Blood Red Shoes! Animal Collective! Black Country! New Road! Hut hut hike!

Blood Red Shoes – GHOSTS ON TAPE
(January 14, 2022)

Talk about a band under the radar. With six albums under their belt since 2008, Blood Red Shoes seems to exist in that no-man’s land where they garner quite a bit of attention with new releases, and yet somehow avoid press from the any of the major indie publications. GHOSTS ON TAPE is my first experience with the ever-shifting musical project from Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell, so I have only itself to compare itself against!

The duo spent much of the album’s production on opposite sides of the world from each other, so I’m not too surprised that this sounds like two different albums cobbled together. Ansell provides the furious, post-hardcore side of Blood Red Shoes and often sounds like The Dear Hunter or At the Drive-In; Carter supplies the softer, shoegazier side of Blood Red Shoes and often sounds like Garbage or Howling Bells. If I recall, there are no tracks where the two of them sing together. It makes for a diverse listen on paper, but the songwriting just isn’t vibrant enough to feel like it wasn’t just thrown together without any regard for cohesion. Diversity without cohesion? Inconceivable!

What really makes this obvious is how front-loaded GHOSTS ON TAPE is. “COMPLY” is a slow, well-paced build of tension to a fantastic moment of release. “MORDBID FASCINATION” is an infectiously throbbing electronic shoegaze groove (I’ll try not to use the phrase “infectiously throbbing” ever again). “MURDER ME” is a blistering display of skronky, fuzzed-out garage pop. A great start.

Eventually, the glossily sanitized sound wears thin. I have a hard time getting most of the rest of the album to stick, and by the end of its runtime I’m left wondering how this could possibly leave a lasting impression. So it gets the OH WELL face, because the first three tracks are worth the price of admission. Just don’t pay to see it twice.

Early Verdict:

Animal Collective – Time Skiffs
(February 4, 2022)

♫ “Time keeps on skiffin’, skiffin’, skiffin’ / Into the fuuuuutuuuure…” ♫ ♩

I’m too cool for Animal Collective. I dove into Strawberry Jam when it was released not really understanding the magnitude of their indie footprint, and I found Merriweather Post Pavilion to be MOSTLY ANNOYING at the time of its release! And those are the only two albums I really even know very well. Shout out to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch, though, that one deserves its legacy.

So, yeah, I know the band has been hard at work with their various multimedia projects in the last decade, but I wasn’t keeping up with it. I didn’t care much. I only bothered listening to Time Skiffs because now I’m writing about music on a regular basis, and I’m glad I did. This album is great! Top drawer, sir.

I’m not even going to talk about how Time Skiffs sees the band propelling forward in a promising direction, because I lack context for what was flawed about their previous direction. I’m instead going to focus on just how tight this mess feels on a gut level. In a musical universe where it can seem like every possible melody has already been mined and extracted, Animal Collective finds new ones as they pass through uncharted paths. A particularly impressive example, to me at least, comes from “Strung with Everything” during the verse that builds to the chorus: “I’ve got this world I think I build a thing and it does/I do believe there’s a conscious in things don’t believe in the time“. The lines are sung in this impossibly awkward meter, and yet the flow is natural enough to be really damn catchy. It reminds of some of the twistier lyrical passages of Strawberry Jam with the confidence of band in their 40s with, like, families and, like, mortgages.

As for the album’s overall sound, the dreamy and smooth psychedelia is a good fit for them. From what I’ve heard from Animal Collective and Panda Bear, the fondness for Beach Boys pop contributes a great deal to their songwriting decisions (most obviously with the vocal harmonies). Time Skiffs presents a similar reflective nostalgia that Beach Boys music always brings out of even the most nostalgically impervious! And that doesn’t describe me at all! So I like this.

Early Verdict:

Black Country, New Road – Ants from Up There
(February 4, 2022)

BC,NR’s debut was a tough act to follow. For the first time was #1 on my 2021 Top 25 by a mile, no contest, having had been firmly slotted in that coveted spot within a week of my very first listen. I liked it so much that it was one of only two full album reviews I wrote for a 2021 album last year (the other being one of the most crushing musical disappointments of my adult life: Danny Elfman’s true solo studio album). As the new year loomed around the corner, I had my sights on February 4th. The BC,NR sophomore album. I avoided listening to all the singles. I wanted to go in fresh. I couldn’t fucking wait.

And then the day came. And all the reviews were rapturous. Most publications rate Ants from Up There higher than the debut. Publications that were underwhelmed last year, even publications that SNUBBED the masterpiece on their final 2021 year-end lists, tossed out glowing accolades with reckless abandon! I was so pumped, I needed to get this thing in my ears like it was…you know, ear oxygen. Or antidote for some ear poison. It was life or death.

Here’s the only thing I’m going to say, because I shall prepare full opinions on a full review on a later date: I like this, but I don’t love it, and the elements that I cherish from For the first time are almost entirely absent here. While I can recognize that this is a considerable progression of their sound (and we can only expect even more progression now that Isaac Wood has left the band), and while I will fight until BLOOD GUSHES OUT MY RECTUM that they deserve all the hype and accolades that they have been getting for the last two weeks, I’m going to chalk this one up to a cut and dry case of “not fully my shit”.

A big thumbs up. I predict this will likely rank fairly high on my year-end list anyway in spite of my pickiness, but it is what it is. Again, I don’t want to go into any specific details here and now. I’ll save that for the inevitable full review.

Early Verdict: