exclaim

exclaim reviewed Second Song by Neil Young 1d

7.0

No matter how exciting, it can be difficult to find words to describe a new Neil Young album. After all, with his newest chrome hearts-assisted effort Second Song, Young's catalogue now boasts 46 titles — not including his work with Buffalo Springfield or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, let alone his countless live releases and EPs. So, while this is technically only his sophomore effort with his new band, it sounds how you would expect: Second Song is classic Young, his distinctive trill over music imagining that Laurel Canyon butted up against the Smoky Mountains, all acoustic guitars with country strings, the occasional harmonica rounding it all out. The album's best quality is its looseness; the sense that, rather than tightening his grip, Young is jamming with friends. For someone so publicly uptight, it's a nice glimpse behind the curtain. Lyrically, meanwhile, Second Song is almost evenly split with songs about how much he loves his wife and songs about how much he hates the government — though both camps are tinged with a nostalgic regret that only turning 80 can bring. The seven minutes of "Day After Day," are a well-spent trip to the core of the man himself, while "Earth Girl" is going to be every hippy's new favourite love song. If you're a fan of Young's slower moments — such as Colorado's "Eternity" or anything off of Comes a Time — this is an album full of similarly beautiful missives. Age has brought a tenderness to Young that suits him well. And maybe that's enough. Just because Young put folk on the map, invented grunge and has been hating presidents since before it was cool, it's not fair to him to demand more. Simply put, Second Song is a great album. However, by its last note, you can't help but have the nagging sensation that it could've been more. But perhaps holding an album that would be a crowning achievement for most other artists as "great but uninventive" is unfair, a cruel reward for a career of many twists but few flops. If you love Harvest-era Neil Young, this is for you. If rocker Young is more your style, there's still a lot of vulnerability and emotive stretches to keep you enthralled. If you're looking for one more big turn from the shapeshifting legend, though, it's not Second Song. Instead, what you have here is a great record that, despite not reinventing the wheel, belongs in the upper tier of an illustrious catalogue.

exclaim reviewed Pylon by beabadoobee 1d

8.0

Just shy of her first full decade as a recording artist, beabadoobee has grafted her quirky alt-rock roots to the slicker, adult contemporary bedroom pop of her recent growth as a major commercial force. This union on Pylon gives fans the best of everything we love about the songwriting of Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus: her warm, velvet blanket of a voice envelops every song, never obscured or overshadowed by lush, technicolour production and bold, creative, psychedelic-leaning arrangements. It's all the sunny-but-safe charm of "Beaches" tempered by the raw personality of her pre-pandemic EPs. The 14 songs of her fourth full-length album are a synergistic union of sophisticated pop sensibilities and idiosyncratic alternative experimentation, the likes of which have seldom been heard in a mainstream artist since before the 26 year old was born. Tracks like the Hayley Williams-featuring "Nothing to Prove" and "Radio" would've been perfectly at home alongside acts like the Smashing Pumpkins and No Doubt in the '90s, when alt-rock topped the charts and was given seemingly bottomless recording and marketing budgets. beabadoobee is perfectly positioned to be a major driving force in the largely female-led rock revolution that's been gaining momentum throughout the 2020s. The sublime pop chops that have helped her open for superstars like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo continue to give her the mass appeal necessary to really kick down the doors of contemporary culture; Evan Stephens Hall (Pinegrove) co-write "Spark" is a great example of how naturally she can pull off a "what if Taylor Swift was an unabashed Elliot Smith fan" moment. That said, it's very telling that she's pushing the energized, midwest emo-tinged "Sun Has Set" and the gleefully unconventional "Switchblade" as lead singles. The majority of Pylon is full of these elements of grit and invention, with glorious fraying barbs of fuzzed-out guitar shanking the cozy pop framework established on 2024's This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Even in the shiniest, most overtly pretty moments on the album (like the tender romanticism of "Write Me a Letter"), Laus invites the messy, incalculable chaos of humanity into these recordings. As a result, every song feels wild and alive, singular in its sonic fingerprint. Whether it's a deliberate reaction to the threat of artificiality threatening to subsume artistry (a topic woefully never far from the creative process and music industry at large these days) or, more simply, the interior instincts of a major talent feeling the freedom to embrace her innate sense of self, Pylon is a powerful marker — a sign of how possible it is to make music that's as filled with unselfconscious pop catharsis as it is with ragged, irreplaceable soul.

exclaim reviewed The Singer in My Band by This Is Lorelei 1w

7.0

Before he was the prolific multi-instrumentalist behind dreamcrunch indie rock band Water from Your Eyes; before plastering Bandcamp with dozens of EPs and singles under the name This is Lorelei, Nate Amos grew up listening to folk music. His father, the bluegrass guitarist and songwriter Bob Amos, made sure of that. Those influences are present, if not prominent, in Amos's extensive EP back catalogue. Though a lot of his work from that period can be cleanly lumped under the umbrellas of experimental indie and electronica, the strongly melodic hooks and choruses of songs like "Money Right Now," "Friend" and "One More Song" place them firmly on the already-blurred borders of pop, rock and folk. This is Lorelei's debut LP, 2024's Box for Buddy, Box for Star, played hopscotch with those borders, bleeding country ballads into electronic bops. On his sophomore album, The Singer in My Band, Amos has settled on his roots — at least for now. Appropriately for an album he developed primarily in the car while on tour, Amos calls Singer a "road album." That roaming, beat-era spirit comes through in the simple, driving chord progressions that mark the album's most characteristic tracks. Singer's opening number, for example — the memorably-named "I Will Eat My Heart in the Morning Light" — is a rolling country rambler whose wonderfully scruffy high-string guitar lead sounds like it took a swig of whiskey and stumbled off a Townes Van Zandt record. The song's best couplet sees Amos insisting he's "not looking for some kind of yonder" or "searching for gods in the sky," planting the listener firmly in the red sand of Americana before "Oh No Now My," the album's second single, reels them back into the dense, textured world of pre-Box for Buddy Lorelei. It's unpredictable, unique, and heavy; one of the best songs on the album once you get past its off-beat strangeness, and the clear outlier in style and production ethos. Both despite and because of its incongruity, "Oh No Now My" gives Singer some much-needed tonal contrast and puts the listener on the lookout for Amos's underlying idiosyncrasies in a set of songs which, at least on the surface, come off as strongly traditional. Though Singer is strong with what it has, the album could have benefitted from more of what "Oh No Now My" has to offer. The album's lead single, "Billy Came Back," puts Singer back on the country road with a jangling acoustic lick on the verses and an equally catchy hook backed up by multi-track vocals and a set of subtle but effective synth strings. That's Amos's MO on this album: sparsely produced verses that give way to dense choruses. Toward the end of the record, "The Kid with the Crown" largely abandons that minimalistic production. The song is better for it, with an explosive lead guitar careening over satisfyingly crunchy beds. There's plenty to appreciate about Singer's stripped down aesthetic, but this track is a welcome return to the sound of Box for Buddy's more heavily-produced hits. Though less varied than some of his previous vocal work, Amos's delivery is as affecting as ever, particularly on the title track which features banjo accompaniment from his father alongside some of the album's best lyrics. Lines like, "You can't belong to Texas if you're from Chicago land," evoke the lonely miles and mythic geography of the genre sincerely while still keeping things tongue-in-cheek. Many of Amos's choruses are supported by backing vocals from his sister Sarah, as well as his partner and Water from Your Eyes bandmate Al Nardo. Considering Amos has mostly forgone the vocal transformations that let him sing against himself on songs like Box for Buddy's "Angel's Eye," those higher backing vocals are a welcome change of texture, particularly on "Watching Heaven Fall" — an upbeat bluegrass track featuring a charmingly scratchy fiddle pushed far enough back in the mix to avoid being grating. The chorus of "Sailing (Your Baby's Down)," is another stylistic callback to EP Lorelei, but an electric guitar arpeggio in the vein of Jackson Browne and early Eagles keeps the verses rooted in classic rock. On the instrumental "Nitro," Amos develops the quick-change acoustic style he first showed off on 2021's "My Friend 2," and "Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever" takes that idea further, building to a beautifully reverb-laden climax complete with a synth orchestra. Outside of a fun guest verse from Nardo, Singer's penultimate track, "And I Haven't Seen My Love in Quite a While," doesn't bring much new to the record, and "Don't You Cry in Lonesomeness" closes the album out with its most pared-down song: just Amos and an electric guitar. It's strongly written and winds the record down on an appropriately melancholic, if anticlimactic note. The Singer in My Band is Amos's most overt experiment with genre to date. Though it misses most of the patchwork magic that propelled the eclectic electro-folk of Box for Buddy, Box for Star, it's a worthwhile expansion of the modern indie folk and country movements — a reflection of North America filtered through the bent lens of one of its most prolific and particular artists.

