Red Mosquito

You guys listen to this Geordie Greep album? Wow!

I've been listening to it for a couple days. It's blowing my mind

Just downloaded it. I've not heard a thing about it until now. No idea what to expect.

This is a really nice listen.

First song from their April 2025 EP is also up on YT, LMS.

It's nice too.

Yeah I thought so.

Here's a bunch of words about a bunch of records that I listened to from the year 2024. There's some stuff that I've left off for one reason or another, be it never really vibing enough or never giving sufficient time and attention or it's just still too new yet. As such, this isn't definitive or exhaustive but merely a snapshot at this point in time.

Godspeed You ! Black Emperor - No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead
This album has followed me throughout this whole year, from first hearing the songs live in February (seven months prior to the album and in a different order than what would be released), to months of analysis and speculation pre-release on the Discord server, to soundtracking my autumn life. Conceived as a gesture to persist in the face of the horrors of war (particularly the one in Gaza), the band are as feisty as they've ever been and are here mining new approaches to their sound and structure thirty years after Efrim first laid the groundwork for what the group would become. Making art while noncombatants die may be a difficult thing to reconcile, but I'm damn glad this band is still around, still making this noise.

We Are Winter's Blue and Radiant Children - "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER"
Godspeed is Efrim's main gig, but he has time for other projects like this debut of a new four-piece with Mathieu Ball (Big|Brave), Jonathan Downs, and Patch One (both ex-Ada). These songs are drone and distortion-soaked free-verse hymns for the cold of dead winter, but there's kernels of warmth in each, a refraction of the kind of hope that's ever-present in all Efrim's works. Efrim hasn't done much singing since 2019's Sing Sinck, Sing album, so it's nice to have him back behind the microphone for all the tunes on this record (no slight against Ariel Engle, his cohort in All Hands_Make Light, she's perfect for that project).

Pearl Jam - Dark Matter
Y'all know what this one's about. Gigaton wasn't a fluke; Pearl Jam can still make great music. Setting aside production quibbles, Watt pulled off some sort of miracle to get these five putting together songs all in the same room with only a handful of riffs as signposts. As a long-time fan of Pearl Jam's weirder, artier side, it's a bit odd to be so taken by an album that doesn't really indulge any of those impulses, but the songs do enough heavy lifting that I've never felt wanting. With back-to-back spectacular records, it's a treat to fall back in love with this band.

Eric Chenaux Trio - Delights of My Life
For the last decade, Eric Chenaux has been tending a mostly hermetic approach in his practice of creating bent folk-jazz balladry, foregrounding his voice, pedals, guitar, and some electronics with only occasional guest contributions. This year unveils a new chapter for Chenaux along with his newly-minted trio featuring Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer and backing vocals and Phil Melanson on electronic percussion and backing vocals. Chenaux continues to follow the same throughline that has been guiding his last several solo albums, but the growth into a band brings a new sense of spontaneity and grooving sway to the proceedings. There is much delight to be found in these seven songs one can be sure.

Shellac - To All Trains
Even before the untimely death of Steve Albini, I was preparing to end my only passing familiarity with Shellac and use this album as my jumping off point into finally listening through their main album run. I've been working on that and feeling sad that it took me so long and that Steve is no longer here as I go on the journey. What I've learned is just how stellar these three musicians were as a band and how absolutely vital and sharp they remained until the very end. If only I had known...

Sarah Neufeld/Richard Reed Parry/Rebecca Foon - First Sounds
This is an album of lovely chamber works from this trio of primarily violin, cello, and string bass. The trio first came together twenty-five years ago to try some spontaneous creation but never recorded the results. As a result of pandemic-related downtime, they reconvened to see if they could recall some spirit of that initial meeting and along the way pulled in the two decades of lived experience since then. Like a cloud, it sometimes floats with spry airiness and other times looms with a heavy cast of solemnity.

Still House Plants - If I don't make it, I love u
A voice, a guitar, a drumkit—on paper it seems so basic, but Still House Plants are formal deconstructionists in a true sense and their spartan setup is the perfect foundation for their aims. Chaotic, dissonant, atonal. Are those insults or compliments? With this album, the answer could be yes. It's an invigorating work that plays outside of any expected norms and it will probably turn off more people than it will attract, but for me, this band is so much of what I want experimental rock music to sound like even when it sits uncomfortably. One of the most thrilling discoveries of the year for certain.

