Oops, I did it again! The second installment of Newer Release Roundup (I lost rights to the trademark in the landmark case Tom v. the Internet) sees a veritable roller coaster of emotional befuddlement and ennui. Maybe! Perhaps it’s more of a euthanasia roller coaster, actually. In any case, here are three more albums that dropped within the last few months.

Lord Huron – Long Lost
(May 21, 2021)

I’ve never been too familiar with Lord Huron’s body of work, but it seems to me that most of their exposure has come less from professional music publications and more from the inclusion of some of their songs within episodes of SHITTY MASS-MARKETED TELEVISION SHOWS such as Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Med, The Vampire Diaries, and many others. Their homey Americana sound resonates well with the sensibilities of the average joe, and their interesting blend of styles creates a very warm sonic palette.

Even without previous knowledge of Lord Huron, Long Lost feels like visiting an old friend. After the gentle introductory track of “The Moon Doesn’t Mind”, the album kicks off strongly with “Mine Forever”, a song I fell in love with immediately. Their combination of surf rock guitars with a Fleet Foxes indie-folk flavor is, to put it bluntly, cool as shit, and the track features two fully realized melodies!

Track after track reveals more angles of American tradition. Country western ballads, jangly early-era rock and pop, sunny folk pastiches, and woeful lyrics of uncertainty, unrequited love, and good ol’ general pain and suffering. What’s not to like!

Oh wait, I know. The final track “Time’s Blur” is 14 minutes of aimless minimalism which takes up about a quarter of the album’s real estate. Supposedly, it’s a collection of all the previous songs stretched out to oblivion into a spacey sonic landscape, symbolizing eternity or rejuvenation or something? I think it sucks! It’s a very frustrating way to end a great album, and if it had been only three or four minutes it would be more excusable, but 14 whole minutes makes for an excruciating failed experiment. Judging the album as a whole, this track is hard to get past.

Early Verdict:

Mare Cognitum – Solar Paroxysm
(March 27, 2021)

Mare Cognitum is the one-man project of Jake Buczarski out of Portland. In the realm of extreme metal, Mare Cognitum can be categorized as atmospheric black metal. This means extremely long track lengths (each of five tracks on Solar Paroxysm exceeds ten minutes) with long stretches of repetitious, plateaued riffing, long stretches of tremolo-picking, and a guy throatily yelling nonsense.

Yes, my bias is showing. I’m spending a lot of time lately trying to appreciate atmospheric black metal, and I’m stuck at the “how does this REALLY sound different than any other record of it’s kind” stage with…well, with literally any album of its kind. Bombardments of blast beats, walls of sound, it all kind of melds together sometimes.

Solar Paroxysm made me take pause. Production is crisp, which is rare for this type of music. The previously mentioned common tropes are still present, but there are some progressive elements to enhance the unpredictability, to an extent. It’s all still metal, man. Notably, quite a few guitar solos pop up that sound right out of a power metal record, which gels in nicely with the raw, odd beauty that builds within the tracks. I’m gonna be honest here, I’m enjoying this record. The runtime is a little long, but my interest gets piqued often enough to keep coming back. Maybe some day I’ll have this whole thing memorized and then we’ll REALLY see where I stand.

It’s also important that atmospheric music of ANY genre matches the cover art. Do we have a winner? Yeah, kinda. I can dig it.

Early Verdict:

The Weather Station – Ignorance
(February 5, 2021)

This isn’t my first run-in with Tamara Lindeman’s indie folk band. I had listened to their previous album from 2018, the self-titled fourth album, which I should go back and listen to again because I remember finding it pleasant. I’m not surprised to see so much more exposure for Ignorance compared to everything else they’ve done, considering it got a rare 9.0 score on Pitchfork to boost their signal.

But, honestly, color me bewildered. On the surface, the slightly experimental sax bridges or the occasional garnishes of colorful instrumentation add something special to the flavor, but each listen brings less to the table for me. The flaws become more glaring, and then hard to overcome. Now that I noticed that the same extremely simple drum beat that drives, like, 7 out of 10 of these tracks, I will never get over it. Now that I noticed the complete lack of dynamic vocal range, I find myself unable to differentiate between songs. Now that I noticed the sterile production, I find myself to be rather inattentive through most of this record.

Reviews for Ignorance are stellar across the board, so I must be totally missing something? Maybe the jazz-tinged ultra-shiny sophistipop has some nuance that I still haven’t fully tapped into? I hope so. We’ll see.

Early Verdict: