golden rule
But after nearly two years of writing, editing and arguing, my book about the EP is coming out in May and can be preordered here:
https://hozacrecords.com/product/aifl/
The book is about the origins, history and cultural impact of the EP since these little objects first started coming out in the 50s.
Over 50 of my music biz friends then helped me shape the list and review the top 200 ever released, according to us (ha).
For those of you who are into this kind of geekery/snobbery, I can’t wait to hear what you think. A labor of love, as all books are! ❤️
Mar 27, 2024
“Songs Of a Lost World” coming to a goth listening station near you Nov 1 🖤
The fr FW Me Friday the 13th the world was looking for
Sep 14, 2024
I will fail to explain just how much this band meant to me in the 90s.
So I will borrow from AV Club who did a fine job of distilling it:
“Unwound is the best band of the ’90s. Not just because of how prolific, consistent, and uncompromising it was, but because of how perfectly Unwound nested in a unique space between some of the most vital forms of music that decade: punk, post-rock, indie rock, post-hardcore, slow-core, and experimental noise. That jumble of subgenres doesn’t say much; in fact, it falls far short of what Unwound truly synthesized and stood for. Unwound stood for Unwound. But in a decade where most bands were either stridently earnest or stridently ironic, Unwound wasn’t stridently anything. It was only itself. In one sense Unwound was the quietest band of the ’90s, skulking around like a nerdy terror cell. In another sense it was the loudest, sculpting raw noise into contorted visions of inner turmoil and frustration.”
R.I.P. Vern Rumsey.
This is their finest song, from their finest album.
I really can’t say enough about the sheer bloody minded genius of this group. 🖤
Mar 23, 2024