What Bandcamp daily editors are listening right now.
Black dresses
LAUNCHING FISH
In early 2020, after TikTok’s rapid — and unexpected — surge in success, Canadian noise-pop duo Black Dresses, better known as Devi McCallion and Ada Rook, announced their plans to shut down the project. (I described in detail their reasoning for that decision elsewherebut in short, blame it on obsessive fans who don’t understand boundaries.)
When they suddenly reappeared the following year with Forever in your heart, an album that many consider to be their opus, I doubted they had backed off; when they unfollow, Forget your own face, thirteen months later, I totally assumed it.
I have good news and bad news this week: the good news is that black dresses are back, LAUNCHING FISH another stellar, surprise release LP; the bad news is that they’ve officially been brought, as Rook said on Twitter: “This is the last one.” If you haven’t tried Black Dresses’ chrome bubblegum yet, do it yourself and switch it up this time: from Nine Inch Nails-y industrial pop (“CAT CUP”) to brassy noise rock (“PURE REALITY”), to trip-hop-tinged screamo ( “GOOD THINGS HAPPEN”), it’s never boring LAUGHING FISH.
If this is indeed the duo’s final work, then it’s one heck of a highlight. If not, then we should consider ourselves extremely lucky indeed.
–Camp Zoe
Conway
Slant Face Killah
In just over 10 years, the laid-back crew known as Griselda have amassed about as many releases as The Fall in 40. As such, it can be difficult to recognize the good ones from bad ones. Good luck, Slant Face Killah is one of the good ones. Conway has always been my pick for the most engaging MC of the bunch, and here he’s fully on board, ably backed by beats from The Alchemist, Daringer, Conductor Williams, and Swizz Beatz, among others.
Unlike the harrowing emotional territory he explored in 2022 God does not make mistakes (his best, though, IMO), Conway is a punchline machine here, rattling off jokes so sly that you have to rewind them to make sure you heard him right or laugh at them again. (It’s hard to pick a favorite, but right now I’m leaning toward: “I’m bipolar, I’m not over the rampage/ I’ll take myself to an Andre 3000 flute album.”)
The features are only as good; Stove God Cooks—who seems, at this stage in his career, physically incapable of writing a bad bar, turns into yet another a feat of strength on “Mutty,” hilariously clowning Jay-Z’s endlessly quotable line from “Heart of the City” about bands breaking up. And sure, you could point out how some of this sounds like Conway returning to familiar ground, but that would also mean you’re probably a nuisance at parties.
Instead of that, Slant Face Killah is the sound of a man completely content with everything he’s accomplished, delivering a record that’s just fucking awesome fun to listen to. In the swamp of mediocrity that surrounds us, that is far from faint praise.
–J. Edward Keyes
La Luz
News from space
La Luz records have always existed at the intersection of the natural and the mystical – the place where the physical world begins to melt into something more abstract.
This is doubly true on News from space, the group’s fourth – and arguably best – full-length album. Written in the wake of frontwoman Shana Cleveland’s cancer diagnosis, the album’s songs straddle this world and the other, infusing Cleveland’s beautifully imaginative lyrical style with new shades.
(The most memorable of these is album highlight “Dandelions,” where Cleveland observes, “Dandelions, little suns of the meadow / How soon they’ll turn to moons.”) The group’s beautifully baroque songwriting also feels more expansive.
La Luz has always drawn from a deep well of ’60s psych pop, but here they achieve a kind of classic greatness. The vocal melodies climb up the octave in half-steps, stopping at every sharp and straight path, their meandering trace enhancing Cleveland’s deliberately enigmatic lyrics.
“You can be a mystery if you really want to,” she sings in the haunting song “Good Luck With Your Secret.” That mystery is one of the things that has made La Luz one of the most consistently awarded rock bands in independent music.
News from space theirs is the most interesting puzzle to date.
–J. Edward Keyes
Motorists
Touched by things
Well, this record is just a non-stop hit, isn’t it? Toronto’s Motorists’ sophomore LP is an unapologetic grab for the power pop crown, packing enough colorful hairpins and twists into its brisk 35 minutes to make all those early ’80s New Jersey rock bands proud.
Touched by things it stands out for its sense of momentum and pure sense of fun, even if the lyrics are a bit clunky to merit vocals in the foreground and echo-less, if you care about that sort of thing (I do). But forgive them, music like this was never meant to make you think too much, just drive a little too fast.
