Back in March, Thad Kopec released an excellent album entitled Center. We loved it. In support of that release, he’s now released a video for the track “First Light Landing.”

The video plays nicely with the album art, focusing on the beauty of various plant life, intermixed with quiet moments inside a home, riding a bike at night or of a contemplative Kopec himself. Zooming out further, this aesthetic touches on the ethos of the album itself; mixing the organic feel of plant life with more modern amenities. That may be taking things a step too far in terms of presumed artistic intent but it’s simply a kind of way saying, this all gels together as a nice whole package.

If nothing else, let the video serve as an entry point to listening to the whole record, which is an excellent experience from top to bottom and best consumed in its entirety.

There’s a definitive dream vibe to the latest Stevie Kin video for “Tough”, taken from her May 3rd release Petals. The grainy, black-and-white piece is a simple affair, putting Kin in a barren field with a roaming light casting a wandering shadow as she slowly dances in an oversized suit David Byrne would be proud of.

The song is deceptively simple, consisting of a lonesome guitar strum, some light percussion and Kin’s detached voice. Throughout the track there are small flourishes of chimes, keyboards and mysterious wooshes that all further contribute to the mystery of the song.

The forthcoming release was recorded in South Africa over a two week period and leverages a good deal of home recordings and overdubs, giving it a layered yet DIY vibe. There’s not a lot of information to know beyond that at this time but, come May 3rd, we’ll find out plenty more.

Last we heard from Gram Ash he had released his Welcome to the Elevator EP and seemed to be exploring some dark, psychedelic territory. It seems he may have emerged from that place with some new tricks up his sleeve.

“How to Indie Rock; An Instructional Guide” is a snarky piece of work. Formatted like an instructional podcast, Gram Ash takes you through all the overused elements of popular indie songs and builds them all together, resulting in “Summer Porch” – a song that is, unsurprisingly, pretty catchy.

Are they making fun of the tropes of Indie Rock? Are they making fun of themselves? Are they hilariously pointing out the obvious? Maybe a little bit of all three.

They’ve already followed this one up with another track, so it’s clear that this How To is not a sign of the band’s resentment towards music but, rather, a welcome re-introduction that they’re back with new stuff.

We don’t post a lot of remixes or re-interpretations here on the site but, occasionally, you come across something so compelling, so absurd, so surprisingly effective that you just can’t skip over it.

Black Market has a rather extensive catalog of “Dub” remixes that cover a wide range of musical subjects. Here’s their manifesto:

What would happen if The Beach Boys had The Wailers as their backing band instead of The Wrecking Crew? What if David Bowie spent the summer of 1975 in Kingston, Jamaica with King Tubby instead of Philidelphia? Michael Jackson meets Scratch Perry? These questions are the basic thesis of Black Market.

On paper, this should not work. Hearing the Angelo Badalementi soundtrack to Twin Peaks reworked as dub, or X-Files extensively re-layered or Bowie languishing in the genre feels like a complete recipe for disaster that manages to never falter. Yes, the source material is fantastic but there’s an infinite amount of remixes and reworkings in the world that completely botch the originals, resulting in an unlistenable mess. That’s not the case here.

Per their own recommendation, this second EP of David Bowie tracks, The Next Dub, is the best spot to start when diving into their catalog. It doesn’t contain any actual tracks from The Next Day but it does have Bowie covering the Beatles through their dub lens, that’s a double dose of layers!

Regardless of your feelings on the ability to enjoy this on a daily basis, you still gotta give it up for a Grade A execution across the board here.

We played Oginalii’s “Light as a Feather” back on Volume 138 of the WOTT Music podcast in anticipation of the accompanying full-length, Cause & Affection. On the show we remarked that it was difficult to come across rock music, particularly of the hard rock variety, that we still found appealing. That particular track felt like an exception to the generally dumb rules of the genre and now that the album is out they’ve materialized our assumptions into a fully formed fact.

Filing bands into buckets of genres can be a dangerous game to play. Oginalii’s album is filled with big guitars that unleash into waves of ominous chords and vocals that turn into a biting snarl, familiar tenants of the Hard Rock sound. However, it’s also got plenty of psychedelic reverb, some dance-y bass lines and the occasional moment of vulnerability. Defining the album into a single column would do it a huge disservice as there are a lot of diverse ideas playing extremely well together throughout the record. “Hard Rock” is generally a male dominated undertaking filled with masculine aggression but Oginalii takes a more subversive and foreboding approach, albeit still a force of nature.

On the whole, Cause & Affection serves as a refreshing reminder that Hard Rock music doesn’t have to a singularly blunt object. This is Exhibit A that there’s plenty of room for finesse and a good fist clenching outburst.

Personally speaking, there are certain genres of music that I’m a complete sucker for. It doesn’t matter if it’s a DIY bedroom recording or an ultra-slick studio recording, if it sticks the landing on the tropes of a particular style, I’m in. To follow on that idea, it seems that shoegaze outfit Your Gaze has really got me figured out.

The latest offering, a single entitled “Underground“, is taken from a compilation called Out of the Darkness that donates all proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. There’s plenty of other like-minded songs on the comp ranging from psychedelic garage rock to fully ambient to modern psych rock but Your Gaze finds the center of the Venn Diagram and locks it in with “Underground.” It ticks all the boxes with it’s underwater production sound, it’s warbly guitar, it’s reverb’ed to hell-and-back vocals and growing wall of sound.

Last we heard from Your Gaze was back in December of 2018 with a cover of Dinosaur Jr (for the same compilation outfit no less) and I’m hoping this drip of random singles is a hint at a larger full release on the horizon. I’d be a sucker for it.