Vennart - Forgiveness & the Grain
The fourth Vennart album, this one has been a tougher nut to crack than its predecessors, but it's no less of a compelling listen. Mike has found himself a comfortable niche here, continuing from his last album, stringing together a kind of art rock that is tuneful but still indebted to influences in sludge, NWOBHM, drone, etc. The album is dramatic and weighty throughout much of its runtime, only lightening up for a couple of songs, and in Vennart's words it's a reflection of a world that is continuously more callous in both interpersonal relationships and the dynamics across social strata. Nonetheless, all the spit and vinegar that Vennart's been known for throughout his career is on display here and there's an overall feeling of resolute determination to make it though the murk.

Tindersticks - Soft Tissue
After thirty years, there's little that can be surprising on a new Tinderticks record, but they still are absolute masters of their signature brand of jazzy, soulful chamber pop. This album curbs back the dancier vibes of its predecessor leaving the band sounding more comfortably in control of their sound, but the end result is far from a rehash. Bandleader Stuart Staples still performs his usual balancing act of juxtaposing a kind of swagger and confidence against a lifelong flirtation with loneliness and heartache, while the rest of the band lock into an array of sophisticated and usually restrained but evocative arrangements. I'm still familiar with less than half of the band's catalog, but this album has been a terrific impetus to work on catching up.

Greg? Saunier - We Sang, Therefore We Were
Deerhoof drummer and founder Greg? Saunier debuts his solo career with this album which doesn't stray very far from the path that Deerhoof has been treading in recent years. However, Saunier's tendencies in newer Deerhoof are sharpened here when on his own, including more biting and straightforward critiques of the flaws he finds in current society. Rickety, raw, and shambolic, it's the perfect kind of album to come out on a label called Joyful Noise because a lot of it really is that. Anyone who's a Deerhoof fan would be well-advised to give this record a fair shake.

Geordie Greep - The New Sound
Hot on the heels of the unfortunate announcement that Black Midi were finished, frontman Geordie Greep anounced his solo debut, The New Sound. Greep and co had already been tangling their mathy, noisy post-punk with a wider palette that pulled from King Crimson, Cardiacs, Frank Zappa, jazz, and bossa nova, and he continues further down that path here while shedding even more of his early heavier influences. With nearly thirty session players contributing, the album features Greep spinning up tales of numerous figures who bluff and bloviate their way through lives marked by hidden despair and inadequacy, many inspired by people he met in clubs and bars. It's high concept and longer than it needs, but it's a bunch of fun.

Erika Angell - The Obsession With Her Voice
Erika Angell has traversed a world with her voice: lieder and opera as a child, jazz in adolescence, improvised post-industrial electronics and folky art-rock as an adult. She pulls all of those experiences and influences together here on her solo debut, living true to its title. Shimmering kosmiche, numinous soundscaping, droning no-wave, and abstract near-pop are all rendered with keyboards, electronics, drums, and strings, but the original instrument of Angell's voice is always the element that grounds, focuses, centralizes, or leads each song. It's definitely a grower of an album for me, as it took most of the year before I fully warmed to the universe that Angell conjures, but I'm glad I eventually got there.

Kee Avil - Spine
Vicky Mettler's second album as Kee Avil is every bit as dark and strange as her debut but in a more bitingly intimate and precise way. Close-miced vocals and a guitar that sears like hot iron or scrapes like shards of glass foreground every song backed up with various threads of micro-electronics, percussive beats, and a handful of string elements. The result is a ghostly, minimalist industrial sound filled with shadowy cobwebs, rust, and mold where sidelong glimpses of sorrow, confusion, and conflict appear. Like her debut, it took a while to get under my skin, but once it did, it became another standout from this year.

Crumb - AMAMA
Crumb's jazzy psychedelic pop grows ever more refined on this third full-length where the band is more confident than ever before but also far more playful as they marvel at their own abilities. The four players effortlessly interweave various layers and textures while maintaining head-bopping snappy grooves. While the previous album, Ice Melt saw the band trying to navigate a landscape of paranoia and uneasy confusion, here they've landed in a decidedly warmer headspace where there's still a search for meaning and connection, but they're buoyed by their survival through those darker hours.

