Cam Recommends

If Sunn O))) had to release a “radio-friendly” single it might sound a little like this track from this expansive doom/drone project from Belgium musicians Neptunian Maximism. Derived from an intensive 4-day residency recording in a centuries-old Anglican church building in London, they constructed a listen that is alternatingly pummeling and meditative (and sometimes managing to combine the two). And maybe due to the nature of the live recordings in the ad-hoc recording space, but it also sounds electrifyingly alive and present. The horns hit with an intensity and clarity and somehow rise above the monstrously low bass and drum section and it all swirls around multiple stop-start dirge crescendos that continue to build in intensity until it all dissolves into black wispy vapor. 

Chilean progressive rockers Chercán (great name) introduce their latest album with a stunning 7 minute mini-epic that surges on waves of chugging guitars and tightly wound blasting horns. Singer Martín Peña-Voces really swings for the fences with a high-wire vocal delivery that shifts from hysterical high-register growls to smooth crooning with an ease of a wizened prog-rock veteran. Halfway through the track we get a fantastic breakdown with horns that build tension before what sounds like a wall of distorted guitars and roiling drums build to an orchestrally flourished finale. It’s a bracing piece of music that is only the beginning of a great album. 

A rollicking good time from jazzy instrumental funk rock outfit Calibro 35. Very much puts me in mind of those stalwarts of the genre and friends of the blog The Budos Band (and, to be clear, it looks like Calibro 35 has been in the game for nearly as long as The Budos Band), but Calibro 35 also brings a distinctly cinematic flare, and one evoking a very particular era of gritty grindhouse theaters and midnight screenings with some Morricone-scored Spaghetti Western vibes for good measure. There’s also just enough modern touches (some light record-scratching and beefy bass-end) that elevate it to top-tier status.

With “A Fine Pink Mist” Chico, CA based power-pop rockers bring us an absurdly catchy opening track to their new full-length record that’s overall filled to the brim with fuzzy, buzzy, high-tempo power-pop psych rock. The opening track seems to take bits of vintage Ramones and classic Misfits and then blends them together with the frenetic energy of high-octane Osee’s tracks and finally mixes in a huge amount of just plain tasty musical sugar for a rip-roaring, fist-pumping listen. 

 With a new Anamanaguchi album on the horizon maybe I’m just more primed than usual to respond to any chiptune-adjacent sounds but this new record from Chicago 3-piece Gosh Diggity hit me like a ton of bricks. Mixing emo/pop punk sounds with chiptune isn’t anything new but gosh darn it, Gosh Diggity brings such an energetic and youthful touch that it sounds incredibly fresh. The three members constantly swap the mic and occasionally bring in a gang of background singers when a particularly anthemic moment needs more muscle. Approaching everything from a decidedly youthful (but extremely clear-eyed) perspective, lyrically they often grapple with Real Shit™ like religious intolerance in the face of free expression (“The Season”), environmental collapse (“It’s Too Crowded in Here,” “10 Simple Tricks…”), growing up with all its uncertainty (“12th Grade,” “Display," "Growing Pains"), relationship ennui (“Dog Song”) and social anxiety for former “gifted students” (“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter)”. But they can also bring the humor (“Gosh Diggity Dental" with its hilarious voicemail sample and subsequent black-metal scream) and consistently coax their vintage video game system hardware to produce huge hooks and gummy earworms that seem nearly impossible. It’s only 30 minutes long but Gosh Diggity show that they have the ambition, chops and vision for an incredible musical career. 

I don’t always mean to harp on about genre and its various boundaries, fungible as they are. Genre, is, by definition, a reductive concept in that it seeks to streamline and categorize (indeed, that’s part of why I’ve resisted the urge to attempt genres as label tags). But, as humans, we do have to start somewhere and with this enterprise of discussing art, genre has its uses. And when it comes to the Texas-based experimental musicians Pyramids, a conception of genre is useful in that they crush so many disparate sounds together the only way to even begin to wrap your head around it is to be able to identify its component parts. From hard-hitting reggaeton beats, softly whispered rapped vocals, blasts of trumpets, breakbeats, black metal screams and occasional drops into tuneful danepop, the entirety of Pyramids’ latest full-length, Pythagoras, is a truly bewildering and breathtaking record. “Bones and Eggshells,” while illustrative of the rest of the songs generally, is still just one facet of a mesmerizing whole. If the pithy notion that “rules are only meant to be broken” has any shot at credibility, it’s with Pyramids insistence on salting the earth between every music boundary possible–and we’re all the better for being able to hear their uniquely expansive vision. 

