It’s Halloween Weekend and once again I’ve forgotten to come up with a costume so I guess I’m gonna be Aluminum Foil Robot Guy for the seventh year in a row. While you’re putting together your costume, here’s are a few new records to check out. After three weeks of 10-16 albums, Indie Basement is relatively light for the last week in October with a mere eight: King Gizzard‘s all-electronic The Silver Cord, American Analog Set‘s first album in 18 years, and OMD‘s best album in almost 40 years, plus Wild Nothing, Robert Pollard side project Circus Devils, Cincinnati post-punks The Serfs, Mexico City dreampop duo Mint Field, and Catalan composer/producer Marina Herlop.
Over in Notable Releases, Andrew reviews 10 new albums including Shabazz Palaces, Taking Back Sunday, Year of the Knife, Ragana, and more.
If you want to get in the Halloween mood, check out my lists of Classic Goth’s 13 Greatest Hits and the companion 13 great classic ’80s goth songs.
Have a spooky weekend and see you in November. Head below for this week’s reviews…
ALBUM OF THE WEEK #1: OMD – Bauhaus Staircase (White Noise)
Forty-five years into their career, these synthpop icons have made one of their best-ever albums
Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark formed in 1978, inspired by Kraftwerk with a dream of changing the world with synthesizers. Forty-five years later, the world has changed a lot but OMD still sound pretty much the same. And that’s ok. In 2023 you neither expect or really want Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys to be pushing the envelope on a new LP. That said, Bauhaus Staircase is a “wildest dreams” situation, an album full of catchy electropop in the band’s signature style that still sounds modern, engaged and not treading water or simply tweaking their greatest hits. This is OMD’s 14th album, and fourth since reforming in 2010, and remarkably one of their best, certainly their most engaging, dialed-in record since 1984’s Junk Culture.
The album was written and recorded during the pandemic, and the state of the world at the time — and the state of being stuck at home — lit a fire under them. “I rediscovered the creative power of total boredom,” McCluskey says, adding that Bauhaus Staircase is their most overtly political album ever. (This from a band whose first Top 10 UK hit was about the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.) They do it in OMD style, of course, with anthems designed to uplift and make you dance while sneaking in some subversive messaging in the choruses. The bubbling, spiraling title track which opens the album is a call to arms inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s 1932 painting (created in response to the Nazis closing down the ever-influential Bauhaus school) with a little Cleveland art-punk in there for good measure. The soaring chorus: “Everyone needs a Bauhaus Staircase / Everyone gets a second chance / All the world needs art and passion / Pere Ubu and the Modern Dance.”
Bauhaus Staircase keeps up the pace from there. “Anthropocene” wraps computer-voice global warming alerts in effervescent arpeggiations; “Verushka” is a sweeping ballad about finding strength in pain and adversity; “Evolution of the Species” imagines a human-free future through vocodered sloganeering (“Birth, Deformation, Death, Mutation, Extinction”) and sizzling disco; and “Kleptocracy” hides biting, cynical invectives in the album’s most gooey pop melody and arrangement. McCluskey’s voice hasn’t aged one bit and when he belts it out on “Aphrodite’s Favorite Child” it’s like the last 40 years never happened. In that regard there’s also “Look at You Now,” a swaying midtempo anthem about not giving up that’s in the “Forever Live and Die” mode and sounds like a lost single from 1985. Bauhaus Staircase pulls off that extremely tricky maneuver of going forward while reminding us of why we loved OMD in the first place, right when we weren’t expecting it.
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ALBUM OF THE WEEK #2: American Analog Set – For Forever (Hometown Fantasy)
AmAnSet still sound great on their first album in forever (well, 18 years)
It’s a great time to be a fan of Austin indie rock greats American Analog Set. A rumored Numero Group box set was recently confirmed and will be out next year; at the same time the band, who broke up in 2005, announced that they’d made a new double album and it’d be out in just a few weeks. “We started playing together again in 2013 and began work on For Forever in 2015,” they wrote. “We finished it in 2019 and left it under the couch for a few years while the world was on fire.”
