Sigh of the Sea
Progressive Electronic, Death Metal, Ska Punk, Slacker Rock, Canadian Hip Hop and more.
Mornin’ y’all. How’s your November going?
Had my Birthday this weekend, one more year closer to the big four-oh which is so threateningly looming on the horizon. Took a quick jaunt over the border to do some junk shopping.
Because I don’t have much else to report here, I offer you a sad-looking but very cozy Maple in these trying times:
Don’t forget that in the Substack app I am running an Album of the Month chat for all subscribers (even free ones!)
This month is the underrated album Social Life by Koufax. Take a listen and join in the chat:
Moving on, here’s what I’ve been listening to and logging lately. Let me know what you have been excited about, music-wise!
Icon legend:
⛏️ denotes picks of the week.
🌱 seedling denotes albums I liked, but may grow on me.
✨ means worth a look, if you like the genres listed in particular.
✂ denotes favourite tracks from a given record.
As always, please reach out on the hellsite, the better site, or join the Rosy Overdrive Discord server where I can be found now and again. You can also find me in the corners of Rate Your Music scrounging for obscure emo, hardcore, indie rock and pop punk.
Don’t forget: if you’re reading this in your email it will be cut off. Read on the web for the full list of reviews!
Celia Hollander - Perfect Conditions (2024)
Genre: Progressive Electronic, New Age, Chillout, Art Pop, Post-Minimalism, Electroacoustic, Ambient, IDM, Field Recordings
Very interesting and engaging progressive electronic with art pop and glitchy or IDM elements. Hard to pin down, but there's a lot of cool textures going on here. Sometimes it's kind of synthy and ambient with percussive arps ("Fire / Fire") and other times it's more straightforward with vocals ("Air / Fire"). Approaches that new age-y nature-y electronic vibe at times without fully becoming a parody too. Kept me hooked and would often pull my attention away from work as I listened. Cool stuff!
Abhorration - Demonolatry (2024)
Genre: Death Metal, Thrash Metal
Really good death metal with a lot of thrash's inability to sit still for too long spread around for good measure. As dewtaylo mentioned in their review over on Rate Your Music, this is stacked with riffs. The songs are long but never feel like a slog because there's always a cool turn or new riff on the horizon at any given moment.
Soshi Takeda - Secret Communication (2024)
Genre: Deep House, Ambient House, Balearic Beat, New Age
Very good Donkey Kong Country Water Level OST-core ("Rainstorm"). Basically plodding and lightly ambient deep house music. Repetitive by design, very good for background music by design (I have to assume) as well. Not sure I would listen to this over and over again, but it's nice to have in the arsenal when the mood strikes. Title track approaches Solitudes-meets-house-music with its animal/nature sounds.
Blockhead - Mortality Is Lit! (2024)
Genre: Instrumental Hip Hop
This is 60+ minutes of instrumental hip-hop from Blockhead. If you've heard their work in the past, you know exactly what this will sound like. Maybe it is because I was a bit disappointed with Luminous Rubble, but this also feels a little auto-pilot for me. Maybe my interest level in 66 minutes of this stuff is waning, especially with their output only increasing in cadence over the years. This isn't bad at all, but I'm not sure I need this much of it or if it's markedly better than, say, Funeral Balloons or Bells and Whistles or The Music Scene etc. etc.
Poppy - Negative Spaces (2024)
Genre: Alternative Metal, Metalcore, Nu Metal, Industrial Metal, Alternative Rock
I have never really listened to Bring Me the Horizon much so I can't weigh in on Jordan Fish's full influence here, but I do like pop music and heavy music and have space in my listening rotation for something that uses big pop production and hooks alongside hyper compressed chugga chuggas.
"Crystallized" and "Vital" offer the best sides of each coin here, the former being a shiny electro-pop tune and the latter sounding like an emo-pop banger slicked clean and busted into even wider screen format. "The Center's Falling Out" is Vein.fm / panic-chord metal role play (non-derogatory because I mostly like Vein.fm haha.)