Tuvaband’s 2023 record New Orders was one of my very favorites from that absolutely stacked year with its incredibly skilled balance of dance-pop earworms, singer-songwriter lyrical depth (with some being especially–and poignantly–politically relevant1) and just plain musical chops. Each song was so well-crafted and well played and its all to the credit of the figure at the center of the band: Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser. The thing is, this is one of those “musician plays all the instruments and sings too” kinda deals so it’s all the more impressive. And later this year (117 days away from the time of this writing) we’ll be blessed with another album, Seven Ways of Floating. 

We’ve already received three singles and I’d like to highlight “Galloping Chest,” a stunning dream-pop jam that creates its own little insular world as Marschhäuser lays out her animosity towards her own anxieties and the way they manifest. “I’m mixing butterflies and heavy lifting…and I am fucking efficient,” she sings early on. Then she chides, probably to herself, “if you continue to keep quiet, your tongue will deflate, if you keep your eyes closed you’ll miss out and you’ll be too late.”

In the chorus, she starts to shift tone, repeating the mantra: “I am breaking it down, I am breaking it down” and then pleads, “I know you can hear me, please let me in.” Then the beat really kicks in, the swirling synths and fluttering guitar creating a haze through which Tuva can continue to sing, transitioning from herself out of her own inaction to us, the listeners: “I can’t lead the way but I can hold your hand, I’ll take you to a wonderland. And then, “if you want everything to stay the same, then go ahead, put out your own flame,” to remind us that stasis is the death of our own spark. 

1 The album’s title track has of my favorite descriptions/aspirations of a possible near-future utopia: “I dream of people like Amazon Jeff to pay for worldwide civil wages//I dream of closing gaps, and the end of some countries dark ages//I dream of totally new orders, and the end of closed borders//At night we watch the same moon."

Sometimes there’s a hook so fucking massive that’s there’s nothing you can do but get out of its way before it crushes you and hopefully it tumbles into as many people as possible with its sheer awesomeness. So, everyone, in that spirit,  I present to you “See Her,” by up-and-coming pop rockers Adult Leisure. I’m gonna take my own advice here and just get out of its way so you can get rolled over by it too.

From Switzerland come Fomies, a band with a voracious appetite for mixing and matching all the little disparate sub-genres of heavy, prog, stoner and psych rock. Their full-length album, Liminality starts in deep sludge mode before moving into groovy garage rock and then rounding the corner into a small suite of prog-rock goodness with my recommendation today, the tracks "Colossus I,” “Colossus II,” and “Colossus III.” No single track runs longer than five minutes but listening all the way through will set you back nearly a quarter of an hour–but it’ll certainly be time incredibly well-spent.

Babe Rainbow’s first album, The Babe Rainbow,  was self titled, or, rather , it used to be self titled. Apparently late to heed Sean Parker’s advice (via Justin Timberlake) to drop “the ‘The,’” Babe Rainbow were THE Babe Rainbow for their first two albums and while they’ve since moved to a cleaner name it’s a fact that they’re a singular band and nobody else can quite do what they do. Even in the (now) very crowded field of neo-psychedelia they stand out with their relaxed refinement, instrumental mastery, sunny disposition and especially with their ability to touch on real world anxieties while never losing the afternoon-vibin’ groove. “Aquarium cowgirl” is a highlight from their latest and while the song came out in April, I present it to you as a pretty stellar contender for song of the summer (chill edition). 

There’s something in the water up there in Scandinavia that seems to inspire fantastic psych/stoner hardrock and Sweden’s Caboose has been apparently drinking liberally from that font. Left For Dust is 9 songs and 30 minutes of fist-pumping, head-nodding, dingy-bar hard rock that is as fun as it is energetic. “Crimzon Haze,” the track I’ve dropped here, is a pretty great representation of the sound overall and a great way to get the heart-pumping to boot!

I was only about halfway through my first listen of this fantastic song from Tunde Adebimpe’s new solo record before I decided I needed to add it to my recommendations list. Adebimpe, best known as frontman for TV On the Radio, has shown again and again his mastery of creating gritty pop hooks mixed with experimental indie/hip-hop style production techniques and, with “Ate the Moon,” he shows he’s still at the top of his game. A children’s choir surfaces over growling guitars and an unstoppable beat carries us to the explosive second half of the song as Adebimpe warms of us the “man who ate the moon” and the fact that it while it sounds like “such a ridiculous story,” it still ends with the man choking to death because he bit off more than he could chew.