Cam Recommends

More than a decade ago, it seemed like pure synthwave was poised to take over the world. Tycho hit the mainstream, Kavinsky was everywhere in the wake of Drive and this thing called “vaporwave” was on the come-up. Fast forward and it feels like vaporwave coiled in on itself and splintered into 1000 micro-genres and “low-fi beats to relax and study to” metastasized into a thing. So I was just delighted to hit play on this great little album from Bali-based producer Ørbita and be transported into an alternate reality where synthwave continued to carry just a bit of an edge. The whole record zips by in less than 30 minutes but give “Space Runner” a shot for a sample of the excellent neon-streaked sonic world presented throughout.

The forward motion in this track by heavy hitting, jazz-inflected electronic producer Bruise Blood is a wonderous thing to get caught up in. Starting small and then building and building and building as it layers  different sounds, first drums, bassline, then little electronic melodies, then more drums, then more little electronic melodies, and so on until it finally hits a groove that carries it all home in a lightning fast five minutes.

This stunning musical journey from Belgium rockers Gros Couer starts like a folksy/funky psychedelic jam from Altin Gün before ramping up the distortion on the guitars and dropping into much more arena-ready riffs before blasting into the stratosphere with a heavy beat and muscular bassline. It chugs along until it meanders into yet another musical mode, with hand drumming, hypnotic drones, a head nodding heavy guitar loop and the occasional electronic synth blast as it fades into the setting red sun. 

I've teased this topic before, but in lieu of publishing my 2025 "best of" lists before the year is actually over (I'm going to be disciplined to my format here, by the way, in that I plan to still do a quarter four notable releases list and then the year-end wrap up--hopefully by mid January at the latest), I'd like to highlight some of the best cover art that I saw this year. I truly love good album art and it is a shame that you generally have to kind of go out of your way to find it at a large enough scale to appreciate: whether in "real life" by finding said records on vinyl, or digitally where most streaming services de-prioritize album art to the point of making smaller and smaller thumbnails. But even if it's just a few more clicks into an artists Bandcamp profile, it's always worth the effort to take a closer look at any record art that catches the eye. I'm not someone who necessarily "sees" anything when listening to music, so it's not that album art represents some kind of jumping off point I need to complete my listening experience (though no shade towards anyone who does process music vis a vis visuals that way), but rather I find it a useful element in interpreting what the artists themselves may wish to communicate with the music contained within that literal artistic wrapper. It’s not all-encompassing of course, different artists place different levels of importance on the physical trappings of the medium. Regardless, ever since I spent hours pouring over the liner notes of that first CD pressing of Radiohead’s Kid A back when I was 16 years old in 2000, I’ve been fascinated and enchanted by album art. Presented in no particular order, and clicking on each cover should take you to an appropriate site to listen :)

A minor-key garage rocker that’s such an earworm that it might take a few spins to catch how utterly dark the lyrical content is: “Maybe I’m just already dead or I’m living in a simulation. But honestly it makes me depressed that this is the best thing someone could invent.” Later, before a bonkers guitar solo from the featured Buckethead, lead singer Sonia Sturino dips into straight nihilism: “Here daydreaming of annihilation: maybe we should just hit reset, it’d be the best thing to stop it all and start it over again…[but] I think we’d go and wreck it all again, caught in a loop pattern.” And yet, it’s catchy as hell and, honestly, I can’t actually debate any of the points made here so it’s best to maybe just sing along. 

If you’re reading this near the publish date then statistically it’s likely at least chilly outside, if not outright cold and dreary. Something about the change put me in the mood for Mount Eerie’s seminal 2009 record, Wind’s Poem. Mount Eerie (and the man behind the project, Phil Elverum) mean a lot of things to a dedicated number of people, whether it’s from the earlier Microphones projects to his grappling with his wife’s death in the devastating A Crow Looked at Me there’s a lot in the back catalog to dig into that’s worth your time. If you somehow missed Wind’s Poem however, now’s the perfect time to experience this simultaneously bleak and hopeful outing that combines elements of bedroom indie with folk, noise, drone and black metal. It can be a harrowing listen at times, but it’s a record I think about regularly for its raw emotional power and ability to completely capture you in its world. 

