Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by New York based project My Wonderful Boyfriend.
Today, My Wonderful Boyfriend shared new single, “I’m Your Man”. Before listening, I speculated it might be some sort of redemption for the penultimate track on An Evening With…, the EP that the Brooklyn based four piece shared earlier this year. That track – titled “Here Comes Your Man”, is a yearning drenched unraveling that pulls from the perspective of, well, not being someone’s man. My Wonderful Boyfriend has a knack for attaining sincerity through those charmingly arbitrary slacker-rock song structures, generating emotional friction through cavorting melodies and raw vocals prone to bouts of excessive repetition. This spills into “I’m Your Man”, leaving the contents of the track a lot less absolute than the title may suggest.
Despite its lyrical ambivalence and housed introspections of “I’m shaky because I’m not quite sure I’m your man”, the track in itself is far from timid. “I’m Your Man” starts on a punchy, over-caffeinated note and still manages an impressive build up over its five minute life span. It’s cushioned with charged da-da-da-da‘s and a stint of hallelujah’s, of which ultimately lead to MWB cramming twenty-and-some-change declarations of “i’m your man” within the track’s final thirty seconds. Whether “I’m Your Man” is a redemption or a continuation or ultimately entirely unrelated to the pining found on their January release is not something I can confidently conclude. What I can tell you, and with confidence, is that it is a damn good song. However, if my opinion is not enough for you to give it a listen (fair enough), then the track’s inspiration playlist – which jumps from Jane Remover to Playboi Carti to Pulp to Wilco – should do the trick.
About the playlist, My Wonderful Boyfriend shared;
“We started out trying to build a playlist of direct influences on “I’m Your Man,” but I guess had too much fun and went with more general influences and songs that make us excited to play, write, and listen to music.”
I have a tendency to fall into anecdotal rambling when I try to write about a project I find especially moving. This achilles heal is most inflamed when a song makes me cry – which does not happen super often – but when it does, I have to fight the urge to cite my own tears. It’s usually a desperate attempt to articulate the gravity of a track without turning to some dry technical dissection, but it doesn’t matter. No one gives a shit about the time I cried at my roommate’s roller blading competition, seated in a patch of grass above the park with Shallowater’s There is a Well in my ratty noise-cancelling headphones. So I will not tell you about it.
What I will say is that Houston based Shallowater is not doing anything new. At least not in a way I can cite on paper. Their soundscapes are familiar and rather organic, and I could write a laundry list of band comparisons ranging from emo and posthardcore to alt-country and slowcore, and they would all be valid. I suppose that is the real root of this apprehensive music journalism crisis I have so generously decided to include in this single review – the chasm between the abstractly unprecedented feel of a band and a reality that they are not technically doing anything unheard of. But perhaps that is the foundation for the most touching projects; an ability to pull from motifs seen countless times before and churn it into something that stops you in your tracks.
Today, Shallowater shared “Sadie”, the second single off their forthcoming record, God is Going to Give You a Million Dollars. The track starts on a gentle note, finding its footing in drawn out enunciations and a cautious rhythm section. As vocals grow in urgency, the soundscapes inflate into an eventual riff –lathered with mucky distortion, indulgent percussion, and a suffocating amount of poignancy. In the span of seven and a half minutes, Shallowater pursues this sort of escalation more than once, leaving you unsure of which buildup is the buildup. Perhaps the answer is neither? Perhaps the mud-slides of twangy sludge are less a destination than they are a means of amplifying slivers of delicacy and desperation between them. In the case of “Sadie”, soft vocals tend to cut deepest when they follow moments of sweeping cacophony. It’s enough to subdue even the sturdiest of poker faces.
You can listen to “Sadie” everywhere now, and pre-order God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars on Bandcamp.
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Portland-based artist Saia Kuli of the project Guitar.
Guitar’s most recent release, 2024’s Casting Spells on Turtlehead, leans into a level of unpredictability, coming upon a post-punk antiquity and kicking it further down the road, Kuli creates a free flow of sound unhindered by its brutalist edge. Throughout the project’s catalog, Kuli has shown that there is a method to the madness, switching gears so casually it feels natural to the first-time listener and consequential to the longtime fans who are excited for what’s next. But through it all, while still grasping to melodic fixations, what fills a Guitar song is almost a pity towards silence – not that it needs to be filled for silence’s sake, but rather offers the possibility of something new that can’t be refused.
About the playlist, Saia said;
When it comes to playlists I’m very heavy on feeling it out. I just start throwing stuff on and then look for that that flow. This playlist has some songs that came out really recently and some songs that I’ve revisited year after year for many years. Some of the tracks on here come from very very deep in my YouTube likes. I tried to use making this playlist as a reason to go find old stuff I used to love and put it beside new stuff I love.
Listen to the playlist here!
Listen to Casting Spells on Turtlehead and other projects from Guitar out everywhere!
