If the title Donkey Howdy or the wildly colorful distorted cover art doesn’t tip you off, Dialup Ghost is having fun on their fifth full-length. Quite frankly, they’ve always been a band that’s chosen to express themselves as they are rather than posturing to be anything else. The best examples of this from previous records would be the light-hearted-but-dead-serious “Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn is a Drug Dealer” and the possibly-most-empowering-and-loving-and-optimistic track “Transphobes and Fascists Hate Our Guts (So What)“? To be clear, Dialup Ghost has plenty of other great songs that aren’t standing up against the injustices of the world, I just think they’re particularly good at it.

On Donkey Howdy, the band embraces a lo-fi aesthetic balanced with consistently grooving drumbeats and driving bass lines with outbursts of deliciously fuzzed-out guitars. The country twinged vocals of Russ Finn lend an air of authenticity on “Bigger Household” – particularly when he sings “Baby, let’s move to the country” complete with a plea to have a multitude of babies. The band ponders the literal Nashville music scene on “Music City Mockingbird,” providing goofy but introspective ruminations about a town that is filled with empty posturing. If you need an entry point to the record, lead single “Soot Sprite” finds the band delivering a frantic pace of excessively upbeat vibes start to finish.

The writeup that accompanies the record states that the band consciously chose to steer towards instrumentation on this record that they had gravitated to in the past. Eschewing mandolin and pedal steel for synthesizers is not an easy choice, but it’s clearly working. They also claim to be embracing their post-punk and garage-pop side over alt-country… but I’d argue it’s been there all along, they’re just setting it free to be it’s truest self.

Every music release put out into the world has a story behind it. Maybe it’s as simple as “person noodles in bedroom to make songs.” Maybe it’s as elaborate as hiring a PR firm to help craft a narrative about a genre bending new fifth album and the heartache that inspired it. Sometimes these stories help contextualize what you’re hearing. Maybe they increase enticement. In the case of this Crystalline Encounters release, the story presented does both.. as well as brings up a lot of questions on the legitimacy of its creation!

Here’s the first paragraph of the release notes:

The music on this tape was purportedly created by Stephen Messler in the years following his claims of having been abducted by extraterrestrials multiple times throughout the late 1980s. Messler disappeared without a trace in 1996 leaving behind a disorganized pile of scattered notes and around a dozen audio tapes on which he had attempted to recreate the sounds he heard while aboard alien vessels. The tapes were eventually discovered by Messler’s nephew who restored and digitized them. This is the fifth cassette in the series, but the first to have a real release as the previous ones were so limited as to barely exist.

Right off the bat, you’re gonna hit play to find out exactly what sounds were attempted to be recreated from the alien vessel. What you hear is other worldly, as well as chaotic and sometimes numbing. It’s not outlandish to think if you were brought aboard an unidentified flying object, this might actually be what it feels like in that environment.

Of course, you may not believe the tale at all. It may be a pure fiction intended to give a quaint story to some ambient noisemaker’s latest efforts. And, yes, that is a valid skeptical view to take. However, looking around the Internet for anything about Crystalline Encounters or Stephen Messler turns up next to nothing related to this effort. If this were just a marketing scheme, wouldn’t there be an Instagram account to follow? Or a YouTube channel to like and subscribe? There’s none of that.

Even if it is just a fanciful story to frame two fifteen minute pieces, it’s an effective one. It gives you context, it creates intrigue and it asks you to enter into a world where a UFO abduction drove someone mad trying to recreate their experience. Try playing the music extremely loud in a room with no visible light, you may just find yourself a believer after all.

Imagine you and your coworkers collaborated once a year to make an album of original songs and covers, then donated all of the proceeds to charity. That’s WORK. They are a collective of musicians, artists, creators and coworkers that all work together at Manuel Zeitlin Architects (MZA) and Zeitgeist Gallery. Together they’ve created collaborative albums since 2017 and benefitted the likes of YEAH!, Nashville Food Project, Daybreak Arts, and many more. Unsurprisingly, the variety of styles from each release is always compelling and worth a listen.

You may not know a lot of architects in town but with Manuel Zeitlin, you probably do! Know Turnip Truck? Henrietta Red? Pinewood Social? Fenwicks 300? Catbird Seat? The Gulch!? That’s all MZA. Zeitlin’s portfolio is vast and impressive. I mention this because Manuel Zeitlin, the MZA’s namesake, has announced his retirement.

Fittingly, the collective coworkers at WORK wanted to pay tribute and show their appreciation for their founder. What better way to do that than en EP of Neil Young covers? Five tracks of excellently executed songs that include a nice range of Young’s highlights.*

Many thanks to Manuel Zeitlin for his decades long career and his (and his studio’s) impact on Nashville. Additionally, many thanks to WORK for consistently coming together to show that being coworkers can be fun, unifying and beneficial to the community. Truly, a heart of gold all around.

* nothing from the electronic Trans album – maybe next year!?