Inwavves - This Summer (2021)

Formerly known as Adasteris (a name that still shows in many places and is now used as a moniker for a small label the artists established), Inwavves is a band from Dublin that "combines elements of alternative metal, shoegaze, post-rock and Boards of Canada-esque electronica into it's own sound" and their (what seems to be the third) album This Summer shows how gracefully they can do that.

The music here is clearly a combination of several music genres. The overall psychedelic rock atmosphere encompasses very dreamy vocals that appear concurrently with metal-like screams (slightly hidden in the backgrounds, so impressive in Siebenundsiebzig) in what can only be described as trip-hop-like dreamy compositions. They can, and usually do, easily get louder and strictly guitar-based (as is the case in This Summer, the title track) and turn into post-rock-like crescendos. Truly, almost every track here sounds as if taken from a different music world, while together they still seem to keep a coherent whole. So there's some neoclassicism in Forever, some dad-rock guitar riffs in Someday Soon or the already mentioned metal-like vocals. This complexity of genres, this eclectic style of the band is something that attracts towards this release.

This Summer costs 7 EUR.

Check: Siebenundsiebzig

Country: Ireland

Genre: eclectic psychedelic rock

Label: Ad Asteris

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Some Became Hollow Tubes - Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups (2021)

The Canadian  duo Aidan Girt + Eric Quach (the latter better known as Thisquietarmy) creates some moody guitar-oriented post-rock music and decided to show a new album after two years since the LP debut Keep it in the Ground from 2019.

It may only be an album that contains the results of clearing out and moving along, as they suggest on the Bandcamp page, but it may be well my favourite one from the band. There are two compositions here, both fairly long and this makes it possible for the artists to give themselves some space and time to properly develop this music. In the best post-rock way, they start as subtle instrumental ambient pieces, go through the moody instrumental music phase to finish with good, old guitar crescendo (especially impressive and pretty long in My Eyes Are Itchy And I Can Barely Breathe). The atmosphere in those two is truly outstanding, pretty comparable to the best post-rock acts out there and this album makes me wait for the Quebec artists new music with a pleasant impatience.

Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups costs 7 USD.

Check: My Eyes Are Itchy And I Can Barely Breathe

Country: Quebec, Canada

Genre: guitar post-rock

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Sugar Horse - The Live Long After (2021)

They call themselves "decidedly average" and playing "monotonous rock" and it does sound a bit fishy for me as their sound is far from being average, that's for sure. The Bristol-based band, throughout several years, released three EPs while getting ready to showing their LP debut. This finally happened at the end of August and I must say, the new album The Live Long After struck me with its sound.

I adore how loud their music feels. Thanks to the dispersed quality of the vocals and screams, the guitars seem to be even louder, so that the audience feels the noise in the whole bodies, every bone vibrates each time the music goes up. And it does it a lot - there's quite a lot of quieter parts where the clean vocals or even basses are put in the spotlight, only to get consumed by the rabid guitars sooner than later. This comes from various inspirations the band admits to having: from shoegaze to doom metal to stoner music, every one of them seems to be audible on this album. The quality of the noise is particularly impressive in the first songs of the album (after I Am Not Now - "an anti-hymn based on an ancient Byzantine chant" serving as an intro) with Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan being my personal number one. 

There are also ballads here and I find them a bit less exciting. However, they represent the band's modus operandi, as the artists create things in slower pace, or, as they call it themselves, they "have a complete disregard for urgency", not to mention that even the slowest ballads here have to drown within the lovely ocean of noise eventually.

The Live Long After costs 7.5 EUR (12 AUD).

Check: Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan

Country: UK

Genre: noisy post-metal

Label: Small Pond Records/Art As Catharsis

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Janusz Jurga - IST (2021)

Janusz Jurga not only has released five albums under his own name, he is also a member of the Vysoké Čelo collective and a cofounder of the Opus Elefantum label, one of the best on Polish offstream music scene. His newest album is called IST and provides us with everything we love in his music since 2018 and his debut album Duchy Rogowca.

