Cam Recommends

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Thirteen tracks of unbelievably good chill beats with some ambient/field recording filagree that elevates each one above the standard “lo-fi” video compilation tune. The album, despite being something of a label sampler and featuring as many artists as it does tracks, is still remarkably cohesive as a listening experience. It’s a calming balm of a listen that I’ve found myself coming back to over and over this year so far. For a bit of log-rolling, an observant listener will see that I haven’t posted in quite a while, despite a track record of at least a post a week for the last year or so. I don’t want to agonize too much over it, but my mental and physical health have been all over the place and I’ve found it so, so, so difficult to focus. So, big thanks to Aureolin Winter for sitting at the top of my “to write about” list for the last little while, hopefully, its patience will be rewarding to you as you listen. 

Here’s where I usually drop a fairly long preamble in which I try to sum up my year in music to some degree or another, whether it’s trying to find disparate themes or some other common touchstone. But this year? 

It’s been a year. 

Despite everything, it was an incredible year for music and I’m excited to share with you what stood out to me the most this year. In the past, I’ve broken this up into two separate posts with favorite albums and songs but, fittingly I think for 2025, this year it’s all coming to you at once. Below are links to Tidal playlists for my favorite 50 albums, 100 songs, and assortment of EPs. 

2025 has been one of the most challenging in my life so far. Music has been one of the few balms to get me through it. I don’t know how I can wrap up any kinds of thoughts on this most fraught of years with any kind of coherence or, really, relevance. So I have to remind myself of my own refrain at concerts: “Less Talk! More Rock!” and just get into it. I've published 3 playlists on Tidal if you'd like to listen along.

Happy listening and here’s to 2026!

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. 

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.  

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 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. 

Two and a half hours of spectacular psych/stoner/prog rock from two highly regarded players in the game, Drop Out III is a spectacular way to spend your time. There’s certainly a lot of music here and a lot to be said, but, really, it’s probably better to just dim the lights, put this one on and let it wash over you and experience the trip first-hand.

Italian longform prog-rock that very much puts me in mind of work from legendary Spanish folk-metal rockers Mago de Oz. Nuova Era has releases that stretch back to the mid 80’s and this new record from earlier this year is their first in almost a decade. It’s also nearly an hour long and is split across two tracks. The first is the longer of the two and the main show here. It features rollicking riffs, chugging long-winded rhythmic jams, pipe organs galore, frantic, near operatic wailing in Italian and Spanish (with lots of lyrics alluding to internal torment, guilt and the dark depths of the mind…and the sea; so, you know, the album is riffing on the classic Jules Verne book from which it takes its name), gentle burbles of oceanic field recordings, horn sections, mournful turned-tirumphant chrome-gleaned guitar solos and just unabashed levels of confidence as it careens in tone between the dead serious and profoundly silly. One glance at the cover art shows that Nuova Era have their tongues planted firmly in cheek in regards to the themes but one listen also demonstrates the profound level of craft and love for the act of musical storytelling that Nuova Era pushes forward with this project. A fantastically fun listen.

It’s already April?! Well, three months into this whirlwind of a year and there has already been a staggering amount of good music released into the world. I wanted to do a general round-up of the albums that have caught my attention so far this year. While the whole point of this blog is to point out things I like, this space is also going to serve as a general clearing house for albums I’ve been wanting to write about but haven’t quite gotten to it–the sheer forward momentum of my life coupled with the near-relentless drops of awesome new music has made it very slippery for me to keep my footing so lots of stuff has fallen through the cracks (both on this blog and in my personal life but that’s for another time and place to tell). So, below, in roughly release order, is a list and some thoughts about music I think is worth your time that’s come out since January. Generally, if I’ve already written about something, I’ll just post a link and move on, but I’ll reserve the right to delve into more detail about some of these later on :) 

Oh, and I made a playlist with a single song from each of the records of this list as a bit of a thumbnail on the year. To make it a bit more worthwhile, I’ll exclude selecting tracks I’ve already recommended on the blog or put on the regular updating playlist.  Listen along to my Quarter 1 highlights here. 

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For such a short album and with so many collaborators it’s remarkable how cohesive and full this project sounds. A testament to a unified vision, perhaps, or maybe just a willingness to amplify the best instincts of this particular kind of “active ambient” sound. If you’re new around these parts and don’t have time to pull up a chair and listen to the likes of Aleksi Perälä, M. Geddess Gengras, Craven Faults or 36, but still want a general vibe-check without even touching any of those artists? Then Worlds: Collide is for you. Blending tracks featuring new-age tinged piano alongside looping-synth interludes reminiscent of the best of Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygéne, it’s also such a brisk listen that it’s over before you know it, leaving your brain wanting just a bit more of that digital warmth. 

