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dustedmagazine · 3 months ago

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Slept Ons 2024 (and one from earlier)

Tindersticks

We missed a few. We always do. December is always a month for catching up on other peoples’ favorites, checking out lists, listening to radio and discovering that, as rich and crowded as our collection of favorites was, we didn’t get to everything. In this annual feature, Dusted writers celebrate the ones that almost got away. Contributors include Bill Meyer, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers and Bryon Hayes.

Kjell Bjørgeengen & Chris Cogburn — Fear of the Object (Sofa)

Confession time: I slept on this recording for over a year. Originally released in May 2023, it came to me that summer, and despite hours of listening and repeated efforts to grasp its very specific enormity, I never felt like I could do it justice. Fear of the Object comprises four CDs packaged in a box that is paradoxically swanky in its grey austerity. Each disc was recorded at a different location and event, by the core duo of Kjell Bjørgeengen, a Norwegian video and sound artist, and Chris Cogburn, a Texan percussionist and electronic musician. The essence of the project is to use Cogburn’s instruments, Bjørgeengen’s translations of video signals to sound, the occasional input of sympathetic musicians (Juan Garcia, Judith Hamann, Ingar Zach, and Aimée Theriot all contribute), and the characteristics of each space to explore the differences between object-generated and electronically sourced resonance. Each presentation is broadly similar, a passage of long tones that either roughen or coexist without disrupting each other. And each is so different, from second to second or disc to disc, feels profoundly different and absolutely absorbing, so that my efforts to articulate said differences feel forever inadequate.

Bill Meyer

Cairo Jag — “N.R.G.” / “Tides” / “Worm”

I couldn’t tell you how or why I found this band — none of my usual newsletters or other channels seem to have written about them, and the best I can intimate is giving “Tides” a spin ahead of a summer support slot for JJUUJJUU at the Empty Bottle I would’ve seen flit across my inbox — and they didn’t even have a proper release to point to in 2024, just three singles spread out over five months in the middle of the year. But you don’t need more than that to get the point: These guys get it. Heavy grooving in the rhythm section, mind-flaying guitar, just-distant-enough vocals, hell, even singalong choruses: All of it points to the beautifully damaged kind of napalm psych I’ve seen work just as well among metalheads as it does among the more strictly acid-inclined. If you miss High on Fire and the output of Birds of Maya or Mammatus simply isn’t enough for you, add this Indianapolis trio to your list of essential listens, then keep an eye out for when they burn both ends on a stage near you. Stay fried, fellas.

Patrick Masterson

The Sleeveens—S-T (Dirt Nap)

You might wonder why I didn’t get to this one sooner, given that the band played Goner Fest, the world’s best and most reliable showcase of punk rock every damn year. Or that they released this self-titled debut on Dirtnap, the label of choice for the Texas garage punk juggernaut The Marked Men and related spin-offs like Radioactivity and Bad Sports. Or that they’re Irish, always a plus when your name is Kelly. But the fact is that I missed it until I went on a holiday hiatus “best of” binge, and heard the rollicking, surprisingly sensitive “Metallica Font” on Nate Knaebel’s excellent 2024 wrap (full disclosure: Nate occasionally writes a review for Dusted). It’s a total banger, rough and heart-felt and rowdy, and not the only one. If you don’t get a rush from headlong, hoarse-romantic “Give My Regards to the Dancing Girls,” there’s something dead inside you. The Sleeveens occupy that wry, busted emotional space where they see the world as it is and carry on anyway, turning a line like “Singing like Aretha Franklin, pissing in the eyes of your racist uncle” into a disgusted rallying cry. Here’s a band that can go hard while remaining fundamentally sweet and wistful, cranking headbangers with heart and world-beating choruses with a crack of melancholy running through them. If I compare Sleeveens to the great Thin Lizzy, it’s not just because they’re both Irish. It’s because they’re both great.

