Styrofoam Winos—the Nashville-based trio of Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel—follow up their 2021 self-titled debut with Real Time, an endearing and invigorating collection of shaggy southern rock and dusty, woolen folk. With a lo-fi, ambling ease, they cruise through road-weary choogles; swampy, faded funkers; harmonica swept confessionals; and meditative, noodling jaunts through the passage of time.
Author: Justin Gage
Thine Retail Simps :: Strike Gold, Strike Back, Strike Out
While the future is uncertain, the present is most decidedly not. In Strike Gold, Strike Back, Strike Out Thine Retail Simps have made one of the weirdest, most discontinuous, jokiest rock and roll records of the year—and one of the best.
Oscar Peterson :: Romance (1954)
Our ‘Midnite Jazz’ series continues with an often overlooked release from Oscar Peterson’s mid-fifties output. Romance features the decorated jazz pianist stepping in front of the microphone for his vocal debut, softly crooning his way through standards and ballads with pure class and cozy intimacy.
Christopher Owens :: I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair
It’s been long enough. There’s no need to play coy, no sense in waiting any longer than we already have. I’ll state it plainly here at the top: this is the album we’ve been waiting for Christopher Owens to make for over a decade. I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair is an extraordinary, wholly unexpected achievement, as bold and beautiful and great as any one of the immortal Girls records.
It may, in fact, be better.
Videodrome :: In Conversation with Sara Gran on The Legacy (1978)
For a special “Halloween edition” of the VIDEODROME column, we sat down with author and screenwriter Sara Gran to discuss The Legacy (1978). It’s a rollicking conversation about the film’s impact on Gran’s life and work, satanic cabals, psychoanalysis, and much more.
Osees :: SORCS 80
No guitars! For his 28th album at the helm of the Osees, John Dwyer and a crew of art punk instigators switch to synths, samplers, drum machines and two saxophones. That’s a radical change, but it makes surprisingly little difference. If you know the Osees at all, you’ll recognize the sound immediately.
Cass McCombs :: Seed Cake On Leap Year
For an artist who ordinarily focuses on what’s next, Cass McCombs has been doing quite a lot of rummaging through the vaults lately. This collection of early, unreleased material comes out at the same time as the backwards looking 2000-2004 Demos, Live and Radio, which is to say the very beginning of McCombs emergence as an artist.
Masayoshi Fujita :: Migratory
Masayoshi Fujita says his music aims to evoke the skies and mountains of his native village of Kami-cho, Hyogo, in Japan. To some extent, they really do: the sedative vibraphones and marimba of Migratory, bundled as they are with a geographical tracklist, allow us to visualize the natural tranquility that is so often associated with a branch of traditional Japanese music.
The Aquarium Drunkard Show: SIRIUS/XMU (7pm PDT, Channel 35)
Tea lights. Via satellite, transmitting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W
Unknown Happiness :: A Geographic Records Sampler
When two members of The Pastels started the Domino imprint Geographic in 2000, the ethos was simple. “The idea was to release beautiful semi-unknown music from around the world and take it as far as we could”. Specifically garnering an organic, collaborative spirit between Glasgow and Tokyo, the label reached the influential ears of the likes of John Peel, David Berman and Jarvis Cocker. From avant-pop ensembles and minimalist jazz to sun-soaked guitar soundscapes, here is a sampling of the singular spirit of the mighty Geographic catalogue.
Jim O’Rourke :: Fast Car (Live In Japan, 9/16/2002)
Luke Combs this is not. Fourteen years after its initial chart-topping 1988 release, sonic chameleon Jim O’Rourke laid hands on Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” in 2002 while touring Japan. Where the original tracks just under five minutes, O’Rourke’s alchemy transmutes the iconic riff into a thirty-three minute atmospheric drone. In a word, hypnotic.
Anna Butterss :: Mighty Vertebrate
It’s tempting to describe what bassist Anna Butterss and their Los Angeles colleagues are up to as “redefining jazz,” but that assumes jazz had a solid definition in the first place. In the 21st century, jazz continues to elude classification, with a resurgence of interest in old, previously overlooked and underappreciated material and the appearance of a new cadre of adventurous, genre-fluid players. But Mighty Vertebrate is a different beast. Neither improvised nor manipulated, begun as through-composed songs but later expanded upon and spun out, it’s groove-heavy, lyrical and spacious, with an energy that feels distinctly postmodern even as it acknowledges the past.
Wendy Eisenberg :: Viewfinder
Wendy Eisenberg contains multitudes. You would be hard pressed to find formal commonalities between the deconstructed bedroom folk of Time Machine (2017), the tender improvisations of Auto (2020), or the banjo freakouts of Bent Ring (2021). Sure, there is that same brightness of the vocals; the felicitousness of the cadences; the centrality of the strings. Yet all of this seems to serve new functions every time, and every time to impose a turn in their way of composing that was previously impossible to predict as a listener.
Trummors :: 5
Come for the close harmonies and burnt pedal steel, stay for the heartfelt, casually poetic lyrics and finely observed character portraits. Lerner and Cunningham aren’t reinventing the wheel here; instead, they’re finding interesting and personal ways to take a tried-and-true landscape and explore its every river, canyon and summit. The results are quietly spectacular.
The Lagniappe Sessions :: Caravan 222
“…I’m your toy, I’m your old boy.” Country-fried Los Angeles outfit Caravan 222 continue to put the honk in the tonk. For their Lagniappe Session, the septet works up stalwart ’70s British pub-rockers Brinsley Schwarz’s “Country Girl,” Danny O’Keefe’s 1972 chestnut “I’m Sober Now,” and a faithful rendition of Gram’s “Hot Burrito #1.”