Breakneck psych rock (think Death From Above 1979’s classic You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine or King Gizzard’s genre-defining Nonagon Infinity) with a heavy emphasis on 50’s midnight creature feature vibes, this debut LP from Dr. Mocker is a shockingly good listen and deserves a lot of attention. If nothing else, for how well the band maintains the tantalizingly oppressive tone without making the thing dreary. Indeed, it thrums with an unhinged energy that explodes in tracks like “A Comfortable Lie,” and coils back up into the metal-spike ornamented steampunk jack-in-the-box that is the overall vibe of the thing (like mood-setters "Channels" and "Air of Sighs"). And that it all ends in an exemplary transition to a stunner of a ten minute-prog rocker ("Under the Rocks") is just icing on the cake.

An obsession with riding the line of blown-out guitars (ala Sleigh Bells and Jai Paul) combined with a love of disco and 80’s synth-pop coalesces into this absolute blast of a record from London’s WOOZE. I spent some time trying to figure out which track to feature for a single recommendation but I think it really takes a couple songs to wrap your head around all the toys that WOOZE have pulled out of the music production box and are bashing together like so many plastic dinosaurs, wooden blocks and stuffed animals. Opener “Sabre Tooth Spider” features power chords that sound 10 miles high and a nearly Brad Roberts-deep backing vocal as it slams through its blazing fast 3 minute run time. With lyrics like “I wanna be your sugar daddy, but you call me daddy of the long-legs variety,” and “haven’t I been the bane of sobriety? We should get together and do Dry January!” I’m not exactly sure what the song is supposed to be “about,” but with this much energy, who cares? Then, if you’re short on time and don’t want to just keep listening to the whole album, skip forward to “Was Father Present” which sounds like an honest-to-god forgotten b-side from Trent Reznor’s collaboration with David Bowie back with 1997’s classic “I’m Afraid of Americans.”

So, go ahead, take a spin and get WOOZEY.

1. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flight b741 

2. Slomosa - Tundra Rock

3. GUM & Ambrose Kenny-Smith - Ill Times

4. Donato Dozzy - Magda

5. Mary Lattimore & Walt McClements - Rain on the Road

6. Foxing - Foxing

7. Fabienne Debarre - Welcome to the Age of Broken Minds

8. Craven Faults - Bounds

9. Half Waif - See You At the Maypole

10. Vista House - They’ll See Light

11. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD

12. Charli XCX, et al. - Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat

13. Ben Luka Boysen - Alta Ripa

14. 36 - Exit All the Lights

15. KNEECAP - Fine Art

16. A.G. Cook - Britpop

17. Oval Angle - Figures of Speech

18. Los Bitchos - Talkie Talkie

19. Pom Pom Squad - Mirror Starts Moving Without Me

20. GIFT - Illuminator

Other notable releases: μ-Ziq’s Grush, Loula Yorke’s Volta, Jónsi’s First Light, Deerlady’s Greatest Hits, MILLY’s Your Own Becoming, Pye Corner Audio’s The Endless Echo, Anis Kitu’s Kaihola, Jack White’s NO NAME, MONO’s OATH, WHY?’s The Well I Fell Into, Loma’s How Will I Live Without A Body?, Blisspoint’s Dog, St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming, Goat’s Goat, Hawksmoor’s Oneironautics, Socks and Ballerina’s A Bit Jumpy., Xylitol’s, Anemones, Bogdan Raczynski’s You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever, Nemahsis’s Verbathim, Kelly Lee Owen’s Dreamstate, Loscil’s Umbel, ORB’s Tailem Bend, Floating Points’s Cascade, Kiamos’s II, Frances Forever’s Lockjaw, O.’s WeirdOs, Discovery Zone’s Quantum Web, Prayer’s Loss of Meaning, Chihei Hatakeyama’s Thousand Oceans, Jonny From Space’s Back Then I Didn’t But Now I Do, Trees Speak’s TimeFold, Autechre's AE_2022--

Ok, first things first. I can’t at all be objective about the following statement and I acknowledge that but here it goes anyway: The Chieftain's The Bells of Dublin is the best set of Christmas songs front-to-back that have ever been put to tape. In fact, save for the soundtracks for The Muppet Christmas Carol, Charlie Brown's Christmas and Home Alone and the fantastic Christmas album Sia put out a few years ago, you really don’t need any other Christmas records (though there’s room in there for some albums from Manheim Steamroller, Trans-Siberian Orchestra and the still-top tier belters of the Hallelujah Chorus, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir).

Now, I’ve been listening to The Bells of Dublin since I was 7 years old, and Christmas music is inherently wrapped up in nostalgia so there’s large grains of salt to take with any recommendations of this nature but really, I urge you to put this record on during your next holiday gathering. Being a release from Ireland’s long-standing Chieftains outfit, it’s, of course, heavily weighted towards Irish and Celtic tunes and renditions of otherwise traditional Christmas classics so be prepared for lots of fiddle, flutes, Uilleann pipes the thundering of the bodhrán and lots of spoken and sung Irish and gaelic. There’s some old classics like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Oh Holy Night” and “I Saw Three Ships,” but there’s plenty of deep Celtic cuts too, like “A Breton Carol,” and my childhood favorite, the rambunctious “The Wren in the Furze.”

