Listening to metalcore is a thing I do when I get tired of endless sunny days or feel less than grateful for my well-loved life. So I guess it ain’t really that often that I get to indulge in a type of music that’s practically dripping with man-sauce. I admit I try to push the vocals back, prefering a hiss, not a roar, even if the sound engineer whose work I’m listening to didn’t think to do just that. So here I am listening to a band with songs that reference indifference, oblivion and persecution. Okay. The guitar playing and drumming on track two, “as blood sheds into oblivion” is interesting musically and melodically, but those damn growly, histrionic vocals are so 2003. The closing track displays similar strengths, someone’s ax soars, but it would be so much more fab if there was a singer supporting this otherwise heartfelt musical effort.
Goblin Bones. Strange But True Facts From The Crypt (Self-released)
Whoever in the hell Goblin Bones. really is, the spectral entity that he appears as—on an album about strange but true facts from the crypt—demonstrates a pretty dang keen understanding about what constitutes left-field hip-hop. From esoterically gathered and re-animated samples to shifty paradigm-smashing techiques using way-lo-fi equipment and instrumentation, Goblin Bones. goes to town and burns the important edifices to the ground on tracks like “NebuLotus” and on the glitchy and itchy “bluerose w/ mescaline.” When flowing, as on “W∈ $P⊙⊙K,” the artist sounds faraway yet poetically formidable, announcing, “I poked a hole in my fishbowl/ And spilled out all my secrets.” That’s a reasonably solid estimation of a collection of work that is breathy, partly-cloudy and diffuse in its approach to an elusive, underground style of hip-hop that these days has supplanted the pretensions of psych-rock.
Palefur Lost Demos (Self-released)
Palefur is the project of Michael S. Cave, a musician from Tijeras, N.M., who works in a variety of local ensembles and is sometimes associated with local sonic mastermind Lee Sillery of Push Drive Studios. Cave’s work as Palefur is somewhat esoteric for rocanrol; polished, crisp and sometimes verging toward jazz, expert guitar playing and starry arrangements form a basis for expression that first came to fruition on the excellent eponymous Palefur release of Jan. 2017. Here, with this EP of unreleased demos, Cave provides listeners more clues to the precise location of his sparklingly deep well of creativity. The opening track, “Contrast,” is full of wonder, a pure pop sensibility tightly packed with echoing vocals and shimmery guitars floating over an amiguously drifting keyboard line. You get the idea, now go listen to this record, please.
