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Talkhouse

Obituary is a death metal band from Tampa, Florida. Their most recent album, Obituary, was released in 2017.
(Photo Credit: Ester Segarra)

Obituary

Music

A Conversation with Obituary and Gatecreeper On Death Metal’s Constant Evolution

<div class="c-message__content c-message__content--feature_sonic_inputs" data-qa="message_content">Bill Nace is an experimental musician from Massachusetts who runs the Open Mouth label. He’s half of the duo Body/Head with Kim Gordon. This year alone he has released three collaborative albums with the likes of Steve Gunn, Samara Lubelski, and Chris Corsano.</div>
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Bill Nace

In Conversation with Bill Nace and Bill MacKay

Singer/Songwriter Mark Kozelek has released albums as Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon, and under his own name, as well as collaborations with Justin Broadrick (Godflesh) and drummer Jim White (Dirty Three). His latest, I Also Want To Die In New Orleans comes out digitally March 1 and on CD April 12 on Caldo Verde Records.

Mark Kozelek

Alan Sparhawk (Low) Interviews Mark Kozelek About His Collaboration with Petra Haden

Sloppy Jane is an eight-to-11 piece music project led by Haley Dahl out of Brooklyn, NY (originating in Los Angeles). An ever-evolving lineup of players, friends, and collaborators. Elements of the live show include: laughter, choir vocals, xylophone, saxophone, kazoo, television, slide whistle, vomiting blue dye, a naked body, a rotting suit, guitar, bass, drums, tambourine, ruby red slippers, violent shifts in genre and speed, a make-believe maestro, and a set that does not stop moving once it has started.

Sloppy Jane

Listening to Weeping Icon’s debut album is to enter a dim catacomb of psychical catharsis. A critical commentary on the unique pressures and power dynamics experienced by the social media generation, the self-titled LP digs sharply into the destructive, repetitive nature of the neoteric tasks idled through daily by the ambitious urban millennial. Uniquely contemporary and keenly perceptive, the ubiquity on this album is natural territory for drummer Lani Combier-Kapel and guitarist Sara Fantry, native New Yorkers who grew up playing in bands together at the center of the booming Brooklyn arts scene. Determined to vent the energy left stirring in the inert confines of lazy, decades-old band tropes, Weeping Icon is the almanac to the complex contrarian language they developed as innovational collaborators during a decade of major socio-political uprooting. Alongside the classically trained, sludge/doom seasoned bassist Sarah Reinold and the scientifically explorative noise musician (and daughter of a scientist) Sarah Lutkenhaus, they devised a dream project in which they could freely encourage equal collaboration, pursuit of challenge, and a dedication to dismantling the cliches they encountered as disenfranchised females in a male dominated arena.
The results are an expansive whirlwind of compelling sonics. Urgent yet calculated riffs rip through a thunderous pummel of percussion, Combier-Kapel&#8217;s anomalous blend of punk and psychedelic drumming carrying their songs with an atmosphere of organized chaos. Typical song structure is a rubric to draw from and ultimately deconstruct, as we experience through the whipping tempo changes and sudden tactile shifts that unseat us throughout the album. Switching off vocalists, they give us a panoramic view into the plagued world of the millennial female, with lyrics that reveal intense contemplation, telling harsh truths through dark and poignant sarcasm. Confronting a generation undergoing perplexing, exponentiated change, Weeping Icon doses their listeners with such a controlled sense of horror and humor that they test our very comprehension of the world we participate in.
Weeping Icon is a collection of seven songs that archive the band’s metamorphosis into a heavier and more provocative undertaking. In keeping with their live performance, a sequence of dystopian sound interludes complete the album, serving as guided meditations between the candid subversive fury of the main tracks.
(Photo Credit: John Swanson)

Weeping Icon

“Everyone’s Looking For An Excuse to Do Something Cool”: a Conversation with Sloppy Jane and Weeping Icon

<div class="c-message__content c-message__content--feature_sonic_inputs" data-qa="message_content">A Giant Dog are a five-headed animal from Austin, Texas, fronted by songwriters Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen. Their adventurous approach to garage, punk, and glam rock has yielded bombastic live shows, a fervent fan base, and an alliance with North Carolina’s Merge Records, who released Toy in 2017 and Pile in 2016. A Giant Dog’s latest is a full-album re-enactment of Neon Bible by Arcade Fire, released as part of Merge’s vinyl subscription series Born Under a Good Sign.</div>
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A Giant Dog

A Giant Dog Talk Covering Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible in Its Entirety

Deeper&#8216;s Shiraz Bhatti, Nic Gohl, and Drew McBride take a thoughtful and direct approach with their songwriting, yielding spry melodies and inventive structures. It’s a clever combination of jagged post-punk and refined indie rock. A tightly wound rhythm section teeters on the edge, but is anchored by intricate guitar interplay and saturated with an enigmatic spirit. Their first album, 2018’s Deeper channeled the anxiety of change in everyday life and navigating the unhinged political atmosphere. Run takes a more existential approach, reaching down past the emotion and staring back at the inner.
Backed by an astutely scientific cover of the John Maus rarity “Bennington”, Deeper sheds the searching bottled up in previous material, carving out an ambit distinctly their own. Brisk, pointed and efficient, and no note wasted, Run b/w Bennington, a new 7 Inch out in October 2019, sets the stage for the Chicago trio’s sophomore LP.
(Photo Credit: Brendan Carroll)