Jurga's deep electronica/dub/techno music is, as always, filled with "dark, dense and oneiric atmosphere", similar to what one can find in dark ambient and dark folk genres. This mysterious and a little bit unnerving ambiance is seamlessly combined with deep-bass electronica making me think of the Lithuanian Giriu Dvasios, who, just like Jurga does, also draws inspirations from folk music to a high degree. Just like on his best-known release Hypnowald, Jurga decorates the electronic passages with forest-originating field recordings and this is something that couldn't fit this music better. This makes the forest dance in a rather ominous way, dance around you and everyone who's lost within. Another thing is the spoken word vocals that appear in the opening and the finishing tracks, performed by Żebyr, the lyrics make the whole album even deeper and more mysterious. Especially the very last sentence of the release: "I guess it doesn't matter what place we ended up in, we're here".

IST costs 2.5 EUR (10 PLN).

Janusz Jurga - Hypnowald (2019) EN

Check: WALD

Country: Poland

Genre: dark folk dub

Label: Opus Elefantum

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Nate Wey - Lost Realities (2021)

Nate Wey's single appeared on this blog already back in September '18 and it's hard to believe that the solo debut LP of Souvenir Driver's vocalist is released only now, three years into the future. His signature dreamy atmosphere and warm vocals prove that it was worth waiting for.

His music is a blend of slow, almost acoustic-like indie pop-rock with ethereal atmosphere, making me think of Rey Villalobos and his House of Wolves in the more peaceful parts. The compositions here are driven by Way's soft, whispering-like vocals and subtly noisy guitars in the backgrounds. But the most impressive here is the artist's ability to write catchy and captivating melodies: songs like Suddenly Tamed, Dark Fountain and the beautiful ballad Ghost Station are what stays with you after the album finishes.

Given the moody but also emotional vibes present in his music, it's no wonder he sings about romance, break-ups but also apocalypse. The latter is very tangible in those rare moments when Wey's music gets louder and more rock-like, changes of pace like this are always surprising and slightly terrifying, however, it means there's no way to get bored with the artist's music. And talking about emotions, I have not heard in a long time a song as emotional as No Harm No Faul, this tragic break-up song is such a tear-jerking anthem someone like Paragraphs could sing. Beautiful.

Lost Realities costs 7 USD.

Souvenir Driver - Brace Yourself (2017) EN

Check: Ghost Station

Country: Oregon, US

Genre: emotional dream pop

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Spirit System - Whatevermind (2021)

The North Carolina-based Spirit System released their second album called Whatevermind, and it includes a very energetic and catchy take on the noisy, dreamy rock. The album was inspired by, as they state on their Facebook account, "pandemic daydreams, birdwatching, astral projection, melancholia, extraterrestrial summer crushes, cats napping, hauntings of the 90s, sunset driving, a snapshot of liminal spaces" and makes a great and airy summary of the last two years.

The band consists of "cozy, stoned, herbal tea drinking, cat loving, late sleepers", what not to love? Their music is less sleepy though, quite the opposite, except for the very dreamy vocals from Laurie Ruroden, there's a lot of lively guitars with very shoegazey moments, appropriate reverbs and instrumental haze, as well as pace-setting drums. The male vocals, on the other hand, add some coldwave/post-punk vibes to the picture, but even those don't obscure the main nature of this music: it's just absolutely immersive and downward atmospheric and the best proof for that is Lavender with it's mesmerizing and airy finish. This is a kind of music that is both atmospheric and pop-like catchy and I appreciate it. Especially when it comes to the loud and satisfying guitar fragments as it is the case in Effrayant for example.

Whatevermind costs 10 USD.

Check: Lavender 

Country: North Carolina, US

Genre: lively dreamgaze

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Horte - Maa antaa yön vaientaa (2021)

There's some dreamy/shoegaze projects from Finland I really enjoy and now, after the likes of Radio Supernova and Mumrunner, it's time for the quartet called Horte. The band released their third album Maa antaa yön vaientaa via Pelagic Records this summer and there's no reason not to try it if you are an ethereal music fan. 

The album's title, as far as I understand, translates roughly to "The earth lets the night shut (itself?) down", referring to the darker but also calmer take on the dreamy music they go with. There's not so much of traditional guitar noise here, the airy vibes come mostly from the atmospheric vocals singing in Finnish (it's always something that in my mind adds to the mystery and attractiveness of foreign music) while music is something that borders slowcore-like indie rock or trip-hop with the way it draws from electronica-influenced backgrounds and experimental add-ons. This concoction makes it feel not only very fresh but also extremely artsy, you can see that the musicians must know well what they do.