I’m not sure things have cooled off much since 2019, if at all, but the crisp sounds of AmAnSet are a welcome soothing balm. The band get the slowcore tag a lot but I’m not sure it ever really fit and definitely doesn’t on For Forever. Many of the band’s earmarks — vibraphone, prominent melodic basslines, jazzy drumming — are here but this is arguably the loudest AmAnSet album, and angriest too. Andrew Kenny’s vocal style, a half whisper that often falls into sinister territory, has never had such seething menace as here. The bass sounds particularly dirty/flinty — almost metal — on “Screaming for Vengeance” (a pretty metal title too) where Kenny sings “It’s young love / You get fucked / You’re gonna bleed a lot.”
For pure AmAnSet satisfaction, there’s “Konika & Maliko” which hits all the pleasure receptors with bass, guitar, electric piano, and vibes intermingling organically, with a motorik beat propelling everything at a purposeful tempo. Even better is the next song, “Over the Jeans,” with its slinky groove, muted guitar and the album’s best, most harmonic chorus. The hits keep coming: “By the Bridle” soars; “The Quiet Dark” which could be a mid-’90s Built to Spill song; the bitter “Gin Shakes” (“Just bad bets and bad breaks / All set fire to save face / And be so fucked for fuck’s sake”); and the simmering, epic-length title track.
At nearly an hour, For Forever is probably too long but that’s mostly to do with the title track that actually doesn’t waste a second of its nearly 13-minute runtime. There’s nothing here that feels like filler. The only disappointment with this wonderful album is that American Analog Set have no plans of touring it. The music is enough, but if they change their mind I won’t be upset.
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ALBUM OF THE WEEK #3: King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – The Silver Cord (KGLW)
Break out the glowsticks, KG have gone EDM
Is there anything King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard can’t do? These insanely prolific Aussie workaholics began as Oh Sees devotees but grew by leaps and bounds almost immediately, embracing prog, jazz, thrash metal, microtonal instruments and more. Now here they are with their second album of 2023 that has them putting their guitars and drums back in their cases and picking synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers. The band dabbled in this territory before on Butterfly 3000, but this time they are fully committed with only electronic instrumentation. If this all sounds like a joke, the band take it very seriously while clearly having a blast.
“We come at electronic music from an amateur angle,” says frontman Stu Mackenzie. “I play the Juno synthesizer like a guitar, I don’t really know how to play it. But I wanted to be at peace with being the rock band pretending to know how to use modular synthesizers. We’re in uncharted waters, we’re further out to sea, but leaning into it, and we got to a spot where we were really happy with what came out.”
King Gizzard may be electronic neophytes but they don’t sound like amateurs on The Silver Cord which proves they’re as good at bangers as they are rippers. There’s a wide variety of styles on the album, most of it from the ’90s: house, acid house, ambient house, jungle / drum-n-bass, and “electronica” are all represented. There are even a couple songs that go in a Technotronic / Inner City direction with Mackenzie having a (credible) go at rapping in that early-’90s house-pop style. But it’s still clearly made by King Gizzard and full of their trademarks, from frequent “WOOOOs” and growls that sound like a didgeridoo, to the clearly impressive musicianship.
The Silver Cord comes in two forms: the “regular version of the album” which clocks in at a mere 28 minutes (one of their shortest), and the “extended version” which stretches out all the songs to over 10 minutes each, totalling a whopping 1 hr, 28 minutes. The extended versions aren’t just longer in the way ’80s extended mixes were, these go in different directions and often have additional lyrics. “I love Donna Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder,” Mackenzie says. “I’d never listen to the short versions now – I’m one of those people who wants to hear the whole thing. We’re testing the boundaries of people’s attention spans when it comes to listening to music, perhaps – but I’m heavily interested in destroying such concepts.”
Both the “short” and “extended” version of The Silver Cord have the songs segueing seamlessly into the next and while I do prefer some of the extended versions of songs, the shorter version of the album plays more like a DJ mix with better flow, while the long one has spacier transitions. They’re related but very different beasts and both are worth checking out (but start with the short one). Will they ever play this one live in full? I hope some electronic or psych festival gets them to do it. I also hope they make another electronic record. Meanwhile, I am down for whatever zig they zag next. Bring on the King Gizzard reggae album.