Cola - The Gloss
On their second album of straightforward post-punk recast for our contemporary dystopia, Cola have dialed back the coziness of their debut for a more detached sound that emphasizes their disinterest in grand statements. The guitar and bass reach for a moody dissonance more often than before and the songs are generally less catchy with only a couple exceptions. Sadly, I think that lack of immediacy has dampened my reception of the album for some reason as I haven't been able to engage with it in a way I expected. Perhaps it will have a renaissance like the final Ought record?

Mount Eerie - Night Palace
I haven't kept up with Phil Elverum much after he ended The Microphones and became Mount Eerie, but I only had a passing familiarity even with that earlier project. Yet, there was enough talk about this album in certain circles that I had to check it out and I am very glad I did. At 81 minutes long and comprised of songs that range from half-formed thoughts to towering epics, it's scope is broad as Elverum grapples with his life as a wizened and hallowed indie-rock mystic who was horrifically widowed and is now a rural/exurban dad. A more concise statement could be made by winnowing down the album to its best pieces, but I truly think something would be lost in that, even though the whole thing can be hard to take at once.

Ancient Egypt - Climb Every Mountain
Ah, the weirdness of the circles of Toronto musicians that orbit around the Tranzac club and intersect in so many interesting ways. Here is singer/songwriter Holger Schoorl with bassist Pete Johnston and trombonist Scott Thompson playing the entire repertoire of seven songs by way of inside-out improvisation that they have been workshopping for a decade and a half. Holger's boisterous voice sings nonsensical phonemes that nonetheless seem to tell miraculous stories as his guitar clambers whimsically along with the other two instruments. It's exactly the kind of head-scratching magic that has kept me in the thrall of so many projects from this miraculous scene.

Duster - In Dreams
With this fifth album there are now more post-haitus Duster LPs than there are pre-hiatus and yet Clay Parton and Canaan Amber seem to have little desire to make significant changes to their musical practice. They're still making fuzzy, tripped-out space rock that sometimes settles down close to slowcore and the only updates are the loss of warmth from recording to old, worn tape and a stubborn kernel of hopefulness that rears up in places. It's an interesting contrast that as their production has gotten colder there's a stronger reach for human connection. Things do end on a darker note, though, and I do wonder, if there's a future for Duster, will they still be plowing the same field?

Papa M - Ballads of Harry Houdini
Here's another project I'm largely unfamiliar with but checked out the album due to trusted recommendations. Split between three instrumentals and three vocal songs (the middle one more spoken-word, though), there's a fair amount of ear-tickling variety on this record. Everything was laid down by Pajo himself using loops and multitracking with little computer involvement and it all comes through as ringingly honest so even the stuff that would normally be a turn off for me ends up being palatable. Fortunately, the bulk of the album is pretty much the kind of stuff I want to hear from a guy who was a founder of Slint, played with Tortoise, and has done time with countless other acts.

Yesness - See You At the Solipsist Convention
El Ten Eleven + Don Caballaro = Yesness. ETE's bassist/guitarist/songwriter Krisitian Dunn was introduced to Don Cab's Damon Che by Joyful Noise label head Karl Hofstetter after Dunn had produced more song ideas than he and drummer Tim Fogarty (ETE's other half) could conceivably realize together. The new friendship quickly blossomed into fertile creativity and this is the result, where Che's more muscular and forceful drumming is intertwined perfectly with Dunn's chunky eight-string bass loops. The duo doesn't stray terribly far from recent El Ten Eleven albums as Dunn presumably does most of the writing, but as I dig ETE quite a bit, this alternate-universe version is worth the price of admission.

Adam Wiltzie - Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal
This is Adam Wiltzie's first album released after the death of his Stars of the Lid partner Brian McBride, and though it was all conceived and recorded before McBride's untimely passing, it's haunting ethereality seems well-suited to reflect it nonetheless. Warm ambient washes for small ensembles of strings, keys, electronics, and guitar effects are a Wiltzie trademark by now and it's precisely what we get on this album, perhaps sounding closest to another of Wiltzie's projects, the excellent Dead Texan. The world is a harsh and trying place and it's always wonderful that there are artists like this who offer up soft and comforting respites against it even if only for a short time.