The really over-produced production style here doesn't bother me as much as something like the new Knocked Loose record, because this is pop music still through and through. My main complaint is likely just length. There's probably a sick EP here of the best songs but at 42 minutes and 15 songs it feels unfocused and a little uneven. That, and like "The Center's Falling Out", there are songs here that sound toooooo close to their inspirations (try and listen to the opening of "Negative Spaces" and not think of Hole's Celebrity Skin.)
Poppy remains an artist I respect and enjoy catching up with because their turns into softer alt-grunge and alt-metal have been interesting to me and have resulted in a bunch of fun songs. But... I never find myself reaching for their albums in whole... yet.
Common Rider - This Is Unity Music (2002)
Genre: Ska Punk
Definitely a fair bit less scrappy than Last Wave Rockers, which had a good number of highlights but never was a record I wanted to listen to top-to-bottom. Have always preferred the consistency of this album to be honest. Really catchy ska-punk (or maybe even just ska-rock? not a ton of punk here) with big concise hooks from Jesse Michaels. They'd later go on to lean back into the punk side of the ska-punk coin with the fantastic Classics of Love in 2012.
Bolt Thrower - ...For Victory (1994)
Genre: Death Metal
Their sound really clarifies itself at this point in their career. Even on the last album, they still had some of their early sound hidden in their foundation but on this record they laser focus in on the slow-to-mid-tempo, heavy as fuck riff-crushing sound to good effect.
Maybe it's just me putting too much emphasis on album art, but I miss the nerdiness of Realm of Chaos-era Bolt Thrower, although that doesn't matter much when the music hits. I think I'll forever be mourning the perfect mix of nasty death and grind that they hit upon on Realm, but the elements they focused on throughout their career continue to make a lot of sense to me.
Korea Girl - Korea Girl (1999)
Genre: Slacker Rock, Indie Pop, Noise Pop, Midwest Emo, Jangle Pop, Slowcore, Twee Pop
Noisy, dreamy indie pop with a slacker rock skew to it. Originally flew under the radar a bit after getting released via Asian Man Records in 1999 but they've recently re-mixed and re-released it. Very enjoyable, kind of has a certain ceiling to the score but I like this type of grey day indie rock from the 90s so it's right up my alley.
RIYL: Seam, Velocity Girl, Mazzy Star, Pavement, Lois, Superchunk and Spent (all according to the press kit, but makes sense to me.)
Organized Rhyme - Huh? Stiffenin Against the Wall (1992)
Genre: Hip Hop, Boom Bap, East Coast Hip Hop
People in Canada know about how Tom Green got their start thanks to the video for "Check the O.R.", but as a whole album it feels like no one ever cared to investigate further.
Figured I should finally cross this off the list, and I'm both surprised and unsurprised this has been left to the dustbin of history. Surprised, because it's pretty good and well-produced hip-hop of the sample-digging variety. It's a mix of vaguely braggadocious and ridiculous rhymes but it never becomes outright "comedy rap" outside of the interludes where Green yells about hamsters or whatever.
Unsurprised, because it's pretty forgettable. None of the songs outside of "Check the O.R." really stand up chorus-wise, and the interludes are pretty unmemorable - plus it has the runtime of a hip hop album released in the 90s.
That said, I'm probably overrating this because I can't not be endeared by a major label hip hop album scraped together by some 20-year old Canadians. As a one-time 20-year old Canadian who also tried to scrape together musical projects, it's easy to find this charming.
That’s it, that’s all. Be excellent to one other.
Happy Birthday Dan, thanks for all the solid recs!
Soshi Takeda is amazing! Love everything he's ever released, and just seems to keep getting better. This was the first one I heard from him, also on Not Not Fun records (they just did a vinyl version this year). https://takedasoshi.bandcamp.com/album/floating-mountains