Deeper

Love is everyday magic. That’s the impression you get listening to Water, the new album by Chicago trio Dehd. Love rises up into the atmosphere like steam off a summer sidewalk and makes you wild. Love breaks your heart and you consider yourself lucky for it. Like water itself, it surrounds us, it supports us; it’s what we’re made of. It takes the shape of its container.
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That’s something Jason Balla, Emily Kempf, and Eric McGrady discovered quickly after forming Dehd in 2014. Balla and Kempf are both veterans of Chicago’s increasingly fruitful DIY scene (Balla with Ne-Hi and Earring, Kempf with Vail and formerly with Lala Lala). When they joined forces with first-time drummer Eric McGrady, they discovered they shared a strange and inexplicable chemistry. The music they make — hazy and reverb-drenched, a scuzzy and hyped-up take on surf rock that could only come from the Third Coast — came so intuitively, it made all three feel like they were stewards of something bigger than themselves, even while that very thing is unmistakably drawn from their own personalities.
Water finds Dehd’s three members united as they push themselves beyond their natural limits and end up in places they wouldn’t have imagined. Balla’s production incorporates flubbed notes and dropped beats, and it emphasizes he and Kempf’s occasionally strained voices. It’s all animated by the red-lining feel-good spirit of the Velvet Underground’s Loaded and the breezy melodicism of C86-era indie rock, with a dash of the Cramps’ spooky-hop bop courtesy of McGrady’s locomotive drumming.
Which makes Water feel like a different kind of record: It’s at once a mature and grounded look at adult relationships, and a raucous celebration of friendship, and a cracked piece of purely musical bliss. It’s a clear-eyed look at the wild nature of everyday life that’s been spun up in sugary sweet melodies and scratched-crystal sounds.
(Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius)
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Dehd

Dehd and Deeper Talk Chicago’s DIY Family Unit

Tony Price is a New York based producer, musician, and songwriter. Born in Greektown, Toronto, Price has lent his expertise to a wide range of critically acclaimed records on labels like 4AD, Slumberland, DFA, Slumberland, and Burger Records amongst many others. In 2017 he founded his label and creative services unit Maximum Exposure, which quickly became an in-demand entity, providing production and design expertise to the likes of Capitol Records, Pat McGrath Labs, Vogue, SSENSE, 4AD, and Night School Recordings amongst others.

Tony Price

Young Guv Talks Making a Rock & Roll Album in 2019

Rachel Browne and Andrew Futral formed Field Mouse sometime in 2009 after meeting at SUNY Purchase. After releasing two 7&#8243; singles, they signed to Topshelf Records and released their first full length Hold Still Life (2014) followed by Episodic (2016). Their new album, Meaning, was released August 16, 2019.

Field Mouse

Field Mouse and Control Top Talk Ditching Grad School and the Meaning of Meaning

Collapsing Scenery is the meeting of two fertile and febrile minds, Don De Vore (Ink &amp; Dagger, Lilys, The Icarus Line, Amazing Baby) and Reggie Debris. Together they straddle the gap between music, art, film, and politics, seamlessly moving between each with the same ease at which they traverse the globe, soaking up experiences and immersing themselves in different cultures.
Since they formed in 2013 “under a pall of paranoia and disgust” they haven’t stopped moving. They&#8217;ve recently collaborated with Jamaican dancehall legend Ninjaman, Beastie Boys producer/collaborator Money Mark, and no-wave pioneer James Chance. The band also has remixes out or on the way from Genesis P-Orridge (Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle), Jennifer Herrema (Royal Trux), Uniform, Youth Code, Brian DeGraw (Gang Gang Dance), Oliver, and more.
Their forthcoming debut album Stress Positions is a glorious collision of futurist electro, glacial goth tones, techno, post-punk and chillwave recorded using analogue electronics: samplers, step sequencers, synths and drum machines.
Collapsing Scenery are artistic explorers pushing into bold new futures, then. Join them.

Collapsing Scenery

Collapsing Scenery and Colum McCann Talk Protest Music, and Protesting in General

Jan St. Werner is a critically acclaimed and internationally recognized sound innovator. In a myriad of ways — as a solo artist, a collaborator, through his group Mouse On Mars, as a producer, as a lecturer at MIT, or as a professor of Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremburg — Werner has challenged traditional approaches to creating and experiencing music.

Jan St. Werner

Jan St. Werner and David Grubbs Talk the Fiepblatter Catalogue

Cross Record is the recording project of Emily Cross, an artist, musician, and death worker currently living in Austin, TX. Her new self-titled album was released August 2 on Ba Da Bing! Records.
(Photo Credit: Jackson Montgomery Schwartz)

Cross Record

In Conversation with Thor Harris and Cross Record

Sauna is a brand new Toronto based band featuring Zach Bines (Weaves), Braeden Craig (Greys), and Michael le Riche (Fake Palms).
With synths in bright focus, which le Riche both plays and builds, this project marks a departure from the electric guitar-driven sound of Fake Palms. Bines (bass) and Craig (drums), meanwhile, provide a tough and tight complement to this new approach. Minimalist one minute and maximalist the next, the music is rich with suspense and satisfying subversions of expectation.

interview