Si Me Ven Alegre is all push and pull, ebb and flow

Laura Itandehui’s vibrant, infinitely danceable new album strolls through a bevy of Latin subgenres, always plucking the most colorful pieces for itself. Meanwhile, lovers are tossed across continent, the dead are ritualized through the power of rock’n’roll, and Itandehui’s band dances through tears of joy and pain. We talked to her below.

INTERIA moves like a swan. Graceful on the surface, churning below to keep afloat.

Nina Maia’s remarkably assured debut arrives with shimmering beauty. The production is sleek and lush by turns, her voice is pop diva perfection with a hint of smoldering, darker powers at the edges. But the influence of trip-hop detours and bursting walls of sound put INTERIA at an odd, intriguing place, even among other Brazilian pop albums that delight in flashing their myriad influences. We talked with Nina below.

The Turning is a pulp novel turned into a metal album.

And that is some of the highest praise I can heap on North Carolina stalwarts Bask. The churning mix of country, stoner metal, old school rock’n’roll, and cosmic storytelling lands The Turning somewhere between Conan and John Carter. It’s space cowboys with riffs. But this is no thudding slab of simple guitar chugging. The evolution of these ever spiraling, mutating songs is astonishing, and with pedal steel and strings in tow, The Turning is heartfelt and beautiful before it dives back down into head-banging goodness. We talked to Zeb below.

Heavenly reverb is suddenly shattered.

Jack Tobias loves ruptures. That’s clear from his work in YHWH Nailgun, where machine gunning synths burst through previously coherent sonic thoughts. On his solo EP Warm People, he pulls off the same trick, enshrouding the songs in ethereal production, then the hammer drops. We talked to him here on The Woodhouse.

The names in Fragile Wings suggest softness; tenuous and brittle.

And there is desperation in “Hopeless Magic,” “Three-Headed Moth” and, of course, the album title. But the album is anything but fragile. A deft mixture of progressive, death, and post-metal, Australia’s Cave Sermon delivers a rousing manifesto, in the same echelon as Deafheaven or Baroness, able to match impenetrable sludge with roaring beauty. We talked to Charlie Park on the Woodhouse.

Stockholm duo Alex Zethson and Johan Jutterström’s new album is a beautiful, minimal reflection on perfectionism and failure.

Through an intense and intimate recording process that picks up the clack of saxophone valves, and the humming of piano strings, It Could/If I refuses to let anyone forget there are two flawed, imperfect humans behind the music. The album reaches into melancholy and uncanniness similar to MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen’s Opening Night, and meditates on how music is perfect while in the composer’s mind, and instantly blemished when it is played. We talked to them below.

A pyromaniac haunts Points of Origin.

John Leonard Orr, a serial arsonist who was also a fire investigator, shambles through Will Stratton’s excellent new album as a wayward grim reaper. But fire itself does not haunt Points of Origin. How could it when it’s the blazing heart of the album? From the former conman forecasting his propane-fueled death to the eon-spanning “Red Crossed Star,” which charts thousands of years of crimes and flames carving California, fire is all matter and all that matters.

Stratton’s story telling slots between the dirtbag ponderings of Warron Zevon and Hannah Frances’ rot filled meditations. His characters are lively, flawed, always running from themselves and the flames that threaten to take everything they hold dear. Song by song Stratton’s remarkable knack for crafting empathy grows deeper and deeper, ensuring we must see ourselves in these flailing and failing coots, and the fears that hold them.

<a href="https://willstratton.bandcamp.com/album/points-of-origin-2">Points Of Origin by Will Stratton</a>

“I’m a savage/I’m a sad bitch,”

slurs Quinton Barnes. He’s more the former than the latter on CODE NOIR. The Canadian rapper blends R&B, hip-hop, house, hyperpop, and anything else that would inject his beats with color and panache. There are moments of vulnerability, but Barnes is mostly here to celebrate and giggle. We talked to him below.

Supplication offers a path.

Christianity, heteronormativity, they promise a program. Follow us, do not question, and you will be rewarded. What happens when you stray?

That’s a core question behind Baths. Will Wiesenfeld’s electronic project has asked it again and again, especially on 2013’s brilliant Obsidian. And the uncertainty has come roaring back on his newest Gut. Gut refers to Wiesenfeld’s promise to act instinctually while crafting the album, allowing impulses to direct the music. And that’s clear from the throbbing beat on “Eden” (which is about having sex with an angel) or the cheery vocals yelling “that’s that!” after Wiesenfeld asserts that “carnal is a normal mode.” Wiesenfeld thrives in juxtapositions and situations that, at first, appear to be contradictions. Gut catalogues sex both as an annihilating, freedom giving act, destroying the anxieties of the body, but also views fucking as a normal, even inane. Wiesenfeld’s exploration of queerness refuses any path, spiritually, physically, sexually. And we’re all the better for it.

Ghosts litter Drinking Songs.

The damned drowned, dying soldiers, innocents packed onto a train before it explodes; there’s not a note on Drinking Songs that isn’t haunted. Released 20 years ago this year, Drinking Songs marked a foundational shift in Matt Elliott’s life. He abandoned his work in the drum & bass group Third Eye Foundation and found a different way to pedal dread. Elliott composed using a morass of phantom vocals, nylon guitar, off-kilter piano, wailing horns, and a pervasive sense of doom. His vision was a dour bar in some Eastern European barony, where the patrons haven’t realized they’re already dead.

20 years on, Elliott has returned to Drinking Songs with a live, recomposed version of the original tale, the specters of the damned as lively as they were two decades ago. We talked to him about the best drink to pair with the album, the death of innocence, and the false promise of futurism on The Woodhouse.