But, as has always been the case with The Chieftains, there’s some surprising international collaborations. Of particular note is the raucous from Elvis Costello (in the ode to the post-Christmas feast-coma “St. Steven’s Day Murders”) and the genuinely thought-provoking turn from Jackson Browne with “The Rebel Jesus.” And while I’m no longer religious, that song cuts through the usual Christmas platitudes with a message that’s as true now as it ever was and which I’ll quote here:

“We guard our world with locks and guns and we guard our fine possessions, and once a year when Christmas comes, we give to our relations. And perhaps we give a little to the poor if the generosity should seize us but if any one of us should interfere in the business of why there are poor, then they get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

Merry Christmas everyone!

Do I dare call this a retro review? I can’t help but smile at the alliteration (we love a good alliteration) and yet also be saddened by the inexorable passage of time. I remember working at Zia Record Exchange when this came out, so how old can it possibly be?

Oh.

Well, regardless, I’m on record with complex (and ever-evolving) thoughts on The Mars Volta’s body of work—having once written: “something about the need to embrace the most obtuse directions for a lot of their music kept a lot of it from being something I’d choose to seek out. And while I liked De-Loused and Frances the Mute, it was frustrating to constantly have them swerve left when I had the gut feeling that, you know, a right turn might be okay too.” 

Even so, every couple of years I’d try to go through their back catalog and see if anything clicked. And early this year, I put on The Bedlam in Goliath on a whim. After all, 2022’s self-titled record from The Mars Volta had made it into my top albums of that year, so it was probably time to revisit the records I’d bounced off of in the past.

And, reader, this time something clicked. Opener “Aberinkula” doesn’t so much start as it explodes like the big bang: frighteningly hot and spiraling out in every direction at near the speed of light. Sure, it sounds like a wall of noise, and I think that wall had just been too high for me to scale in the past. But something about that early day in January had me primed to get my head over that wall and fall into the cacophonous, terrifying whirlpool that is The Bedlam in Goliath. Yes, as a whole, it’s pretty long and can be an exhausting listen, but I think that only adds to the overwhelming nature of it all. There is some sort of narrative going on—something about a cursed Ouija board (and apparently the creation of this album, in and of itself, was an incredibly fraught experience)—but all that really melts away in the unrelenting forward motion as bandleaders Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López capture ball lightning in a Tesla coil.

I really do recommend listening to the whole record if you can set aside the time and get in the right headspace, but for a brief glimpse, I’ll post the song “Agadez,” which is actually one of the handful of tracks that doesn’t explode out of the gate in the first few seconds, so it might be a bit more digestible as a single. Still, I think the song is a good representation of the album as a whole, especially as it starts to freak out in the second half. Even 16 years later, this project sounds innovative, nervy, and entirely unique in its approach to off-kilter art-rock. The Mars Volta go on tour early next year, and I hope it indicates that this pair of veteran weirdos will still deliver future surprises.

  

Hailing from Norway, this four-piece has named their second album after the genre they both play and coined, which combines influences of classic metal from the ’70s and spaced-out desert/stoner rock of the ’90s into an electrifying sonic mix known as Tundra Rock. That description gets you most of the way there: vocals are often double-tracked like Ozzy-lead Black Sabbath, drumming is hypnotic and heavy like old Kyuss jams, and riffs are alternately pounding and melodic, pausing occasionally for dreamy moments of bliss like early QOTSA. There’s also a distinctly Scandinavian sense of shaggy perfectionism here: the production is clean and sheer, but the playing is loose enough to allow for moments of unpredictability. I can imagine Slomosa easily playing heavier covers from Sweden’s The Radio Dept. They even invoke some The Argument-era Fugazi with the mid-album instrumental “Good Mourning” transitioning into the thundering “Battling Guns.” 

And speaking of which, while all these songs rip (seriously, not a single dud in the bunch), I think “Battling Guns” is the clear standout. Hooky, heavy, and featuring a stellar bass solo (we love a good bass player around these parts), it’s been on repeat since the first listen. The video for it is also an exciting watch and demonstrates the easy rapport between these musicians that bodes well for their future career. It’s also refreshingly political, with the band showing support for the people of Gaza, who have been subjected to the kind of violence and terror flashed on screen—acknowledging, of course, the absurdity and horror of all war, especially the kind perpetuated by colonialist powers. While the mushroom cloud has long been an extreme image that many hard rock bands have deployed for simple shock value, here, where the band ends the video eating watermelon in silence, the threat of nuclear annihilation seems apt. And while I’m stoked to read that the band seems to be in this for the long haul (when asked in a recent interview if they could be in any band at any time in history, the bassist replied, “No, I just want to be in Slomosa,” to which the lead singer chimed in, “Slomosa in 2050”), they’ve already released a stone-cold classic. Dim the lights, light some incense, turn up the bass and put this bad boy on—you won’t regret it.