Beach House is releasing an album, Once Twice Melody, in "chapters." The four songs comprising the first chapter were released in November. One song was "Superstar."
"Superstar" offers sentimentality. Sentimental songs always have a chance with me. I like sentimentality. I like to remember good times from when I was younger because otherwise I just worry about everything that is happening now or might happen in the future. I like to think about the good times in past relationships.
When you were mine We fell across the sky
Then the song (and I with it) turns maudlin for a moment.
Right after Thanksgiving, the Swiss noise-rock group, Coilguns, released two songs—the first installment of its new collection of 12-inch vinyl singles, the "Hummus 12-inch Maxi Collection," carried by guitarist Jona Nido's label, Hummus Records. Song one, “Shunners,” opens with thick, three-note progressions glaring down on tumbling drums. A high-strung vocal relives the anxieties of one asking himself how he will make it to the end of the year. The intensity builds as he loses his nerve amid the constant calls for vigilance—“Hold the line! Watch the line! Line the line! Watch the watch!” Approaching two minutes, the song shifts, then finally spasms out something like djent or groove metal, trying to stomp out anxieties that seem only to multiply. The lead guitar bends and loops through more anxious loops, getting nowhere. The song finally, after five minutes, falls apart, worn from worry.
Coilguns usually records live, and recent efforts have been entirely self-produced, like this EP. What is new is a bass guitar. Kevin Galland joined the band in March 2020 to play bass and help mix and master the audio. Song two, “Burrows,” shows off the new, gritty bass with a pummeling, forward-facing groove that knocks down what stands in the way.
This EP and the rest of the "Hummus 12-inch Maxi Collection" are pressed on transparent or transparent-colored vinyl and housed in a picture disc-style sleeve. Side A has the music, and side B has an original drawing from Noé Cauderay screen-printed in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Out of Gas.
Coilguns is not planning many shows for 2022, so the group, which started in 2011, will be producing its fourth studio album.
Vandal X’s noise-rock sound has moved over the last
decade from angular punk and metal influences toward sludge and doom, away from
bands like The Jesus Lizard and Helmet but still near to Unsane. Now the
Belgian band, which formed around 1995, celebrates its career with a best-of
album, XXV, accompanied by a compilation of rarities.
The band is a twosome of volume masochists dishing
noise-rock fans all they can handle and more. Bart Timmermans is the original
singer and guitarist, and Dave Schroyen took over the drum kit in 1999 after
the original drummer, Jo Boes, left.
XXV starts
with “Fuck ‘m All”—feedback feeds into riffs that punch through the wall. The
scream-shout chorus “Fuck ‘em all!” burns through the mic connection. First
songs are often statements, and this is a fine one. Drums on “Jacobs Wife” pop
with syncopation as the guitar plays a guileless riff that turns out to be a
great contrast to the song’s big bass-drum kicks.
On “All Lined Up,” the snare drum cracks out the bars
and goes full bore into the chorus, where layered vocals seethe out “All lined
up against the fuckin’ wall!” with the barking guitar’s tone buried in the low-
and mid-range. XXV has 13 songs, and the last third or so sound
more like sludge metal—maybe none more so than “Patient Zero.” The vocal is
deeper, the guitar tone has a fuller, more present buzz, and the drums sound
gauche. Next to the earlier, faster-paced songs, though, this final stretch
drags.
The pandemic delayed the release of XXV,
but the band has assured its audience that the best-of will finally come out
December 10 (via 9000 Records). It will be offered in a limited-edition white
vinyl (remixed and remastered) with a CD of previously unreleased demos, live
recordings, and rarities from the band’s “archives.”