In this view, Kun joki haihtuu is a special track, the first that shows the louder, the noisier side of the project, the one that is soaked with the unnerving but also exciting atmosphere. Together with Väisty tieltä they create a satisfying and very shoegaze-like finish, which only proves there's little the band can't carry out.

Maa antaa yön vaientaa costs whatever you want to pay.

Check: Kun joki haihtuu

Country: Finland

Genre: trip-hop shoegaze

Label: Pelagic Records

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Unreqvited - Beautiful Ghosts (2021)

There are artists who produce a lot of albums (and for me, it means more than one a year) and they are all absolutely of the same, high quality. In those cases, I can't really post about all of them, but sometimes you have no choice. The Canada's Unreqvited is one of those projects. They released great albums Mosaic II: la déteste et la détresse and Empathica last year alone and are back with another brilliant thing called Beautiful Ghosts.

There's no mistake in that they call their music "depressive & uplifting" nor that the album's title refers to both the aesthetically pleasing and the mysterious. The artist's signature sound goes together with what is often referred to as blackgaze: the rapid flow of metal music that is being made more accessible by electronica and synth's use. And then there are also sacral-like, very airy backing vocals (so beautiful in Autumn & Everley), drones and neoclassical instruments (so epic in Cherish). One would say that this is this kind of stuff that is surely meant to get lost within metal music, but Unreqvited manages to somehow keep alive both faces of his music: the metal is loud, the ethereal parts are beautiful. Beautiful ghosts. And it's especially well-audible in tracks like Funeral Pyre with all its diversity.

It also very much fits the theme of the release, love, although, as the album's Bandcamp description points, "pop music basically has one universal topic: love, which is probably the very reason why metal bands generally shy away from that subject like the plague". If that's true, Beautiful Ghosts does such a great job to sound like the poppest black metal music ever. That said, it seems that it's not really what the artist wants to be the only sound of their project, as they state on Facebook, "Beautiful Ghosts isn’t necessarily indicative of where the music is going moving forward, in fact, the next thing i’m working on (for a spilt ep) will be the complete opposite". I presume there's gonna be some blacker music soon coming from this direction.

Beautiful Ghosts costs 6.99 USD.

Unreqvited - Mosaic II: la déteste et la détresse (2020) EN

Check: Autumn & Everley

Country: Canada

Genre: artsy blackgaze

Label: Prophecy Productions

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Pan Daijing - Jade 玉观音 (2021)

Born in China but residing in Berlin, Pan Daijing creates unique electronic and industrial music that on her new album Jade evolved into intimate and touching poetry performance as if she was standing right next to the listener and showing her heart.

After her debut solo album, the 2017 Lack, "Daijing has expanded her operatic vision into a series of major commissioned exhibition-performances" that involved big cultural institutions and epic-proportion compositions that included, for example, "full casts of opera singers and dancers". The new album was meant to be an antidote for this, a way for the artist to look inwards and produce more intimate music. It worked like charm, the electronica here is experimental enough to catch attention without overwhelming the audience, while the ambient pop vocals make it the subtlest, the most intimate poetry. Her voice, even though it's usually very quiet, sounds powerful both when put on top of delicate ambient or on harsh industrial noise. Not to mention the moment when it turns into opera-like madness in my favourite Metal.

Jade 玉观音  costs 7.5 EUR.

Check: Metal

Country: China/Germany

Genre: spoken word electronica

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Maarja Nuut - Hinged (2021)

The Estonian experimental musician Maarja Nuut, who I posted about when she released folky album World Inverted in 2020, clearly found the pandemic times very inspiring: after another album last year, she's back with a new one called Hinged.

The release revolves around the notion of generations and how many things, including physical belongings, are passed over time from the older to the younger ones. On her Bandcamp page, the artist describes her stay in her grandmother's farm that resulted in such a theme for thoughts and later for the album. The material came from sessions Nuut spent on "wiring modulars, experimenting with [her] voice, and strumming old vermona organ" and the results are very experimental, form-free, opened for anything. While the music experimentation leaves me confused more times than not, I really enjoy how the artist try new things with her voice, which results in mesmerizing and airy passages like in A Feast for instance.

