Drug Church, Sonic Youth, and a fresh start (in fits and starts)

No. 1286: Drug Church - Hygiene

Moving into a new house isn’t easy. Moving across the country is significantly harder. We did that in 2021, after making some life choices about necessary changes mid-pandemic, spurred in large part by feelings of inertia. But it was just as difficult going from the short-term apartment we rented, where we were mostly living out of boxes, to the house we bought shortly thereafter. The sense of feeling unsettled made us a little anxious, to start, and then our cat got sick, initially evident through a sudden onset of blindness. (That was scary.) It turned out that his diabetes came back (he self cured years earlier and then…uh, un-cured), but on top of that he had cancer, and basically we thought his time had come. It was a little too sad to comprehend and even now, as I remember it, it was pretty devastating. But once we gave him more doses of insulin, his sight came back, he ate some tuna, purred and got in my wife’s lap. And then he lived, happily, for nearly a year longer. It felt like a miracle—he got to have a happy retirement.

And then we moved in on a cold-ass day, with the heat off inside the house when we got there, so it took a week to basically get to room temperature temperature (as I type this, it’s even colder outside and we’ve woken up on some coooooold mornings). And we still had boxes around, mostly for furnishings and whatnot that we had to unpack or had shipped or bought new since we disposed of things before we left. (And a second player to listen in my office as well as in the living room.) There were some comic mishaps, like when I lost my footing and slid down the stairs, comically eating shit, but somehow didn’t let go of my coffee cup. Weirdly proud and embarrassed at the same time. Plus I was sore for a day or two.

All while this was happening, I was listening to Drug Church a lot, specifically this album, Hygiene. Mostly because it rips. They’re ostensibly a hardcore band, maybe more specifically a post-hardcore band, something akin to Fucked Up if they were influenced more by Flip Your Wig than Zen Arcade. This album in particular does a pretty stellar job of bridging power pop with hardcore, and if Weezer released records like this, well, I wouldn’t dislike Weezer as much as I do.

My favorite song here is “Detective Lieutenant,” even if I somewhat disagree with the premise (though it does make me reconsider some things). It’s essentially an anthemic post-punk song about how if an artist you like does something shitty (or cancelable, if you want to go that route), that shouldn’t have to affect the value of the art. And I get that to some degree—there’s not really any un-problematic classic rock band, if you’re looking to poke that bear (it sure isn’t Aerosmith!). But that’s also easier said than practiced when you’re faced with something really hard to swallow; let me just say I’m glad I was never a big R. Kelly fan. Still, the chorus, “We don’t throw away what we love!” speaks volumes, and the lines we draw in the sand are really up to us. 

Mostly, the hookiness and energy and the strength of the melodies kept bringing me back, an energizing album during an exhausting time—and god knows it’s always good to have one of those around. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Detective Lieutenant”

No. 1287: Sonic Youth - In/Out/In

Sonic Youth have made a lot of records during their career, and I have quite a few of them. Not all of them, maybe not even most of them, but a lot of them, and while I increasingly find myself saying “I need more Sonic Youth records” a lot less (the more you have, the less there are to buy, or so the math tells me), somehow I keep getting more of them. This is one that nobody knew about until 2022 however, a set of early 2000s outtakes from around the time they recorded Murray Street. These are more jam sessions than songs, really—only one has vocals, and only one is short and more tightly structured, though they’re not the same song. Instead they kind of spread out into these “Marquee Moon”-like explorations with all of the members just kinda groovin’ on some psych exploration vibes. The closest that Sonic Youth ever got to being a jam band, I suppose, though they’d probably resent the implication (other than Lee Ranaldo, who is an admitted Deadhead). 

This record was released by 3Lobed, who sent me a freebie because the publicist who handled the release is a mensch. And the thing of it is, I might not have actually bought this on my own, but now that it’s actually part of my collection, I’ve listened to it quite a few times. It’s a different side of Sonic Youth and one that’s highly enjoyable, even if one that scratches a considerably different itch. And perhaps the fact that this happens as often as it does is why I end up buying so many Sonic Youth records. Each one serves an entirely different purpose, but what they share in common is you get to listen to Sonic Youth, which is always a good thing. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Out and In”

No. 1288: Mary Lattimore & Paul Sukeena - West Kensington

This is another record I got gratis from the fine folks at 3Lobed and it’s a gorgeous ambient collaboration—I’ve made my admiration of Mary Lattimore’s music known and this only adds to that. Though I’d be lying if I said I listened to this as much as Silver Ladders or that it had as much of an impact as that one. But it doesn’t have to, really—sometimes a pretty record is just a pretty record and you can make do with that. Rating: 8.8

Listen: “Flaming Cherries Jubilee at Antoine’s”

No. 1289: Pedro the Lion - Havasu

This one also arrived as a freebie but from Polyvinyl rather than 3Lobed. (A lot of these are represented by my friend Nathan who works in PR and hips me to a lot of fantastic music.) Pedro the Lion has always kind of peripherally been on my radar but rarely much more than that, and I think maybe I kind of brushed David Bazan’s music off when I was younger because it mostly seemed like the really serious emo kids were into him and I didn’t really listen to emo so much as bands that weren’t emo but that people who didn’t know anything about emo thought were emo. Like The Dismemberment Plan, who clearly are not an emo band. I also knew that Bazan was in the very loosest terms “Christian,” but I recognize now it’s more in the same way that Sufjan Stevens is a Christian, and not, say, Carman. 