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Mint Field – Aprender a Ser (felte)
Mexico City dreampop duo deliver exquisitely rendered moody vibes on their third album
The third album from Mexico City dreampop duo Mint Field ticks a lot of Indie Basement boxes. There’s more than a little shoegaze, and trip hop, plus Italian film scores, ’60s orch-pop and psych, and just a dab goth. And while it doesn’t sound anything like Cocteau Twins, Massive Attack or This Mortal Coil, it’s almost as if everything Elizabeth Fraser has touched in the last 40 years has informed Aprender a Ser (“Learn to Be”) in the best possible way. Intricately layered and exquisitely rendered, the album is more mood than anything else, but what a mood! Add this to your late night / comedown / vibez rotation.
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The Serfs – Half Eaten by Dogs (Trouble in Mind)
Third album from acidic Cincinnati synth-punks is a bad good time
In the ’60s, a band called The Serfs might have been a novelty act, a group playing surf-rock instrumentals while dressed as feudal peasants. These current-era The Serfs, though, hail from Cincinnati and make bleak, acidic synth-punk a la Crack Cloud, FACS/Disappears or Total Control. (The latter’s Mikey Young mastered the album, natch.) How bleak? Their third album is titled Half Eaten By Dogs. If Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ were an album, it might sound like this: dank, ilicit, and poisonous, yet alluring. All this while still packed with hooks, but when they dig into your flesh, make sure those wounds don’t get infected.
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Marina Herlop – Nekkuja (PAN)
Gorgeous fourth album from arty Catalan composer/producer defies categorization
Catalan composer, vocalist and producer Marina Herlop makes music that defies categorization. A classically trained pianist, her music has elements of classical, but also pop, psychedelia, electronic music, and the avant garde. The closest one-word description might be Bjorkian; her fourth album, Nekkuja, is made with harp and flutes but also pounding synthetic percussion, and everything feels like it’s built around intricately layered loops. (Marina doesn’t actually sound like the Icelandic pop icon, but she clearly orbits the same eccentric solar system.) She made this one while waiting for 2022’s Pripyat to be released. “Some days I used to sit on the balcony of my flat to catch some sun,” she explains, “I would close my eyes and start visualizing myself as a gardener, pulling out purple weeds from the soil, every bad memory or emotion I wanted to expulse being one of the plants.” Nekkuja, she says, is that garden and she’s grown some vividly psychedelic vegetation. If forward-thinking Knoxville festival Big Ears ever decide to have a rave night, Marina would make a good headliner.
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Circus Devils – Squeeze The Needle (GBV Inc)
Robert Pollard lets his freak flag fly on the first album in six years from his psychedelic side project
As if the indefatigable Robert Pollard wasn’t busy enough with the constant stream of Guided by Voices records (three this year!), he also found time to resurrect Circus Devils, his psychedelic rock trio with brothers Todd Tobias and Tim Tobias. Their first album in six years, Squeeze the Needle lets Pollard’s freak flag fly with an anything-goes edict that seems to include everything except (thankfully) actual circus music. Things get pretty weird across these 20 short tracks, but Pollard does sneak in a few signature earworms amongst the insanity, as well as a few lovely acoustic songs and at least one about major league baseball.
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Wild Nothing – Hold (Captured Tracks)
Jack Tatum’s fifth album as Wild Nothing expertly recreates Big ’80s sonics, but like the decade itself it rings a little hollow
As Wild Nothing, Jack Tatum has explored just about every corner of ’80s pop, from the Cure-isms of his 2010 debut through lush sophistipop, synthpop and R&B. For Wild Nothing’s fifth album, and first in five years, Tatum has his eyes squarely on the charts, aiming straight down the middle, as in mid-’80s and the middle of the Billboard Hot 100 where some quirky stuff lurked on the edges of the Top 40 at the time. On Hold, Tatum fully embraces widescreen Big ’80s production — think Tango in the Night, Invisible Touch, Dancing on the Ceiling, Welcome to the Pleasuredome — with layer upon layer of synthetic and organic instrumentation, including such touchstone sounds as gated drums, fretless bass, and sampled orchestra hits. If you have a fondness for these kind of visions of excess, Tatum shows a mastery of the form and it’s hard not to be impressed by the technique even if it’s not your cup of tea. Unfortunately, like much of what was produced in the ’80s, a lot of the album rings hollow. Tatum is still capable of writing stick in your head pop melodies and big hooks (“Dial Tone,” “Alex”) but, even more than on 2018’s Indigo, the songs get a bit lost in all the shiny overproduction. As an exercise in style, though, Hold is an empty calorie feast for the ears. Patrick Bateman would’ve loved it.
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