Flight Mode – The Three Times
Flight Mode are obsessed with memory and the tricks it plays on you. The Oslo based band have released three EPs to date, each one dedicated to a specific time and place in frontman Sjur Lyseid’s youth. One chronicles a high school year abroad in the United States; another is a portrait of mid-twenties ennui. Those releases (along with a new one, Tøyen, ‘13, about a momentous year in his thirties) have been compiled together to form the group’s debut album, The Three Times. While in some ways I do prefer them as standalone releases (each one, appropriately, has it’s own character and tone), collectively they fit together as a portrait of the artist past and present. Regardless of how you prefer to experience these songs, Flight Mode have been quietly putting out some of the most evocative and downright beautiful rock music of the last five years and The Three Times is the perfect entrypoint for the uninitiated.
Dead Bandit – Memory Thirteen
Dead Bandit, the duo of Chicago-based singer songwriter Ellis Swan and multi-instrumentalist James Schimpl, traverse well trod territory on their sophomore outing Memory Thirteen. It’s the kind of record that would have fit in perfectly with Kranky’s early roster: guitar forward post rock with some country twang and a hint of gothic noir. This familiarity doesn’t lessen the pleasures of their music though; it’s well executed stuff, and like the best post rock it wraps sweeps you up in its own little world. The best analogue I can come up with is the Southern fried mysticism of something like Kentucky Route Zero, wee hours listening that adeptly blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
Nate Scheible – or valleys and
Nate Scheible’s Fairfax, which he self-released in 2017 and got the reissue treatment a few years ago, is a piece of music that’s stuck with me since I first heard it. Built around a cassette of phone messages and voicemails Scheible found at a thrift store, he transformed those recordings into something that felt both intimate and cinematic. His latest release, or valleys and , bears some of the sonic hallmarks of its predecessor but utilizes them to different ends. Here Scheible seems less concerned with overarching narrative than with the possibilities of sound itself, juxtaposing meditative piano lines, warped spoken word recordings and even the crinkling of the plastic bag. The interplay between these short compositions plays out like walking through a well curated art exhibit: it’s a feast of shapes, colors and textures that manage to cohere into something greater than the sum of their parts.