This year kind of su–Ah shit, already said that. This is Part Two, no time for reminiscing – we got cool, overlooked music to get to. This will likely be the most understated part of this year’s Missed Connections feature as we’re looking at doomy slowcore, experimental brain-cookers, and tasteful post-punk/prog. Don’t forget to check out Part One linked above if you missed it!
Iain
As my first full year of doing reviews for Everything Is Noise winds to a close, I figured I’d take my first Missed Connections entry to look back. It’s been a ton of fun, and I’d say I’ve already learned a good bit. I’ve learned that variety is key when it comes to picking out what I want to review. Why just typecast myself, easy as it is to do so? I’ve learned to not use the word ‘non-Euclidean’ exclusively in the Lovecraftian sense if I don’t want an editor calling me out. And I’ve learned that I shouldn’t just overload myself with weirdo metal when I know damn well a 40 Watt Sun album is about to be released. Because that’s just what I did. I let Little Weight pass me by like a fool. Fortunately, for this feature, I have a chance to correct that mistake!
I’ve been a fan of 40 Watt Sun for a good while now, since my college days in the earlier part of the 2010’s. The band came to me by way of frontman Patrick Walker’s previous project, Warning. Now, Warning is absolutely legendary among depressive music fans, especially for the gloomy doom metal monolith that is Watching From a Distance. 40 Watt Sun formed in the wake of Warning‘s dissolution, and initially they followed that tragic doom blueprint with The Inside Room. But for all its grey haziness, that album was somehow warmer and felt more melancholy than outright miserable like its predecessor. Over the years, Walker and company have drifted further from metal and more towards a plaintive slowcore. Little Weight is the latest step in that evolution, and for my money, it’s some of my favorite stuff the band has managed yet.
That said, Little Weight does seem to turn the clock back just a little bit from the band’s previous album, Perfect Light. Whereas that album was almost entirely acoustic with a lot of piano in the mix, Little Weight brings back more distortion on the guitars, and features little more than the core of guitar, bass, drums, and Walker’s own powerful voice. It’s very stripped back sonically (while produced absolutely beautifully), laying the band’s emotional core bare for all to see. Most of the songs feature a select few progressions building slowly and deliberately to moving refrains with little window dressing, besides a couple understated guitar solos on songs such as “Astoria” and some tastefully slinky basslines. It’s simplistic, and if you’re seeking sheer sonic complexity, it won’t be found here.
But that was never really the point with Patrick Walker’s music. 40 Watt Sun triumphs on emotional impact, and Little Weight delivers that in spades. From the opening desolate progression that introduces “Pour Your Love” to the final chords of “The Undivided Truth”, 40 Watt Sun channels raw melancholy through every note. Be it hopeless or bittersweet, every moment of Little Weight is a testament to Walker’s ability to craft music that reaches to the depths of heart and soul, and feels like a comforting, understanding arm around your shoulder when you’re feeling beaten down by life. Certainly not an album for a sunny, cheerful day, but one that’ll be there for you when it doesn’t feel like much else is.
Vitally, though, there’s plenty of variety across Little Weight that assures that the band never sounds stuck in a mode. Songs like “Pour Your Love” and “Astoria” trend towards a harder edge and much more sheer gloom, while “Half a World Away” and “Feathers” feel a little warmer and more dynamic in their approach. Hell, I could point to acoustic coda of “Feathers” as a particular favorite moment just for the uplifting catharsis it provided me. “Closer to Life” feels genuinely catchy by 40 Watt Sun standards, while the extended closer “The Undivided Truth” ties all their elements together, moving and morphing over time to provide an emotive high point for the album that’s near guaranteed to bring on chills. Powered by Patrick Walker’s soaring vocals and beautifully poetic lyrics, it’s just 45 minutes of beautiful sadness, and I’d be hard pressed to pick a negative moment. And I don’t want to, because I love this album.
When it comes down to it, I really can’t even be mad that I missed Little Weight back when it dropped. The days were still hot and bright, and Little Weight feels so much more proper soundtracking cooler days with falling leaves and early sunsets. Patrick Walker has once again delivered a beautiful album that I’m bound to revisit time and again when spirits aren’t so high, a balm for an injured heart or soul. Maybe 40 Watt Sun is condemned to be a band that only gets a chance to shine when things are dark for the listener, but I’m glad music like this is out there. And I don’t plan on letting the next album pass me by!
Steve
There might not be a single album that fits in so well with the narrative of 2024 than London trio Still House Plants’s April release If I don’t make it, I love u. The album title itself is a message just as likely sent to you from a dear friend who couldn’t make it to the art opening, as it is from a terror-filled teenage girl hiding in the corner of her apartment in Gaza. We have spent a year in a world where the murder of 40,000 plus human beings in an area smaller than Las Vegas can coincide with a country losing its collective mind over a pop star dating an NFL player, and everyone acts as if this is fucking normal. If anything, our global society is as close to a moral and existential collapse as it ever has been, and it’s among these edges that Still House Plants have crafted their gloriously bizarre, noisy and chaotic compositions.
It’s a band that teeters on the edge of collapse: a desperate minimalist approach to sonic craftsmanship, as if Finlay Clark’s guitar and David Kennedy’s drums are in a constant state of war, no ceasefire in sight. And Jess Hickie-Kallenbach’s voice becomes this otherworldly sheen that has settled around the chaos like the cinder-block dust from a 2000 pound MK-84 bomb. They aren’t metal, but there’s a heaviness to this noisy, pseudo-jazz trio that demands your attention. And in terms of creative audacity, you’d be hard-pressed to find music that was so challenging, and yet earnest in its delivery, from any band this year.
The songs on If I don’t make it, I love u live in a singular space, so it’s easy to get lost in the cacophony over the length of the album. There’s a chaos to each and every song, like the atoms encased in the iron shell of those bombs aching to explode. In the context of the year’s best albums, Still House Plants gets a bit buried under the accolades of the more muscular albums. If I don’t make it, I love u, for instance, makes Absolute Elsewhere almost seem quaint by comparison. While that latter album is an amazing reworking of modern prog, Still House Plants seems to have reworked sound altogether, and they’ve done this with just a guitar, a drumset and a voice.
Take “Silver grit passes thru my teeth” for instance. The song barely takes off with a kind of improvisational off-kilter guitar riff over Kennedy’s plodding ketamine-soaked drums. Hickie-Kallenbach has never seen a phrase she couldn’t stretch over every single note in an octave: her voice oscillates, bends and stretches over the rhythmic chaos laid out by the band. By the mid-point, the song collapses into a noise-drenched, dissonant mess, and Hickie-Kallenbach still manages to find the grief and beauty in all the noise. There’s not a single song on If I don’t make it, I love u that doesn’t challenge the listener.
And this is why the album is such a special one: we live in challenging times, as they say, and Still House Plants is a challenging band. They challenge us to rethink how we define music- both in how we listen to it as well as how it is crafted. They challenge us to listen deeply, to find a spot to cling onto, be it the clanging strings of a Telecaster, the short snap of a snare drum, or the warped operatic vocals of a singer possessed. And they challenge us to try and hold it all together- to make changes before the whole world collapses. After all, it all depends on the first part of that title: If I don’t make it. If we can change that, then we’re only left with that singular, powerful independent clause that closes the end of one the year’s best albums, and that’s I love u. If we had more of that- and less ‘ifs’- we’d all be better off.
Broc
I’ve been experiencing a love/hate relationship with the British post-punk world. Bands I once loved have become stale, and while there are still great acts in this genre, overall, I feel like the most exciting part of it is over. However, English Teacher has won me over with This Could Be Texas.
Released in April, This Could Be Texas didn’t become one of my favorite albums this year until around October. It was very enjoyable at the first listen, but the album’s staying power was a surprise. It seemed like every month since its release, I had to listen at least one time. Then, in October amongst a stream of heavy metal reviews, This Could Be Texas became my go-to album to unwind from colossal riffs and overwhelming chaos.
Which could be weird, given that English Teacher aren’t afraid of chaos, proggy shifts in musicality, time-signature changes, and building the occasional sense of dread. But they are also very good at crafting beautiful and harmonious moments. “Mastermind Specialism”, for example, is a lovely acoustic ballad that ends with increasingly discordant squeals and noise with a refrain that summarizes English Teacher’s approach to music, ‘Bittersweet and less is more/damned if you do, damned if you don’t/Doctor Who and doublethink/the path not taken, fork in the road.’
Perhaps a more fitting genre for English Teacher is indie-prog, as they channel Black Country, New Road’s proclivity for multi-instrumental arpeggios on tracks like “This Could Be Texas”, “Albatross”, and “Broken Biscuits”. Yet, the literary and pop culture references call to mind black midi and The Smiths, at times, and the bass heavy post-punk of “World’s Largest Paving Slab” and “R&B” is also undeniable.
This genre bending is arguably their biggest appeal. This Could Be Texas doesn’t linger on a singular sound long enough to wear it out. The infectious alt-pop of “Nearly Daffodils” shifts into those lovely arpeggios and another more aggressive refrain, but maintains all of the thrill that the first half of the track brings.
Frontwoman Lilly Fontaine pens lyrics that revel in the sort of banal existence that living in uncaring capitalism produces. We are all connected, and we know it. But the day-to-day details of modernity and relationships are the very things that get us by and serve as metaphors for the injustice and absurdity that comes from living this way. On “Sideboob”, a love song to Pendle Hill in Fontaine’s hometown of Lancashire, she channels and summons Romantic painter Friedrich along with poets Shelly and Byron, affirming that a connection to nature is essential.
“The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” counters natural beauty with another hometown anthem, this time rooted in the unnatural, ‘I’m not the terrorist of Talbot Street, but I think ruins are beauty,’ she sings before the soaring shoegaze chorus declares, ‘you should see my armoury.’ This is echoed on “Broken Biscuits,” with the lines, ‘Can a river stop its banks from burstin’?/Blame the council, not the rain/no preparation for the breakdown.’
Lyrically, these songs take their time to unveil themselves, drenched in layers of romanticism, post-modernism, and deep empathy. “Albert Road”, again an homage to Lancashire, gives sympathy to the spiteful souls of the world, ‘but don’t take their prejudice to heart/they hate everyone/the world never showed them/how loving can be fun.’
English Teacher have a wide breadth of offerings on This Could Be Texas, each turn a joy to experience and unpack. Whether they are indie-pop, indie-prog, post-punk, or simply the latest recipients of the Mercury Prize, they have earned every label and accolade with their debut. If for some reason you slept on this record, or, like me, didn’t fully absorb it at first, give This Could Be Texas another spin, the rewards build on themselves.
