The weather’s getting warmer! Sort of. Unless you’re in Borneo or New Zealand or Uganda. Then it’s either as warm as it always is OR it’s getting colder! I know my geography.

Hey, I also know my music. Here are new releases from Earl Sweatshirt (hip hop), BUÑUEL (not hip hop), and the Birthday Massacre (so not hip hop that it circles back around and laps it again).

Earl Sweatshirt – SICK!
(January 14, 2022)

Earl Sweatshirt has the distinction of being the third, and last, member of Odd Future that anybody knows or has even heard of. The first two being Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean. Tyler brings the edge, Frank brings the nostalgia, so what does Earl bring?

He brings a knack for wordplay, an unmatched, labyrinthian rhyme scheme, brutally honest, relatable lyrics, and a little bit of edge and nostalgia. Just muted, sort of. Throughout his solo career, Earl has touched upon personal issues with his father, grief over lost loved ones, struggles with mental health, insecurity with fame, all with shuffling, glitchy beats, deadpan malcontent delivery, and a wry sense of arrogance that shines through from time to time, where appropriate. Now, with SICK!, just like almost everyone else, Earl reacts to the pandemic. And he’s a new father to boot, which makes the whole global disaster extra mentally ravaging. Trust me on that one.

And just like everyone else, Earl comes out of the ordeal a changed person. The beats aren’t as dank and muddy as they’ve been before, there’s a little bit more crispness to the production. Earl himself doesn’t sound nearly as frustrated, and even though he still weaves around his rhymes with that trademark lethargic haze, there’s a little bit more begrudged optimism here than we’ve ever seen before. Our boy is growing up!

Too bad Earl Sweatshirt doesn’t make full albums anymore. Clocking in at 24 minutes, SICK! doesn’t feel fully realized. Apparently he had a 19-track project in the works, but he scrapped most of it. Still though, worth the price of admission.

Early Verdict:

BUÑUEL – Killers Like Us
(February 18, 2022)

I’m expecting a new Oxbow record sometime this year anyway, but I was pleasantly elated to learn only weeks ago that Eugene S. Robinson lends his voice to an Italy-based noise rock supergroup known as BUÑUEL. I can’t stress dramatically enough my recommendation to check out anything Robinson is involved with. For context, Eugene S. Robinson is an amateur martial artist, poet, philosophical writer, occasional actor, and a terrifyingly jacked black dude whose stage presence is nothing short of intimidating. All this, plus he has an aggressively desperate vocal style. It’s a perfect pairing with the gritty, dirgy, and uncompromisingly harsh music that the three core members play with just a barebones guitar/bass/drums setup.

If Robinson is on the first two BUÑUEL albums I’ll need to listen to those too, because Killers Like Us fills the kind of dirty Jesus Lizard / Shellac / Flipper post-hardcore noise rock void that is hard to find these days. When he blurts out lines like “I’m the handsomest man/With the handsomest plan/To cinch it tight like a belt on a waistcoat” from the manically unsettling “When God Used a Rope”…hell, the very beginning of “Hornets” has an ominous feedback buzz while Robinson offers his dead serious, desperate monologue: “I want you to take a glimpse…I want you to take a real hard look…“. All his yelping and shrieking and wheezing and crackling. I can’t think of many other vocalists who are less impossible to do anything but pay rapt attention to. There’s a mountain of weight behind each and every word.

Like any good noise-rock band, the noise is interesting and varied and tense as fuck. It pierces into those primal corners of your brain, the ones you don’t think about too often, the ones that trigger those subconscious fight-or-flight responses that really get your juices flowing, baby. Puts hair on your chest is what it does.

Early Verdict:

The Birthday Massacre – Fascination
(February 18, 2022)

Don your oversized steampunk coats and strap on your platform boots with the 400 buckles! Gothic dance! Gothic dance! Everybody gothic dance!

I’m going to be brutally honest here. This music just ain’t for me. There’s a lot of music out there that actually is for me, so why should I bother with the music that ain’t for me? HERE’S WHY: because it’s a good to work that open-mindedness muscle once in a while, you dinguses. This is a perfect opportunity! I even have some good things to say about this!

If nothing else, the atmosphere is absolutely pitch perfect. Transportive, you might say. Pure darksynth whimsy from beginning to end, never once breaking character, never once straying from the little self-established fantasy world this music falls entirely within. Effervescent synthesizer pops and bubbles along as Sara “Chibi” Taylor sings in the most sweetly decadent, cartoonishly feminine voice you can possibly imagine. The chorus to “Once Again” (“I’m talking to the ghost of who I knew/I’m walking in the shadow left by you“) is so absolutely, infuriatingly, perfectly catchy that it’s unbelievable.

The caveat? It all sounds so damn phony. Perfectly crafted in a sterile gothic laboratory, designed to resonate emotionally with Disney-level precision. Half of these songs, especially the Mountain Dew-fueled darkwave “Like Fear, Like Love”, sound like a flawless, dusky autumn evening with friends during Six Flags Fright Fest. Like a magical goth prom night. Everything is so sparkly and indulgent, rife with the kind of rose-tinted nostalgia that you could only find in a terminally ’80s coming-of-age movie.

It’s not for me. Not at all. But this band is, without a doubt, the very best at what they do. Gotta give the credit where credit is due, after all.

Early Verdict: