It’s been a busy few weeks here at Undrcurrents HQ, thanks to the holidays and real life encroaching into time usually dedicated to listening and writing. We weren’t been able to cover as many albums as we would have liked last month, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a bumper crop of great music over the past thirty days.
A brief programming note: expect us to wind down for the rest of this year. We may have one or two more album reviews before the year is out (as well as our year end coverage later in the month), but that will likely be it for 2021. We’re not going anywhere; there are already many 2022 releases that we’re excited to talk about as we head into the new year, and we’ll be using the next month to spend some time with them as well as revisit old favorites.
To anyone out there reading this: hope your year is coming to a relaxing close, and thanks as always for reading.
LeakLeek – Leak
Imagine if The Raincoats and DNA had a baby who played the musical saw, and it might approximate LeakLeek. The Nagoya based band has been playing together for nearly a decade, but Leak is only their third release (following a previous set of demos and an EP). The band’s bread and butter seems to be short, sharp blasts of no wave, but the prominent placement of violin and vocal saw imbues tracks a spooky, Cramps-like vibe rather than the pure dissonance and chaos you might expect. Despite the album’s sixteen minute runtime they also manage to demonstrate their range, stretching out on tracks like “Polar” to create cavernous sonic landscapes. I’ve heard that the band shares members with Nicfit, another Nagoya band who have an album coming soon via Upset the Rhythm; after hearing LeakLeek, I can’t wait for that one.
Mandy, Indiana – … EP
Mandy, Indiana jumped onto my radar about a year ago after signing to Fire Talk Records. The Manchester group’s debut EP, which consists of three original songs and two remixes, poses more questions than it answers. It’s a portrait of creative restlessness, a set of tracks that showcases the project’s possibilities rather than pigeonholing them into any single sound. Sometimes they remind me of the icy detachment of coldwave acts like Ruth (perhaps because of Valentine’s half spoken, half sung French vocals); at others they hit the dancefloor, pile on the dissonance or do both. One thing is clear: each track here lays out a potential path forward for them, whether it’s the throbbing, industrial tinged “Bottle Episode” or the mutant dance beats of the “Alien 3” remix. I can’t wait to see which one they choose.
Claire Cronin – Bloodless
Bloodless, the latest album from singer-songwriter Claire Cronin, was written and recorded amid apocalyptic conditions; Cronin moved to Berkley shortly before the pandemic hit, so she also got to experience one of the worst wildfire seasons California has ever seen. The album leans into a gothic Americana sound, largely centered around Cronin’s vocals and guitar. While both real world circumstances and the supernatural make lyrical appearances, the sparse arrangements conveys everything you need to know: this is haunted music, plain and simple.
model home – both feet en th infinite
model home has been steadily working at the outer edges of hip hop for the past few years. The Washington, DC duo of rapper NappyNappa and producer Patrick Cain have rapidly built a formidable catalog (including nineteen Bandcamp-only albums along with a handful of other albums and compilations), but their latest is one of the best I’ve heard. There’s always a solid groove providing a backbone to each track, which the duo uses to build complex, off-kilter rhythmic structures with beats and vocals. The end result is the best of both worlds, resolutely strange and avant-garde while still feeling compulsively listenable.
Trevor Nikrant – Tall Ladders
Styrofoam Winos, the Nashville based trio of Trevor Nikrant, Lou Turner and Joe Kenkel, put out one of my favorite albums of the year. One of the highlights of that album, opener “Stuck In A Museum”, was an upbeat track whose lyrics spun off in increasingly surreal directions; after listening to Nikrant’s latest album, I can hear his fingerprints all over that track. There’s at once a magic realist and apocalyptic edge to his writing that shines throughout; people are suddenly swept away from their seats at a cafe or transform into electronic cigarettes, mysterious men try to connect you to a “brain machine” and steal your youth, messianic figures lead masses down to the beach. These colorful stories are matched by an expansive musical palette that breathes life into each word. Yet another stellar record coming out of the Dear Life camp in 2021.
dltzk – Frailty
Although I’m in my early thirties, I’m still an old man in many ways. Because my main mode of musical consumption during my formative years was purchasing albums from record stores, I largely prefer those formats to this day. As a result of my inability to keep up with the times, I’ve completely missed out on digicore until now. A genre birthed on Soundcloud, it sounds like PC Music as filtered through video game soundtracks. dltzk (pronounced “delete zeke”) is an eighteen year old musician from somewhere in New Jersey who helped pioneer the digicore sound, and their debut album feels like it will be a landmark release for the genre and perhaps the one that will break it into the mainstream. I’m still digesting it, but the album makes me thing of a lot of things: pop punk, emo, the video game soundtracks of my youth, all tied together with impeccable songcraft. All I can say is the kids are clearly all right.
Floating Room – Shima
Maya Stoner’s musical project Floating Room has featured a rotating cast of musicians and an ever shifting sound since its inception. The latest iteration of the project, Shima, pulls heavily from various strains of 90’s alternative rock to land on a sound that instantly feels comforting and familiar. Though the four tracks here are uniformly excellent, the EP’s most thrilling moments here are also the most cathartic; tracks like “I Wrote This Song For You” and “Shimanchu” slowly build to a boiling point before exploding into furious screams and jagged guitar solos. Shima arrives in conjunction with a national tour, which feels appropriate for a set of songs that will undoubtedly shine in a live setting.