Tag: Wavves

For quite some time, Mommyheads have delivered the sort of complex pop and lyrical insight that fills in the cracks and gaps in your musical thinking with new ideas and sounds.

If the name didn't give it away, there is a very distinct beach slash surf feeling to San Diego's Wavves and their sun-glittered sounds.

Tonight started out with an hour of the sickest music around, which is to say songs about illness, medication, and other health-related issues. The following two hours were the usual incomprehensible mixture of genres and bad attitudes.

Exquisite rock and roll, filled with bombastic drenches of reverb and enough monster riffs to fill a stadium, powering through sounds psychedelic, surf-like, and power-chording, but with enough dynamics to keep it from becoming exhausting.

It’s dense and it feels implacable, yet at the same time it’s sweet and comforting, like a punked-out beach blanket bingo, with cascading fuzz pedals and the feeling that the next wave is going to crest even higher.

Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.

Uwe Schmidt has had an extensive career, recording under many names as electronic musicians do, but it's his work as Señor Coconut (and now as Atom™), where he deconstructs familiar songs into something Kraftwerk would play if hired to play a quinceañera, that brings me this very particular weird glee.

It’s easy to suspect Ray LaMontagne came from a recently unearthed time capsule documenting the folkie scene of half a century ago.

The world of Khruangbin is made up of velvet sunsets, shimmering dunes, and cool river rocks. There’s also a guitar, some drums, and a bass. And lately, vocals.