Spring is like a chronical of a solitary road trip. It was written in New Mexico, recorded in California and Illinois. In each location, a crack crew of players and arrangers joined Kayla Cohen, the sole constant in Itasca. This collective effort has yielded an album that sounds spare, but never bare, and despite their assistance, Cohen sounds alone.
The people she addresses in her songs inhabit memory and mind-space, but you couldn’t hit them with a rock. And while she sings of fields and canyons, she sounds like she is the only person getting out of the car to take them in. Strings, steel guitar and keyboards wrap around Cohen’s singing and strumming like a long scarf and an old sweater, keeping her warm without calling much attention to themselves. Spring is not a record for every occasion, but if you’re trying to quiet the persistent noise of life, it’s an apt companion.
Utter certain words in a sequence, and the world deems you either a prophet or a madman. Since 2015, the stylish fever dreams of Leeds-based trio Drahla—conveyed through scattered singles, cryptic sleeve covers, and music videos—read like fragments of a codex that could’ve been the work of either. Yet ponderous bass lines, guitars that jar nerves like razors and the occasional sax squall plant Drahla firmly in the art-damaged post-punk crowd, where a cool exterior and esoteric texts can shield the artist from any commitment to prophecy. And ergo, you don’t have to be a lunatic or a seer to sing baffling non-sequiturs, as Drahla does on its debut LP. You just need an alluring aura, a working knowledge of occult rituals,and enough chutzpah to convince everyone that your existential ennui equates to truth.
On the surface, singer/guitarist Luciel Brown, bassist Rob Riggs and drummer Mike Ainsley seem like Artists displaced from space and time. As Brown teases out such lines as “Castle in the air has fallen/Creation is invalid” or “Ancient Egypt in the palm of my hand” to her own serrated riffs, mundane life and ordinary people fade into tiny dots within Big Picture Concepts. Even with Drahla’s opaque lyrics, though, those dusty dialogues from academia aren’t too hard to work out—as on the rather Siouxsie-like “Stimulus For Living,” which boils down existence to a regular pattern of stimuli (fast food, sunsets, etc.) to maintain contentment. Meanwhile, “Invisible Sex” addresses our modern-day obsession with fabricated personas (both online and off) that morph into another reality in the public eye: “A profile to assign to/A glorious reflection to elevate my DNA/Visual exterior for opinion/Visual exterior for submission.”
Spend more time with Useless Coordinates, though, and you’ll find a self-fulfilling prophecy. The locked-door riddles serve as the only landmarks in the labyrinth, where tortuous corridors of sax and guitar blend into one discordant tangle. No one in Drahla will guide you through this maze, either; Brown and her acquaintances seem to place themselves above the clamor, save for the jagged bridge on the Sonic Youth-esque “Twelve Divisions Of The Day.” Even here, though, lazily drawn line “Holy water, shine on me” sounds like nothing less than a taunt, a mockery of spirit as it withers within secular rituals: “Waking up, body clock/An imitation, self-regard.”
Are these mysteries worth spelunking for? Perhaps, but dive deep enough into Drahla’s musings, and the most horrible secret emerges like a slug: There areno stairways to the stairs, no curses in the pyramids, no aura in the moonlight. Useless Coordinates has either exposed enigma as the forgery of aged signifiers, or Drahla has reduced the chaos of the unexplained to well-tread paths on a map. The initiate can only guess; the adept will surely know. But both will keep searching anyway.
Scrape down through the layers of rock history and what do you find? More layers—it never ends. This LP represents a labor of both archaeology and love. Who knew that nearly 40 years ago Kungälv, Sweden, was the home to a trio of teens who sounded uncannily like Liliput or some lost Rough Trade band? At the time, maybe a couple hundred show-goers and a few dozen people who purchased their homemade tape at the local record store.
But now these unwitting progenitors of the girls-rock movement have had that tape and a concert recording from spring 1982 cut into wax and packaged along with a booklet of remembrances and photos. Group members Eva, Åsa and Ulla (first names, just like the Ramones!) sound a bit wobbly at times, and their singsong vocals, buzz-saw guitars and un-doctored drums sound very much of their time. But you have to admit, a time when some teens could nip out for an afternoon, record a song about DJ John Peel and get him to drop their name on his show is a finer time than our own.
Space comes in a box, and all you need to do to get some is stomp on it. Writhing Squares, the Philadelphia duo of bassist Daniel Provenzano (Purling Hiss, Spacin’) and woodwinds/keys player Kevin Nickles (Ecstatic Vision), accomplish a self-contained variant on space rock on their second LP. Punch a key, and synth tones bubble; activate the delay pedal, and the voice of whoever is singing (they share duties) turns into a reverberant blur. They’ve got a bit of Hawkwind’s open-throttled aggravation in their sights and some Suicide-al angst in their hearts, but mostly they have a knack for evoking space and then subverting their own best efforts.
This is most likely their intention, since the singing conveys cruelty and frustration that are at odds with the intent to escape. Writhing Squares’ music works best, in fact, when it deals with limits. The shorter, vocal-fronted tunes grab your attention, and if you get to close to the bass, they’ll likely snag your sleeve and do some damage, too. The sidelong instrumental jam on the flip is a bit too open-ended for its own good, since duration dissipates rather than builds the tension that is this music’s essence.
Lena Hessels is not the first 17-year-old to lock her self up over the summer and make a record. But this is not a typical teenager’s recording project, because Hessels is not your average teenager. She is the daughter of guitarist Terrie Hessels (a.k.a. Terrie Ex). She’s spent her whole life experiencing music making first hand and has already engineered her dad’s upcoming duo record with Ken Vandermark. Billow benefits from such technical assurance.
Shifting between churning, Fall-like rhythm guitar, vulnerably sparse piano and a sampler loaded with field recordings and accordion chords, Hessels creates settings that evoke foreboding. One tune sounds like a distillation of Mark E. Smith and Co.’s rhythmic merits, another like a funhouse distortion of a sea chantey. Her English-language singing transmits an uneasiness well matched to the ambiguity of her lyrics, which are long on imagery and short on concrete exposition. This 21-minute EP is a very strong first move.
