Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and artist stores (where applicable) below.
We most recommend purchasing direct from the artist, but appreciate that Bandcamp’s practices have undoubtedly been the best of the large-scale digital music services. If you purchase from such a service, we strongly recommend waiting for a Bandcamp Friday, which Bandcamp has announced will extend through the remainder of 2020.
Albums of the Week
Sucker’s Lunch by Madeline Kenney
I wrote about some of these already, but the album as a whole more than lives up to the singles. There’s a cautiousness to the songs that mirrors a slow love, but every one of them acknowledges beauty in love, getting settled into a groove and unsettling the song for a few moments here and there. Kenney layers sound atop sound, eventually weaving something like a fever dream tapestry, nearly always carrying the song high into the atmosphere. They feel like almost-revelations, hidden in understatement. And throughout, her stained-glass voice, shimmering melodies, and moments of discordance. An honest kind of love, one that admits it takes a sucker to search for and accept it.
Pick up the Album on Bandcamp
Follow Madeline Kenney on Facebook
No Horizon by Wye Oak
I find myself eternally dumbfounded by the sheer amount of creativity and talent in Wye Oak. Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack encourage uneasy revelation as Wye Oak, but they also not-so-secretly release solo records (Flock of Dimes for Wasner and Joyero for Stack), somewhat secretly play in so many other musical acts (Bon Iver, EL VY, Lambchop, Loma, etc.), produce records, and can almost randomly appear onstage during others’ live shows. In so many ways, their playing is as ubiquitous as any in the scene.
I’m from Baltimore, so I plenty of bias, but Wye Oak continues to release some of the most relevant and deeply affecting music in the world today. Back when I fancied myself a writer, I often lamented that art cannot capture the non-linear nature of living, but I find this assumption routinely challenged by how I experience Wye Oak songs. They play with melody and discordance in a way that reflects how I so often interpret the world around me, and I think that continues with No Horizon. I can’t really describe their music, but I think words like “dense”, “sparse”, “atmospheric”, “pulsating”, and a few others offer a kind of starting point. They use guitar, synthesizer, drum machines, and ultimately make some of the best music in the world.
Pick up the album on Bandcamp
Follow Wye Oak on Facebook
Beneath the Woodpile by The Dirty Grass Players
One of Baltimore’s premier bluegrass bands that have kind of blasted onto the scene in the last half-decade (especially live), they finally released a second album. On Beneath the Woodpile, their typical energy abounds, and they neatly straddle the line between tradition and newness (though, to be fair, the modern conceptualization of bluegrass is still relatively young). What I like most about The DGP is how they always nod to that tradition while also acknowledging the easy influences of John Hartford, Phish, and progressive bluegrass. I think the band would say they don’t take themselves too seriously and avoid attaching themselves to a singular musical movement (e.g., trad-folk, newgrass, etc.), but follow the songs where they will while using bluegrass as a framework. It’s a helluva record and I desperately want to see these guys play again soon.
Pick up the album on the band’s website
Follow the Dirty Grass Players on Facebook
Indistinct Conversations by Land of Talk
Elizabeth Powell is a wildly gifted songwriter and musician. With Indistinct Conversations, they take that title and run with it; these songs do reflect those distant, indistinct conversations, those passersby of thought, time, and moments. It’s not just the ones we hear faintly at the museum or walking on the streets, but it’s the subtext in the comments we read on the internet or the newspapers. Somehow, Powell takes something fundamentally unclear, indistinct, and burgeons it with the space for clarity. In the constant chatter of our lived lives, we become these tangled balls of anxious energy, indistinct selves, and listening to this record feels like meditation, a mindfulness practice. My favorite moments are probably the quieter songs, but I love when Powell rips on “A/B Futures”.
Pick the album up on Bandcamp
Follow Land of Talk on Facebook
Long Lost Solace Find by Mike Polizze
Mike Polizze is better-known for his work as Purling Hiss, if only because that scuzzy, fuzzy band marks the majority of his publicly available output (and it’s all worth your time). On Long Lost Solace Find, he records in an official solo capacity for the first time, exploring a different kind of sound than ever before. He’s a Philly musician; everything that comes with that label in the indie scene largely applies here, but taken in the Purling Hiss context, it’s almost a stunning departure.
Polizze explores loping melodies that sound easy and almost certainly are not, introduces meditative instrumentals that call to mind Jack Rose, and explores those kinds of lyrical absurdities hinting at profundity just like the songs of Kurt Vile and Adam Granduciel. I suspect those are appropriate touchstones, but these songs are certainly their own thing, apart from but still part of that Philly zeitgeist. An edge of pop filters into the songs and they become earworms for different reasons than so much of KV and WoD. This is the sort of album that could easily define a summer, something to spin repeatedly.
Pick the album up on Bandcamp
A Hero’s Death by Fontaines D.C.
It took me awhile to get into Dogrel, their first album – I gravitated towards other, tangential sounds like Protomartyr and Parquet Courts, while everyone else seemed to name-drop Shame and IDLES (contemporaries), as well as more than a few somewhat apt Joy Division comparisons. Eventually, “Boys in the Better Land” and “Liberty Belle” won me over and I keenly wanted to see them live as soon as I could, especially if I could see Dublin first. Then, covid and the American nonresponse.