And again, she's not alone. This time, Nuut joins forces with Nicolas Stocker, a Swiss jazzy artist who is very keen on free improvisation music - and although he is responsible only for drums in some of the songs here, you could say that it might have influenced the overall very experimental ambiance of the album. 

Hinged costs 8 EUR.

Maarja Nuut & Ruum - World Inverted (2020) PL

Check: A Feast

Country: Estonia

Genre: experimental electronica

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Królówczana Smuga - Żałosne (2021)

Folk-oriented but very modern lo-fi industrial music from the East corners of Poland, this is Adam Piętak and his music project that got recognized thanks to 2020's ODRAPDORAP and now is being pushed further towards the weird and mesmerizing world of Piętak's uniqueness due to the new album called Żałosne ("Lamentable"). 

Unlikeon the previous release, there's very small amounts of vocals here. Perhaps the new brand outfit with the BDSM/folk-inspired mask (yes, it's possible!) makes it particularly difficult to sing or Piętak just decided to draw special attention to something else this time. But when they show, in Sitarenka ("A Sievemaker Girl"), they are still his signature asset: somewhat spoken, somewhat shouted out, a bit metal-like, very lo-fi and mixing the folk leitmotif with Weltschmerz-induced, super unnerving lyrics. And yes, the folk roots are strong as always - the whole album's theme revolves around sitarstwo, the art of creating sieves, apparently popular back in the day in Piętak's hometown of Biłgoraj. But, as always in folk music, this is only an excuse to introduce the real theme of the album, as the artist states it, "Żałosne is an album about parting/splitting-up and the grief that comes with it". No wonder that the main message I took from those tracks is "everything is horrible!".

Further into the album, it turns out to be purely instrumental. The tone clearly sounds like it was supposed to: it's a lament of a hurt soul. And Piętak does a really good job in creating this industrial, post-apocalyptic and very, very sad atmosphere while adding folk instruments into the mix. I have no clue about those, I can't describe or name what is being used here, but you can hardly come across such a combination, very often bordering ambient/drone confusing soundscapes, that's for sure.

Żałosne costs 3.5 EUR (15 PLN).

Królówczana Smuga - ODRAPDORAP (2020)

Check: Gorzki baź

Country: Poland

Genre: industrial folk

Label: Requiem Records

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Sungaze - This Dream (2021)

Ian Hilvert and Ivory Snow are a married couple and also a band, their beautiful and dreamy music was already posted about here two years ago when the Ohio-based artists released their debut album. It has to be said that while the debut was brilliant, the follow-up in the form of this year's album called This Dream is nothing short of equally good.

The release title says everything about the music here. The album is opened with a subtle but touching intro that makes the second part of Look Away and its guitar sounds even more emphatic. But in general, the album is more about airy melodies than loud bursts, more about the ethereal laziness than anything rapid and uncomfortable. Even if the lyrics do point to some intriguingly uneasy topics, the music, its catchiness and dreamy atmosphere soothes them down. That said, my favourite Body in the Mirror is quite unnerving in the way it reminds us of the tiring burdens of existence while presenting also a frustratingly catchy tune. I think the album's last but one track's title, Strength in Softness, may be very much a meta-commentary to the artists' whole approach to music.

As before, the concept of their music revolves around Hilvert and Snow's vocals being in a form of a musical dialogue. Snow sounds sometimes like a true dreamy vocalist should, sometimes goes more into the lazy-like manner of Holy Motors' Eliann Tulve and this is a considerable compliment from my side. Oh, and don't forget - sungazing is something you can do only metaphorically unless you have special equipment to do so.

This Dream costs 7 USD.

Sungaze - Light in All of It (2019)

Check: Body in the Mirror

Country: Ohio, US

Genre: dreamgaze

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Ranges - Cardinal Winds (2021)

The Montana-based instrumental post-rock band caught my attention back in 2019 with the master-piece album Babel. I sort of had known they existed before, but it was only after their 4th album that I was sure they are one of the best artists within the genre. Now, with Cardinal Winds, the Americans want to remind us about this fact.