CV Vision’s recent album, Release the Beast is a head-spinning ride through half a dozen different genres and styles with maybe the only throughline being the imperative to just, like, “keep it chill, man.” The record starts with a Bibio-adjacent wobbly guitar melody, laughing vocal snippet samples and a loping beat that contains shades of the fabled Land of the Loops. But the very next track veers into sunny 60’s vocal-lead psychedelia, only to be followed by a woozy dubbed out cut that wraps itself around dial-tone samples. And the record continues in this hazy toggle between interrelated but still disparate sounds with every track until we come to “A Memory” which falls into the psychedelia side of things but carries itself with such immaculate shag-carpet swagger that it can’t help but be a standout in a record of ear-catching tunes. 

The sparkling chorus feels like it could soundtrack a 90’s allergy medication commercial but in an alternate reality where TV commercials won Nobel Peace Prizes. I spent so long trying to come up with that analogy to capture the feeling of this track that I just ask you to listen to the song now to see what I mean. 

I was sadly not familiar with long-running Zambian rock outfit We Intend to Cause Havoc (or WITCH for short) until their record, SOGOLO from this summer hit my radar with the outstanding “Kamusale” as the kickoff track. Starting with an aggressive guitar riff and chanting it quickly folds into a growling guitar loop that roils beneath nearly the rest of the song. It builds with drums, group vocals and buried organ synths before unleashing some gritty guitar solos and even a crazed harmonica but it’s the stunning lead singer’s performance that brings it all together as a unified, exhilarating chaotic blast of sound. 

Black Taffy fills an extremely specific niche for me: if you need trippy instrumental late-night music that’s both sweet and eerie, both warm and bracing, both dusty and nostalgic and yet it all needs to have that ineffable iridescent oil-slick sheen of music that sounds like molten molasses…well, then I’ve got exactly the musician for you! And if you’ve sussed out a hidden message about the void that Black Taffy fills in the music space via the overweight adjectives above, then you’ll really want to hit play on this great new record.  

Indie-rock weirdos Sorry return with a great new album in COSPLAY and I’d like to single out the enigmatic “Waxwing.” Sorry deploy their finely honed electronic touches throughout (the stuttering vocals, the looping scratchy samples) but its lead singer Asha Lorenz’s delivery of the main refrain that really elevates this track for me: “Maybe you’re desire, maybe you’re the bomb, you make all of my money, because you make all of my songs!” It captures the ethically cloudy no-floor-beneath-your-feet feeling of knowing you use your personal angst for artistic fodder and also knowing that it can’t last forever. Plus it’s as gummy a minor-key earworm as you could possibly want.

 *Ron Perlman narrator voice in a post-apocoplytic retelling of The Tale of Two Cities: “That Dickens bastard had it right: it was best of times and it was the worst of fuckin’ times…”

~

If you are unfortunate enough to know me you’ve probably heard my bit by now about this classic literature intro that’s even more true now than it was at the dawn of the industrial revolution. We live in an age where a small device in my pocket can play me a seemingly infinite amount of recorded music instantaneously. Yet the same companies that make that technological miracle happen are also doing vast harm to a huge number of human beings, not to mention our planet. From the ecologically destructive and human-devouring enterprise that is rare-earth mineral extraction used to create our phones, to the exploitation of musicians with ludicrously low payouts, to the industry embracing and pushing AI slop, to the investments made into nefarious privacy and humanity destroying efforts by the corporations running the streaming services, the cost of that miracle is unbelievably high. Irresponsibly high. Unforgivably high. And certainly, it’s unsustainably high. 

And the worst part of this, as with so many modern ills, is that it doesn’t have to be like this. 

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