Hi! Here is some cool music I’ve found in the last couple days.
Oliver Tree — Ugly is Beautiful
Genre: Pop Rock
Recommended track: Cash Machine
Oliver Tree is probably best known for his absurd JNCO jean-wearing, bowl cut aesthetic. I honestly know very little about him. I’ve just seen pictures– and once you see pictures of him, you just can’t stop seeing him on your eyelids, in your dreams, etc.
Anyway, the music, so, this is a pop rock album full of tunes that are somewhere between [generic radio-oriented pop rock], the good later-era Weezer, and some Blink 182 with a touch of white guy non-rapper pop rapping. Sounds terrible on paper, but ends up solidly endearing with the delivery of lines like “I’ve been the outcast… it feels great” when the man looks like an outcast and seems to be punching above his belt. The way semi-marketing-team-manufactured viral pop rock can actually work is if it actually comes off sincere, and Oliver Tree manages that in a strangely captivating way.
Neptunian Maximalism — Éons
Genre: Pop Rock, hahaha, no, just kidding– Free Jazz / Noise Rock / Drone Metal
Recommended track: PTAH SOKAR OSIRIS
This album is two hours and eight minutes long. Éons lasts eons! It’s so long! It doesn’t feel like it should be any other way though. I Voidhanger Records finds the weirdest stuff in the universe, I tell ya. This album is incredible. It’s like if you mashed Acid Mothers Temple, Gorguts, Sunn O))), and Godspeed You! Black Emperor up in a big bowl, cranked the dial on whatever was produced from “10” to “10 but it’s Free Jazz”, took a whole lotta drugs and then improvised something based on what you saw on the sheet music from that exercise.
This album is captivating! Every track is a massive journey in and of itself. “How do you make music like this?” is something I only say when I haven’t encountered something like this before. It’s reaching to the past in its absolute avant-garde nature and at the same time screaming into the future. You sometimes got screeching psychedelic guitar. You sometimes got rumbling bass half riffs that bubble up occasionally and threaten to make this a doom record. Nearly 20 minute long guitar drone + 12+ other instrument pieces late in the album. You got very judiciously used creepy as hell, buried, ritualistic demon vocals that sound like they’re coming out of the guy on the awesome album cover. You got SO MUCH SAXOPHONE, but it’s like it’s mixed into the atmospheric wash of, again, so many instruments coming together to do demon summoning. You got this pull, tension, and climactic rhythm and shift that wouldn’t be out of place in the best apocalyptic post-rock pieces there are. I can’t tell what’s written and what’s improvised, but the energy in this thing is absolutely electric. It’s nuts. Gonna end up on my year-end list easily. Get weird and listen to this.
Mark Kozelek with Ben Boye and Jim White — Mark Kozelek with Ben Boye and Jim White 2
Genre: Chamber Folk / Singer Songwriter
Recommended track: My Brother Loves Seagulls
Mark Kozelek has been doing this –journal for his fairly mundane life as an aging musician set to music– thing for many albums now, both under his solo name and with his band Sun Kil Moon. I get why a lot of people don’t like it. I cannot get enough of it.
This is another entry in that category with collaborators Ben Boye and Jim White providing piano and guitar respectively to the backing behind Mark’s semi-musical sing-rambling of small stories of his life and memories. The instrumental arrangements drone on lovely with intention as we’re walked down streams of consciousness. Spikes of subtle poignancy punch through in this style. Mark’s vocals and words feel heavy. The worry, love, and sincerity in his examinations are what make it for me. Even though it’s such a normal life for an older privileged white man to be leading and writing music about, there’s a universalism in it. The mundanity is charming. The way that Mark opens the book of his mind to the world in this music is beautiful.
While you’re here, why not be Very Cool and donate to the NAACP Defense Fund?