The title refers to the four directions of the world: North, South, East and West, as they were perceived by the Ancient Greeks. And so do some of the track titles while other ones suggesting some epic journey that takes place somewhere within those "cardinal winds". It all seems to be deriving inspirations from the Ancient epics like The Iliad and so there's little surprise that the guitar music here is definitely accordingly majestic and epic. The instruments sound like mountain ranges (sic!) or waves on a stromy sea - there's a lot going on with the loud and huge sounds for some time only to go low and quiet for a change eventually. I remember Babel as more massive, more audience-crushing while the new album shows a lot of melodies and complex compositions with everything a good post-rock release requires. Also, Deluge is going to be one of the post-rock highlights of the year.

Cardinal Winds costs 7 USD.

Ranges - Babel (2019)

Check: Deluge 

Country: Montana, US

Genre: guitar post-rock

Label: A Thousand Arms Music

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Wayne Robert Thomas - Canticles of Bliss and Canticles of B​-​Sides (2021)

Wayne Robert Thomas of Indianapolis is another fantastically sensible ambient artist whose albums are released via the Past Inside the Present label. Canticle of Bliss is one that shows huge amounts of the most delicate feeling of nostalgia written as a soundscape ambient music.

Thomas recorded the album between 2019 and 2020, but, as he admits, "quite a lot of the tracks [he] made ended up not making the cut and a considerable amount of time was then spent listening to a small selection of songs" - so he settled on the only reasonable way out: releasing a companion B-side album that is at least as good as the main one. And although the overall inspirations taken from the works of Hildegard of Bingen are pretty straightforward, the artist points to the fact that the religious content of the originals is not necessarily present on his album (although some droney moments like  Legend of Whispering Hills definitely have those cathedral-like sacral vibes) and the vocals are transmuted into guitar loops that express his own feelings. This results in long, long minutes of beautiful and calm compositions.

Canticles of Bliss costs 7 USD, Canticles of B​-​Sides costs 5 USD.

Check: Legend of Whispering Hills

Country: Indiana, US

Genre: ambient soundscape

Label: Past Inside the Present

 

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Praises - EP4 (2021)

I remember the third EP by the Canadian artist Jesse Crowe's project Praises as one of my favourite albums of the last year. Not surprisingly, this year's EP4 is almost as good and absolutely worth-mentioning on the blog.

Crowe's music balances somewhere between ethereal ambient pop and industrial-flavoured electronica. However, it also shows a lot of catchy melodies and compositions that make some of her songs my instant classics - like it is with the EP's closure in A World on Fire. But before that, there's three more songs: the opening ballad Apples for My Love, the more post-punk-esquely aggressive and cold We Let Go and Soil - a song that brings some of artsy chaos to the picture: Crowe's vocals become here theatrical and more into pop's melodiousness while the music is very much unpredictable. And finally, A World on Fire adds a madly catchy chorus on top of the unnerving, anxious theme. My favourite kind of combination.

EP4 costs 4 CAD.

Check: A World on Fire

Country: Canada

Genre: industrial synthpop

Label: Hand Drawn Dracula

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⊙ (L'Effondras) - Anabasis (2021)

Four years after their last release (the brilliant Les Flavescences), the French band ⊙ are back with their fourth album called Anabasis. Filled with guitar post-rock sounds, this is a solid offer for all the fans of the genre.

The LP shows a "natural progression in the band's body of work, clarifying their aesthetics in five haunted & hypnotic tracks". Those are built in rather unique way, the compositions are often very suprising and pace-changing (take for instance the second part of The Grinding Wheel with its hesitant and yet very loud bursts of sound). And so it makes the longest tracks the most unpredictable and thus the best, especially when it comes to the 11-minutes-long Ce que revele l'eclipse with the massive wall of noise that makes an especially satisfying post-rock treat. There's so many interesting moments on the album, even though it's only almost 40 minutes long, and everything is based on the impressive and highly atmospheric guitar madness - it is definitely true that the album "explores more emotional & personal territories without losing an inch of the band's gritty trademark".

Anabasis costs 7 EUR.

Check: The Grinding Wheel

Country: France

Genre: guitar post-rock

Label: Medication Time Records

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