–Mariana Timony
Ockeroid
Land of Crows (Original Soundtrack)
I know we still have a week until May, but with Hades II, Animal well, Crazy boy, Hauntsand Land of Crows over the past thirty days to unanimous, vociferous praise, I’m just going to go ahead and call it: this has been indie gaming’s best month yet.
The same goes for the soundtrack, which is strong throughout; however, in my opinion, the top score (excuse the pun) goes to a composer from Los Angeles Ockeroid and creepy, yet playful ambient compositions for which they were designed Land of Crows, an extremely enjoyable survival-horror-adventure game by SFB Games. Vivid, old-fashioned presentation PlayStation graphics with challenging puzzles and combat (fig Resident Evil through a Final Fantasy VII filter), tasks players with uncovering the mysteries of an abandoned theme park while avoiding endless hordes of monsters, a 6-8 hour experience that’s equal parts stressful and sentimental.
Ockeroid’s arrangements of songs like “Fairytale Town” and “Ocean Kingdom” harness ’90s nostalgia to similarly unsettling effect, mixing and matching vintage sound fonts with a dynamic fluidity that heightens the tension on screen without overwhelming the attention.
Not by Akira Yamaoka Silent Hill 2 OST I did my best to listen to the survival horror soundtrack separately. Indie gamers keep winning. And ambient fans, that goes for you too.
–Camp Zoe
Forgive
Paranoid in hell
If Pardoner are ever to be awarded the standard of popularity they deserve, it will be because they finally wore it all out with a series of fierce records declaring that they don’t care about a) music b) success c) being cool, while at the same time making a racket more musical, dynamic, and simply more fun but everything else around him.
New EP Paranoid in hell continues last year’s joke People who love peace expanding that record’s voracious appetite for all the best guitar rock of the past four decades, but skipping the lazy ’90s rock crap for more distinct ’80s punk callbacks (singer and guitarist Max Freeland calls the California punk band Dils, and the powerhouse pop group from Ohija Mice as an inspiration.)
It was also released on the great Convulse Records in Denver, the perfect hardcore label for a band that has secretly always been a hardcore band thanks in no small part to respected drummer Rivero van den Berghe.
Music this good can’t stay a secret forever, can it? Well, yes, but it won’t be because the Pardoner failed the job. We might not be either, though, as the initial batch of 400 7″ EPs are all but sold out. Good work, standards.
–Mariana Timony
pink siifu
GOT FOOD IN THE CREEPY’!! VOLUME.2
Just in time for Memorial Day weekend, Pink Siifu brings you the perfect barbecue soundtrack I have food in the manger!!! Flight. 2, a beautifully hazy 30-minute stroll through neo-soul, jazz and hip-hop that evokes the feeling of early summer in both its sound and performance.
Presented as one long poem, the poems within it have no discrete endings or beginnings; instead, one simply gives way to the next in the same way that a hot afternoon gives way to a cool evening when you’re not paying attention to the clock.
One minute you’re listening to a sloppy, jazzy organ phrase, and the next you’re in the middle of a laid-back trap tune with no clear idea of how you got there, but no matter what. As at any good backyard party, welcome guests wander in and out, dropping a few lines before heading to their next destination.
Siifu is also in relaxed mode, and his delivery is loose and rambling throughout, holding the whole odyssey together without any constriction. The whole thing is refreshingly low-stakes and begs to be played on loop as you pop the cap off a cold one and throw a few burgers and dogs on the grill.
–J. Edward Keyes
various artists
Imaginal Anthem Vol XIII: The Songs of Bruce Cockburn
Several times while listening to this James Toth-certain recognition of Canadian artist Bruce Cockburn—one of the country’s domestic geniuses, along with Mitchell, Cohen, Young and Willie Dunn—I had to pause the record to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the music, delivered so poignantly by a range of indie artists who approach Cockburn’s painterly songs with respect but also with a sense of artistic play, eg Lou Turner’s use of marimba on “ Pacing the Cage, heartbreaking Luke Schneider’s pedal steel on Kyle Hammett’s version of “All the Diamonds,” a welcome surprise vocal from experimental fingerstyle guitarist Matthew Rolin on Powers Rolin’s version of “Fall.”
Beauty is an extremely underrated quality in music today, as if something beautiful can’t also be brilliant or that any emotion triggered by loveliness is by nature shallow and fleeting. Bridging love and grief and humanity, this collection of Cockburn’s poems proves otherwise.