Fyear - Fyear
There is a barrage of terrifying future possibilities ahead of us at this moment in time and Fyear tap deep into that, fusing a kind of spoken-word approach that is something akin to slam poetry with large ensemble electroacoustic music that draws from drone, metal, art rock, and out jazz. The dueling poets are an integral part of the music on hand here, using the cadence of the lyrics to shape changes in tempo and intensity or performing an almost percussive function with aptly positioned consonant sounds. Just as important is the saxophone and electronics system used by primary composer Jason Sharp and its rhythmic and textural groundwork is assisted by a pair of violins, a pair of drummers, and pedal-steel guitar.

Colin Stetson - The Love It Took To Leave You
While still feverishly in demand as a film score creator, the past few years have seen Colin Stetson have enough time to also pursue personal musical projects, an album each year. Following the drone explorations of Chimaera and the eulogy to his late father in When we were that what wept for the sea, this year's offering is a further expansion and refinement of the intense physical practice he's pursued for the past fifteen years. Over the course of 73 minutes, Stetson and his chosen instrument (shifting between alto sax, bass sax, and contrabass clarinet) serenade empty woods, roar to summon demons, soar skyward, and descend to oceanic depths. In truth, this album is a lot and I'm not always here for it, but I'm happy that it's found its way into existence.

Dirty Three - Love Changes Everything
After a dozen years, somehow Dirty Three have reawakened and have delivered the most impressionistic album of their career. This band have always contained the ability to summon a storm of feelings through their music, usually using a palette of violin, guitar, and drums, and this is no different other than the waves are now eddying in a more gentle and sorrowful fashion than ever before. The alchemical connection between the players is a soothing balm for downtrodden hearts—these guys have been through the sturm und drang themselves and come out the other side—and in a way they act more as guiding lights than the fretful, angsty men they once were. This is one of those albums that is truly an essential work for the life we now exist in.

The Smile - Wall of Eyes
A Moon Shaped Pool may have been Radiohead's swan song, but its reverberations still echo as Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood come together as The Smile. Their debut record was a grab bag of sorts, still pulling many threads from that latest Radiohead album and stitching them up with the more advanced rhythms of drummer Tom Skinner. Now a more proper band of their own, the trio can't escape their DNA, but there's a more invigorating thrust to their songs and a beguiling charm to their love for stilted and unusual sounds. The way that all three members get totally absorbed in the force of these songs has also done wonders in reinvigorating the debut for me, as I was largely underwhelmed with it in 2022. Someday, perhaps I'll have the wherewithal to give proper attention to Cutouts, too.

Jeff Parker IVTet - The Way Out of Easy
Jeff Parker is an understated master of working jazz guitar into ever more psychedelic soundscapes, whether it's with bands like Tortoise, Isotope 217, and Chicago Underground or with his eponymous ensembles New Breed and IVTet. This is the latter, bringing in four sidelong slabs of expansive interstellar jazz excursions. The four players are captured immaculately and their playing is hypnotic, to the point that I often find my mind wandering as I listen, dipping in and out of the spectacular sounds that seem to inhabit every moment of the album. Like a number of other records this year, the sheer length of this release is both a boon and an albatross as I all too often don't find myself with the time or energy to devote what this deserves, but it's yet another gem.

Cheers Brett - got 3 albums to snatch from that lot.

This did make me laugh though - this totally sounds like all that I would hate. I was waiting for you to add that BJERK! was guest vocalling on a track to make the nightmare absolutely complete!

Brett wrote:Still House Plants - If I don't make it, I love u
A voice, a guitar, a drumkit—on paper it seems so basic, but Still House Plants are formal deconstructionists in a true sense and their spartan setup is the perfect foundation for their aims. Chaotic, dissonant, atonal. Are those insults or compliments? With this album, the answer could be yes. It's an invigorating work that plays outside of any expected norms and it will probably turn off more people than it will attract, but for me, this band is so much of what I want experimental rock music to sound like even when it sits uncomfortably. One of the most thrilling discoveries of the year for certain.

I love Deerhoof but the Saunier record fell flat for me.

I enjoyed the GY!BE record but it didn't stick with me at all.

Papa M's best work is Whatever Mortal - the new one was pretty hit or miss.

Both of the records from The Smile were marvellous, was really hoping to hear a few tracks live when I saw Yorke solo last year but he only played Radiohead and solo material, which was a shame.

Saw the Dirty Three perform basically everything off their 2024 album and they were riveting. Highly recommended.

Really loving last year's Nilüfer Yanya album My Method Actor. Very interesting. Kinda jazzy, with pop melodies, and loud fuzzy guitars appearing here and there to add some grit.