A Hero’s Death is pretty indisputably a great album, almost immediately. They exploded from tiny clubs to big venues, and instead off doubling down on their sound, they’ve done something different; suddenly, the songs are introspective, even impressionistic, and they actively explore what it means to exist in the current state of things. Whether intentionally or not, a song like “I Don’t Belong” feels appropriate for a quarantined life, all while the music itself manages to alternately hypnotize and thrash, to seduce and subvert.
Pick the album up on Bandcamp
Follow Fontaines D.C. on Facebook
Such Pretty Forks in the Road by Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette is one of those musicians whose releases I’ll always enjoy, and that continues here. I was a child during her Jagged Little Pill heyday in the 90s, but Such Pretty Forks in the Road certainly reinforces her legacy as someone whose voice can shift from a howl to a whisper in a moment, whose lyrics cut deeply and quickly, and ultimately produces polished indie-pop that offers rewards for both active and passive listeners.
Pick the album up on Bandcamp
Welcome to Hard Times by Charley Crockett
Charley Crockett is one of those real-deal American folks who’s lived a life worth writing about and just so happens to know how to make music in almost every American folk tradition. He can boogie like it’s 1958, sing you the saddest damn honky tonk songs, channel early Springsteen, and he can switch into a 70s soul sound flavored with creole and Johnny Cash. If that intrigues you, listen to this one. It sounds like a mish-mash that shouldn’t work, but it nearly always does. I’d start with “Wreck Me” or “Welcome to Hard Times”, but it’s better to listen to the whole thing. If it helps, he’s also a nicer-than-anybody-else man.
Pick the album up on Bandcamp
Follow Charlie Crockett on Facebook
Quarantine at El Ganzo by Sebastian Maschat and Erlend Øye
With Whitest Boy Alive planning to play a festival in Mexico, Erlend Øye arrived from Norway in Mexico on March 3rd, Marcin Ōz and Daniel Nentwig arrived from Germany on March 13th, and Sebastian Maschat arrived from Costa Rica on March 16th. I promise, this is relevant. The festival gig was then canceled.
At the same time, however, they had four free days of studio time from the Hotel El Ganzo in Baja California Sur. The band was forced to separate because they had to quarantine for 14 days before they could enter the studio. Erlend and Sebastian went to San Jose de Cabo, whereas Marcin and Daniel stayed in Mexico City. They attempted to record remotely, but ultimately that didn’t work. So Erlend and Sebastian started to play and eventually record together at El Ganzo. Sebastian is the drummer in WBA, but had secretly been writing songs of his own across the last 15 years, taking this time to introduce them to Erlend. They bounced a stable of songs off each other, selected the ones they each most enjoyed, and ultimately created a record with their songs equally represented.
It is a beautiful record, full of the rhythms and melodies that have come to dominate Erlend’s most recent records, with nods to bossa nova, island life, electro-dance, and everything I could want from them. It is, in its way, an easy kind of listening, full of moments that stick in the ear.
Purchase the album here
Lonely Trip by Trey Anastasio
Phish (and by extension, Trey Anastasio) are controversial among music fans. They jam almost endlessly, and it’s hard not to immediately think of their music as reductive and indulgent. In the last year or so, I’ve come out the other side of this criticism (which is valid for plenty of people) and instead find myself enthralled with the way Trey plays, the tones he achieves, and those solos that feel uniquely his.
He wrote Lonely Trip while quarantining in his NYC home, with only two guitars, a single amp, two mics, two keyboards, and an 8-track. It is very much a moment in time captured, but there is plenty of that trademark sound to be found. He dedicated it to healthcare and essential workers.
Pick the album up on Trey Anastasio’s website
Follow Trey Anastasio on Facebook
Singles of the Week
“Amerikan Dream” by Front Country
Melody Walker, Adam Roszkiewicz, and Jacob Groopman are Front Country, and this song pulls no punches. Walker’s voice – a physical thing that never fails to amaze me, no matter how often I see them live or listen to their records – explodes again and again, alongside rapturous playing from her bandmates. But it’s the message that matters most, the way they quickly dismantle the notion that the American Dream is an attainable or accessible thing.
Sonically, I never know exactly how to describe them, but their sound somewhere between punk, bluegrass, and heartland rock. Ultimately, the music just slaps, and the message is appropriate, all-to-timely, and well-reflects the shape of American society. This is the only single I’m listing this week, so I’m ending with this quote from Walker in Rolling Stone: “Since it [the American dream] is a belief more than a fact, the first step in changing it is to dismantle the dogma within ourselves so we can be free to imagine a better country together.”
Upcoming
Total Freedom by Kathleen Edwards
Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? by Fantastic Negrito
Twelfth by Old 97s
Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was by Bright Eyes
Right Now by Twisted Pine
Wiseacre by Eric Slick
A Little Heat by Andrew Grimm