Jennifer Kelly

Subdued — Abbatoir (La Vida Es un Mus)

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The avalanche of excellent punk music made during 2024 had the unhappy consequence of lots of releases being given relatively cursory attention when they deserved a whole lot more. England’s bumping scenes, from Yorkshire to Brighton, were especially fecund in 2024, and terrific records by Imposter, Bad Breeding, Hellscape and the Chisel came and went. I listened and liked them, but the pace of life and the ongoing slide of other music carried me elsewhere. Abbatoir, the second LP by Londoners Subdued, might be the best of the bunch; certainly it marks a band in striking development, fusing the muscular anarcho-punk of previous record Over the Hills and Far away (2020) with death-rocking textures that evoke Rudimentary Peni at Blinko’s rawest. But the more palpable resonance is with a band like Subhumans, c 1984. Melody infuses the strongest songs on Abbatoir, like “Vulturemen” and “Children of God,” complementing the political rage with memorable sonic structures. The real thrill on the record is the closing song, “Deserve Anarchy,” a downhill sprint powered by venom and sweat. Singer Jack shouts, “Their crisis of excess / In a crisis of need / We deserve anarchy now.” The precise meaning of “deserve” is an open question there, provoking, punishing, tempering. I hear multiple intended significations — but it’s anarchy. It doesn’t want to be mastered.

Jonathan Shaw

Tindersticks — Soft Tissue (Lucky Dog/City Slang)

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It makes sense that my pick for an album I’ve slept on is more often than not an act I’m not super familiar with. Why wouldn’t I go out of my way to play the new record by one of my favorite bands? But longevity can complicate this. There is a place where you can divide the discography of long-running Nottingham band Tinderstick pretty easily; from 1993-2008 one group of six people made six albums (five of which I adore, one I need to go back to someday); then half of them left, and then from 2008 through 2021 they added a new rhythm section and made seven more. I’ve checked in on and enjoyed a couple of those (if nothing else, Stuart Staples’ voice is still a marvel), but they haven’t stuck with me the way their earlier era has, and 2021’s Distractions left so little impression I couldn’t tell you anything real about it now. So, it was with resignation and foreboding that I added Soft Tissue to my year-end listening roundup. It made the cut partly because of the modest running length (just under 40 minutes if you don’t count an unnecessary edit of the opening track tacked on to the end), but I expected mere due diligence; time to check in and confirm that this old favorite was doing fine but maybe wasn’t for me anymore.

That initial listen, I basically had my hand paused over the stop button, waiting to be unimpressed enough to eject and move it to the recycle bin. But I never quite hit it. I couldn’t make my mind up after one listen, but I had a lot to get through, so I filed it away as a future problem. Which is how I found myself playing it compulsively a week or two after I had finished off my 2024 lists, belatedly realizing that Soft Tissue not only feels like a new Tindersticks album that will stay with me, but my favourite since 2001’s Can Our Love… (an overlooked album that’s probably top ten all time for me). Part of it is that they seem to have returned a bit to the soul influences of that LP and 1999’s Simple Pleasure. Nothing here’s as propulsive as “People Keep Comin’ Around” or breathes fire like “Chilitetime,” but the more active songs like “Turned My Back” and “Don’t Walk, Run” groove in a way I no longer expected. And the slower, more abstract atmospheres of “Falling, the Light” and “The Secret of Breathing” have a delicacy and lightness of touch that it feels like they’ve been missing for a while. Maybe there’s more for me to unearth in the records between 2001 and now, but for the moment I’m just grateful to have a Tindersticks album I unabashedly love for the first time in a couple of decades.

Ian Mathers

Yuasa-Exide — Information and Culture & Naturally Reoccurring (Round Bale)

Minneapolis mainstay Doug Busson mines the lo-fi strain of 1990s nostalgia with his Yuasa-Exide project. He distills fuzzy, punky kiwi jangle through a hazy cloud of the indie rock purveyed by the likes of Homestead, Matador, and Merge, tossing the sonic salad with a dressing made of loner home recordist vibes. This music is a pure nostalgia trip for folks like me, those of us who’ve bought tickets to every recent Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. reunion show, flying in the face of middle age responsibility. It’s noisy and warm and full of recorder grot and tape hiss but contains enough melody to be charming and downright catchy. Busson’s been doing his thing for awhile, but flies so far below the radar that fellow Minnesotan David Perron and his Round Bale Recordings imprint sought to transmute his music into physical form. Spoofing the format of the old MCA Twin Pax twofer cassettes, Perron brought a pair of Busson’s recent song cycles into existence. The A side has a coarse grit, while the flipside finds Busson tumbling his rough-cut stones into fuzz-pop gems. Yuasa-Exide definitely slakes my lo-fi thirst.

Bryon Hayes

#dusted magazine #yearend 2024 #slept ons #Kjell Bjørgeengen #Chris Cogburn #bill meyer #cairo jag #patrick masterson #the sleeveens #jennifer kelly #subdued #jonathan shaw #tindersticks #ian mathers #Yuasa-Exide #bryon hayes

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