exclaim reviewed Who Loves The Sun by Chat Pile 2w

9.0

Hardly a glimmer of light has shone upon the world since Chat Pile broke out into — and against — its awfulness with their staggering 2022 debut, God's Country. Yet here we are, inching ever closer to the sun all the same. Sounding the alarm more soul-crushingly than ever, the band remain angry, deranged and mired in the muck of this place. With each release, they've sunk further into the dread and spiritual decay their music has always mined, as though modern life keeps rewarding their worst suspicions with fresh evidence. Their latest, Who Loves the Sun — never mind its brooding, almost-taunting title — is the next evolution of that descent. It plunges further into the band's sonic depravity, burrowing deeper into the hell they've rendered so vividly through their gnarled, downtrodden sound over the years. This time, though, something feels different. The fury hasn't simply endured; it has metastasized. Chat Pile sound even more unhinged, as if the years have only confirmed every fear, grievance and nightmare they first screamed into existence on God's Country, then unraveled on 2024's Cool World. What's changed is not the intensity of rage, but its focus. The old monsters — landlords, corporations, etc. — haven't left. They've moved inside us, shaping us until we barely recognize ourselves. That corrosion of identity hangs over much of Who Loves the Sun, but "Deep Blue," one of Chat Pile's most quietly devastating songs on the topic, chronicles the slow dissolution of the self most effectively. Raygun Busch's imagery of skin melting away and a mask becoming inseparable from the face is grotesque in a way only Chat Pile can manage, but the horror lands because it feels real to those of us in the rat race. The song isn't simply about conformity; it's about surviving long enough within broken systems that performance becomes indistinguishable from identity. Busch's repeated insistence to "smile and smile" feels less like encouragement than a command, exposing the exhausting performance modern life demands. If "Deep Blue" is about the masks we don, "Influence" is the sound of realizing the mask is all that's left. Doomscrolling, spectacle, the endless and vapid drip of dopamine — these things hollow us out until, as Busch howls, "That's what it feels like / To lose your fuckin' soul." By the time "Christabel '26" arrives, the erasure is complete: "They want you to embrace / Your own faceless mirror / They want to steal your soul," Busch spits, turning identity into another casualty on the battlefield of capitalism. We become strangers to ourselves. The mirror shows nothing, and nothing is exactly what we've become. The weightiness of this collection of songs doesn't come at the expense of Chat Pile's warped sense of humour, however. If anything, Who Loves the Sun proves the band are at their funniest when also at their most horrifying. "Creature" opens with ants dreaming and skulls speaking before the whole thing collapses at the feet of ecological ruin. Then there's "PEN I S SMALL," ridiculous title and all, disguising one of the album's sharpest critiques of labour exploitation beneath deadpan absurdity. Workers destroy themselves beneath the blazing sun, surviving on black coffee and Pepsi while their lives pass as a series of acts of subordination. As always, Chat Pile's jokes land because they stop being jokes. Even with all the self-deprecating, self-aggrandizing quips and sarcasm, one thing about Chat Pile remains unmistakable: the sound of Chat Pile. The music of Who Loves the Sun, as ever, mirrors their suffocating outlook on the world at every turn. Luther Manhole's guitars grind and convulse with greater confidence than ever, finding fresh shades of ugliness within riffs that seem permanently caked in rust. Stin's bass thickens every crevice and corner into something broodingly swamp-like, while Cap'n Ron's drumming threatens to burst apart every track without sacrificing the precision of drilling directly into your skull. Together, they've created an album where each passage feels less like a crescendo, adding another weight to an already unbearably bleak load. At the centre of this oppressive amalgamation remains the incomparable vocalist, Busch, whose voice continues to defy description. He doesn't merely scream; he pleads, mocks, narrates and unravels. Whether he's unleashing some ominous liturgical chant about ghosts and ghouls of late-stage capitalism on "Intruder," or on "Family Funeral," doing his best Linda Blair impersonation, emptying his guts of all the bile and vitriol within, Busch never sounds like he's pretending. He sounds trapped, trying to figure things out alongside the rest of us. Not many bands make the end of the world feel this near the present. Who Loves the Sun gets at how the scariest stuff is just everyday life — waking up, putting on the mask, going to work, and forgetting where you end and everything else begins. If God's Country was about staring at what's broken, this album is about what happens when you start to become part of it. It's messier, more draining and the clearest version yet of what Chat Pile do best: making unbearable music for an unbearable world hurtling toward the sun.