So to hear these later-career records has been somewhat edifying, especially because Bazan’s last few records have been surveys of his younger self and his life as a kid growing up in the places the records are named after (Santa Cruz, Phoenix and, this one, Havasu). They feel less aligned with the ‘90s-era indie stuff like Death Cab for Cutie pre-O.C. (who were his labelmates at the time) and more like late-career Mount Eerie, which is great, and heartbreaking. And so is this. The music’s still largely subtle and slow and sometimes takes a few listens for it all to sink in, but this is a beautiful record that can be deeply moving at times, and which I seem to enjoy a bit more with each listen. There’s a Fred Thomas record that came out in the past few months that has a similar kind of vibe, and I’ll have more to say about that when it comes up in the rotation, but now that I’m in my forties, the Indie Guy Looks Back at His Life records resonate with me in ways I probably never expected. Signed, an Indie Guy Looking Back At His Life, probably. Rating: 8.7

Listen: “Old Wisdom”

No. 1290: The Drin - Engines Sing for the Pale Moon

I’ve never been a completist, outside of certain few artists, and even then I’m sometimes a little slow on the uptake (for as big a fan of David Bowie’s music as I am, I still have some notable gaps in my collection). But when I find a band I really like, I also tend to start scooping up their records in short order. The extended universe of The Serfs is one such example. I first heard their debut, Sounds of Serfdom (which I might have to order from a German seller to get a vinyl copy—I slept on my local shop’s copies) back in 2020 and then subsequently heard this, from Dylan McCartney’s solo project (btw ironic name for a guy who definitely doesn’t make boomer rock), and from that point on I listened to everything either project released, as well as Crime of Passion, featuring the same three musicians. So essentially it’s a miniature Cincinnati collective of sorts? The same band in a sense but different projects nad sounds. 

This is the first album from The Drin that I heard, and as of right now there’s five, and they’ve been released at a rate of at least one per year. A lot to keep up with, but this still might be my favorite. Lo-fi, scuzzy post-punk with a heavy dub influence, a bit of synth/minimal wave and industrial throb. It covers a lot of ground and every song is different, but I always come back to “Guillotine Blade,” which is just a monster of a dub-punk dance track. Even if it’s relatively stripped down. Incredible stuff, and while I might not buy everything they release, I’ll definitely listen to it no matter what. (And probably still pick up a fair amount.) Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Guillotine Blade”

No. 1291: Herbie Hancock - Empyrean Isles

It seems as if whenever I write about a formative jazz artist, I find myself racking my brain trying to determine whose music resonated with me first, before I really understood that jazz was the kind of music I wanted to hear. Miles Davis and Charles Mingus are two of the obvious answers, but Herbie Hancock might be the real answer. I remember hearing “Chameleon” when I was a lot younger, and it didn’t sound like jazz to me. It sounded like funk, and I loved it. 

But even before that, my first experience hearing Hancock’s music was through a sample, specifically “Cantaloupe Island,” as used in Us3’s “Cantaloop.” The name sorta gives it away. This was during a short period in the ‘90s when hip-hop and jazz were kind of intersecting—Ron Carter playing on A Tribe Called Quest records, for instance. And maybe it’s just my age showing, but I still love the sound of jazz rap. Nonetheless, years later when I heard Empyrean Isles, I immediately recognized “Cantaloupe Island” and, naturally, quite enjoyed it. But the album became one of my favorites of Herbie’s—who has released a lot of great records—in large part because of the other standouts, like the more avant garde “The Egg,” or the darker melodies of “Oliloqui Valley.” Even now I’d rank it in my top 3-5 Hancock records, an early favorite that shows where he really started to break free from being a good jazz bandleader and composer to a great one. (Though “Watermelon Man” was on his first record and yeah, he kinda nailed that one). 

This was reissued by a label called Future Shock, notably also a Herbie Hancock album title, and while it seemed sketchy, I’d been looking for a proper Blue Note reissue for a long time. For whatever reason, it proved to be one of the more elusive Hancock records. So I bought this one, which was affordable and actually sounds pretty good, despite what might be a gray market record. So it goes. Rating: 10.0

Listen: “Cantaloupe Island”

No. 1292: Dead Finks - The Death and Resurrection of Jonathan Cowboy

Every now and then I have to peruse Bandcamp, both its editorial content and just the pages of labels that I trust, for a new raft of barnburning punk to add to my queue. Australia’s Urge Records is one label I periodically look into for that reason; they released the Poison Ruin compilation that I absolutely love, along with the Stooges-y party punk of Nightclub, and as I bring this up here, I’m actually reminded that I haven’t checked out what they’ve been up to in the last year or so and should probably get right into that when I have a moment. They have yet to let me down. 

Dead Finks, also from Australia, are one of the best discoveries I’ve found just by the measure of how hard these songs go. This is a short record, under a half-hour, with eight songs that all rip. It’s somewhere between punk, garage rock and jangle pop, with a tunefulness that makes it hit harder, whether on the driving hellride of “Sour Grapes” or the full-throated screams of “(My Human) Extinction.” Yep, this album rips. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “(My Human) Extinction”