Atsuko Chiba - Water, It Feels Like It's Growing (2023)

The Canadian band claim to "venturesomely cross genre-defining borders with a cohesive and hypnotic blend of post-rock, progressive rock, and krautrock, weaving together a rich sonic tapestry that subverts through offbeat songwriting". This blend of genres feels particularly impressive on their third album called Water, It Feels Like It's Growing.

The dense and steamy atmosphere is one that characterizes the band. Their music is very much guitar-oriented, often in a very prog rock way, but adds so much to their compositions. The very first thing is the use of vocals: there is a good range of various kinds of vocals, often with the use of backing vocals, making those heavy psychedelic rock vibes all over the album. These fun-fueled, colourful compositions have this energetic and engaging component accentuated very much. But the band's music can get more atmospheric, even dreamy, with Shook (I'm Often)'s oneiric vocals that fill out the spaces around the audience and Seeds' beautiful string sounds. The whole album sounds like it was taken from thee past when psychedelia and prog were more popular and I appreciate this kind of homage.

Water, It Feels Like It's Growing costs 9 EUR (9.99 CAD).

Check: Water, It Feels Like It's Growing

Country: Canada 

Genre: psychedelic prog rock

Label: Mothland

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Yoo Doo Right - A Murmur, Boundless to the East (2022)

The Montreal-based Yoo Doo Right were one of the biggest gigs during this year's dunk!festival. Live they present a loud and exciting volcano of emotions but on their albums their music feels more nuanced and artistically complex. A year after their fantastic debut on Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose, they released at least as good followup in the form of A Murmur, Boundless to the East.

And accordingly, they describe their own sound as a concoction of numerous genres that in the end results in "crafting a unique sound that could be described as a >>car crash in slow motion<<". Such a fitting summary and I can totally see it: many different elements everywhere, not-too-fast tempo and the feeling of overwhelming energy. This is their music all right. Probably the best way to simplify it is labeling the music as psychedelic post-rock. On one hand the complicated structures of the compositions as well as the very psychedelic rock-specific vocals, on the other the guitar passages that grow and grow in a tension-building way (so great in SMB) that leave no one unsatisfied. 

The two worlds are iconically combined in the album-finishing Feet Together, Face Up, on the Front Lawn, a psychedelic rock anthem sung in short phrases that ends with mind-blowing guitar heaviness.

A Murmur, Boundless to the East costs 7.5 EUR (9.99 CAD).

yoo doo right - Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose (2021)

Check: Feet Together, Face Up, on the Front Lawn

Country: Canada

Genre: psychedelic post-rock

Label: Mothland

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yoo doo right - Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose (2021)

One of the most interesting debuts of the last months, the Canadian yoo doo right have just released their first long play Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose and it hits so hard in the best way possible. 

The band describes their music in a very picturesque way, talking about the guitar and synthesizer soundscapes in which "solemn, chin-to-chest vocals dance in and out of the primordial sonic spectrum". And indeed, the album starts with a solid dose of guitar blizzard in a very post-rock-like compositions, that, at the same, suggest a lot of psychedelic rock influences, especially with the way the repetitive drums induce mesmerizing trance as do the similarly repetitive vocals that appear somewhere in the middle of the album. But the main magnet for me is the quality of the noise. It is always present, sometimes in the backgrounds, sometimes in more prominent role and especially attractive in the perfectly loud finish in Black Moth.

Their music seems to draw inspirations from both past (Marché des vivants' title may be taken from the event held in Poland to commemorate the Jewish victims of WWII) and future (extremely Black Mirror-like vibes can be felt in The Moral Compass of a Self-Driving Car particularly). And perhaps everything that fits their spacial and massive music that shows a lot of space vibes (they introduce themselves as "part interstellar ear-worms" after all) and induces striking feelings in the audience.

Don't Think You Can Escape Your Purpose costs 9.99 CAD.

Check: Black Moth

Country: Canada

Genre: psychedelic post-rock

Label: Mothland

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