This week I have new releases from Ty Segall, Ætheria Conscientia, and Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp. Hell, with a band name that long I don’t have much time for an intro. OH WELL!

Ty Segall – Harmonizer
(August 3, 2021)

Ty Segall is a cool, down to earth kind of dude. Every picture of him looks like he’s a friend of my little brother, and that’s saying something considering a) he’s four months older than I am, and b) I don’t even have a little brother!

All of his albums up to Sleeper share this very raw, “just record it and release it” vibe that I hadn’t heard much from Segall ever since. Beginning around about 2014, Segall has strayed consciously onto more sophisticated and more experimental songwriting avenues (2018’s Freedom’s Goblin is one of my favorite albums of the decade). In my stupid, unneeded opinion, Harmonizer shows some backtracking to his roots, and that’s not a bad thing whatsoever. Like every other artist in 2021, Segall’s recent stripped-down songwriting decisions were driven by pandemic lockdown.

With Harmonizer, Segall’s guitar playing is back to the forefront. The glossy, crunchy hi-fi production is matched perfectly with blaring lights and Segall’s frowny puss on the album art; this album feels simultaneously flashy and reserved. Like all the tracks were recorded in a soundproof, well-equipped studio in the basement of a hopping, dingy club away from where the action is. Replete with synthy buzzing, throbbing bass, and Segall’s patented John Lennon-impression vocals, this 35-minute thing is fun from beginning to end. Nothing particularly cathartic and life-changing, but I have zero complaints.

I could wax poetic about Ty Segall’s musicianship for pages and pages, and I might some day, but now is not the time for that. Don’t tempt me.

Early Verdict:

Ætheria Conscientia – Corrupted Pillars of Vanity
(April 9, 2021)

I gave this album the Metallurgical Evaluation treatment earlier in the year, but my OCD and my desire to pad out this post by, essentially, rewriting what I’ve already written reigns supreme!

Ætheria Conscientia is an atmospheric black metal band with a strong sci-fi theme, as evident by their album cover that shows some sort of ancient glowing robot bird or something. Corrupted Pillars of Vanity straddle the fence between metal, jazz, and prog (it’s a three-way fence!), weaving plenty of saxophone in between long, throaty passages of sludge metal scream over layered riffs. Lots of Neurosis influence is here, alternating slow acoustic prettiness with giant concrete blocks of soul-crushingly heavy and morose extreme metal. Don’t forget the 10+-minute track lengths. There’s also a fair amount of tribal drumming, which is never a bad thing to my ears!

My initial gripes with their project still stand months later: the sci-fi influence isn’t very obvious in their music. Usually such bands will incorporate otherworldly synths, robotic vocal effects, washes of industrial noise, or even some psychedelia. There’s none of that on Corrupted Pillars of Vanity. It’s an album very much grounded on Earth, not whirling through outer space.

Still, though, I like unique sludge/doom/atmoblack (whatever you want to call this), and the liberal use of the saxophone makes Ætheria Conscientia’s second studio effort stand out among the landfill full to the brim with this kind of heavy metal. Any fan of this sound will be more than pleased.

Early Verdict:

Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp – We’re OK. But we’re lost anyway.
(July 2, 2021)

I am always, always, ALWAYS interested in adding to my personal knowledge of bands that sound like out-of-control, demented marching bands playing an intriguing mix of everything you could think of (sidenote: check out a band called Perhaps Contraption). Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp. The Almighty Marcel Duchamp Orchestra.

I’ve already sung my praises of the debut albums by Dry Cleaning and Black Country, New Road. Between Dry Cleaning’s dry female vocals, and Black Country, New Road’s colorful instrumental palette, I think OTPMD’s fifth full-length meets somewhere in the middle. At any given moment of their slightly mysterious existence, the European collective contains between 6 and 18 musicians playing, obviously, all the instruments that any given member knows how to play. And then some more!

This music is right up my fucking alley. OTPMD weaves a seamless tapestry of post-punk, worldbeat, noise, krautrock, free jazz, surf rock, dance music, big band, and keeps it cohesive! That’s the important part! Any avant-prog band can throw a bucket of genres into a blender and call it good, but I sense an honest effort on OTPMD’s end to make the whole greater than just the sum of its parts. AND, lots of disparate music that I have heard my whole life gets dredged up from my memory banks while listening to this. The rhythmic marimba brings to my mind Adrian Belew-style worldbeat and PS1 Crash Bandicoot games! Backing vocals sound like Fela Kuti’s chorus singers. Funky, tense beats bring to mind early-mid ’80s-era Talking Heads. Intense, slow-building momentum sounds like ’10s-era Swans. It’s giant pot of delicious art school stew, which sounds gross in a sentence like that, but I assure you that it’s quite fantastic and sublime.

My personal favorite track is “So Many Things (To Feel Guilty About)” where the spoken-word bridge by one of their vocalists (hard to find concrete information about specific personnel for this album) is merely a laundry list of things that people get mad a women about (“…for being too demanding, for being too assertive, for being needy and greedy, for criticizing, for being a pushover, for being British, for working too hard, for being too busy…”). During this extended bridge the music behind it keeps building and building into a fever pitch! I love that shit.

Fun, captivating stuff! I’m going to check out all their other albums post haste. You do the same.

Early Verdict: