This week’s selection is pretty diverse. Artists featured include Blood Incantation, Denzel Curry, Pastel Blank, Menajerie, PEACH and Jockstrap & Taylor Skye ft. Ian Starr.
THE BEST
‘Luminescent Bridge’ – Blood Incantation
Blood Incantation’s 2019 album Hidden History of The Human Race was one of the best death metal albums I’d heard in a long time.
They followed this up in 2021 with an ambient album – which wasn’t my cup of
tea, but I appreciate the band’s insane versatility. Now the Denver musicians
are back with another project in the pipeline. The two singles they’ve released
from it seem to be a fusion of metal and ambient. ‘Obliquity of The Ecliptic’ provides
that much needed dose of death growls, blast beats and chugged riffs that I was
after, but surprisingly it’s their new Pink Floydy instrumental ‘Luminescent
Bridge’ that I prefer out of the two. The track has such an epic build-up, and although
I expected it to eventually explode into death metal, the fade into cavernous spacey
ambience is just as satisfying.
‘Sked’ – Denzel Curry
Hip hop singles keep getting shorter. I’d barely got my
headphones on and the track had already ended. Nonetheless, ‘Sked’ is 99
seconds of pure fire. The slimy bassline
is nasty and Denzel hasn’t sounded this threatening since, well, ‘Threatz’.
Also, I just realised ‘sked’ means ‘scared’ and isn’t some obscure new slang
word.
‘Dopamine’ – Pastel Blank
10 years ago when I started this blog, finding new
exciting music to write about was easy. Nowadays, it feels like much more of a
mission to find stuff that’s truly fresh and exciting. Is the quality of music
getting worse? Or have I just numbed my dopamine receptors by consuming too
much music over the years? It was at this moment that I stumbled across this
track in my inbox, which is all about the chase for dopamine online that causes
us to scroll endlessly through social media. We’re all trying to look for that
next quick dopamine hit online, and it becomes harder the older you get. Needless
to say, this track stood out to me and gave me that dopamine hit I’d been
looking for. And not just because the message – the funky ever-evolving instrumentation
slaps too. The single comes off the Canadian indie band’s upcoming LP.
‘Holding Pattern’ – Menajerie
‘Holding Pattern’ won me over in the first 20 seconds. Jazzy
guitars play out to a slow but sharp stomping beat, which then abruptly stops
dead to allow some smooth liquid vocals to trickle in. It’s this type of seductive
tension that I look for in a neo-soul song and this track is oozing with it. The
Meanjin/Brisbane-based neo-soul outfit (which is uniquely fronted by three
female vocalists) are releasing their debut EP Selective Deafness this
Friday.
‘Already There’ – PEACH
This is just the type of noisy rock single I was craving
this week. The vocals are energetic and raw, mixed loud enough so that they cut
through the fuzzy riffs without overpowering them, and I love how absolutely tuneless
and fucked-up the guitar solo is at the end. ‘Already There’ will appear on the
band’s debut self-titled album PEACH out on the 30th September.
THE WORST
‘Red Eye’ – Jockstrap & Taylor Skye ft. Ian Starr
This is Playboi-Carti-esque autotuned mumble rap pushed
to the very extreme. It’s so hostile on the ears that I can kinda understand
the thrill of it. At the same time, I never want to hear it again.