Articles by Jared Dix
Styles We Paid For maintains their consistently high standard and current hyper productive streak. Stocking stuffing good.
If you like your rock music dark and intense, exploratory but still roughly song shaped then there’s probably something here for you to enjoy.
Drones and breakbeats, clouds of strings, jazz ghosts and solo piano all soaked in a comforting ambience.
Lengthy modular synth explorations that unwind in a leisurely and hypnotic manner.
The titles suggest a quick scout around a concrete plant and the music sounds like a night in an abandoned multi-storey car park.
It’s remarkable that an artist this far into their career is still holding out that promise of going somewhere new for both themselves and their audience. Looking forward to seeing where we go.
Warm and contemplative, I Can Wait is four linked tracks of gently flowing sound to help ease your fizzing brain.
A stunning piece of work, Dances / Curses is an enigma and a blessing. It covers much ground and it resists lazy classification. It’s a lot.
Hand Tools is a fast and slightly queasy flashback to all things pre-lockdown. Warming and medicinal, like a shot of Jäger.
Bold, multilayered and disorienting Honey Badger is an enigmatic and beguiling listen that rewards your patience.
Further refines their attack into a protean pre-teen metal that feels confident in itself and open to all possibilities.
Cherry Pickles invite you in to their wonky hand made universe. It’s an invitation worth accepting.
a weighty chunk of dark and swirling rock, well suited to driving into the long dark night of winter.
There’s plenty of chaos and confusion here still but it might be the brightest and breeziest Shit & Shine have ever sounded and it’s a pretty fine way to be sitting out a lockdown if nothing else.
Soaked in urban claustrophobia and a manic uncertainty Doomswayers is ambitious and accomplished, an imaginative shot in the arm.
garage punk blues in exhilarating two minute buzz saw blasts of jangling anxiety and broken distorto whine.
A pastoral calm beset by aural hallucinations The Walled Garden is a weird and hidden treasure
The energy they radiate is empowerment not grievance, a sense of strength in community. These aren’t protest songs, more songs of identification and celebration, of shared joy and pain.
Crisp and clear but charged with ‘in the moment’ energy, in a certain light it could be their best record.
Fantastic Man is nine chunks of relentless pounding drums, serrated guitar and agitated yelling. It is bracing and delightful.