“We were really heavy for a minute there. For Dizzy Spell and that era we were so hyper-focused on what we can get out of our amps and our pedals, just the sonic width we wanted live and the thickness we wanted”, Isaac Kauffman explains of Abel’s 2024 record, Dizzy Spell.
The Columbus based band released Dizzy Spell just shy of a year ago, a record armed with an arsenal anxious intensity carved with heavy guitar and hazy feedback. There is an immediacy to the listen, as Abel wastes no time reaching a heightened emotional state as they shred through ridiculously catchy pop structures and pedal suffocation. It is an intense album in an all consuming way, thought drowning sort of way. The lyrics are poignant and often heart wrenching, but they are approached in a manner that feels distant, as the album succumbs to a sea of shoegaze-fueled dissocoation. On Dizzy Spell, noise is a lifevest. On How to Get Away with Nothing, Abel leaves this cushion behind, exploring new ways to manipulate their soundscapes as they prod at what can be found, and more importantly, felt, when they slow down.
Released last week via Pleasure Tapes, Julia’s War and Candlepin, How to Get Away with Nothing marks Abels shift towards a slowcore leaning sound. The stylistic decision stemmed organically, pulling from a chapter the band was in whilst they made it. “My bandmates go through phases, and I think it makes the most sense to take those moments and run with them”, Isaac tells me. “It really lends itself to emotional music when you take things as just a section of your life”.
The authenticity that comes with this philosophy can be felt through Abel’s discography. While How to Get Away with Nothing leans away from the density and shoegaze feel of Dizzy Spell, it also attests to the strength of the project’s identity, and their ability to experiment with genre without alienating the feel of Abel. Their “phases” do not come at a cost to the band’s ability to extract beauty from a raw and gritty sound, a consistent pillar in their releases.
How to Get Away with Nothing boasts a sound that is expansive, challenging and profoundly textured. It leaves space for near silence. It toys with manipulations of pitch and speed. It flirts with the thickness of Dizzy Spell. It experiments with a hyperpop feel. All of this could be a recipe for auditory whiplash, but How to Get Away with Nothing is grounded by the deliberate and balanced nature of its structure. Abel maintains an equilibrium while exploring various means to express melancholy, as well as a range of vocal approaches. Volatile deliveries scrape away at minimal guitar arrangements on “Dusk”, while on “Parasympathetic” earnest and gentle vocals exist in the shadows of a track guided by imposing percussion.
The record commences with warm and earthy lo-fi track “Grass”, which features twangy contributions from fellow Ohio-based project Cornfed. As implied by the title, it’s a song about grass, though the abundant plant is viewed as a concept rather than a reality, as Abel admits to a laundry list of fear that comes with walking barefoot in the grass. Fear as a barrier is carefully weaved into both Dizzy Spell and How to Get Away with Nothing, though the notion finds itself more crushing on the latter release. As they adhere to a slowcore style, drawn out moments of instrumental minimalism carve space for ideas to be questioned, and for emotional paralysis to be expressed through achy chord progressions.
“I think taking that into slowcore and slower songs lended itself to offer more of a minor space for lyrics”, Isaac reflects. “Although the lyrics still take up emotional width, I think we wanted to focus on keeping those tones and atmospheres that we created in a slower sense, and that lended to the emotional guitar parts having to be pushed. I feel like we’ve always had this kind of disconnected vibe to our songs, and I think that leaves our own playing styles and emotions on the table while also keeping the atmosphere thick”
The most devastating tracks on the record are followed by songs that toy with elements of hyperpop, and although they still tackle heart-break and dwindling self assurance, the blow is softened by their twinkly, bedroom-dance-party shape. Isaac tells me though he usually does all of the production and engineering for Abel, for How to Get Away with Nothing, the band collaborated with Quinn Mulvihill from Glaring Orchid, offering him extra time and capacity to experiment.
“I think that with the extra mixing help, I felt like I had more space and time to put some weird mixing energy into a few songs, and I wanted to do that just to break up the album in a way that felt different than using interludes or something like that”, he explains. “I think my melodies always come out in a pop way, and I think putting that over slowcore stuff is really good a lot of the time, but there are certain melodies where you’re like, how will this work over an emotional, drawn out guitar riff? It was almost just the easy way out to make something more poppy and more straightforward.”
The humbly deemed “easy way out” elevates Abel’s already textured sound, as well as the How to Get Away With Nothing’s intricacy as a whole. The hyperpop motifs and eccentric sonic manipulations contort themselves into moments that feels mechanical or almost alien-like, offering a complex juxtaposition to the album’s organic bones and painfully human lyricism. “I think there’s always been this production heavy side of Abel simply because I’m still teaching myself how to do certain things and I need to try it before I feel comfortable. So I think those hyperpop songs are just a testament to handling my growth,” Isaac says.
While it stands as proof to their skills as songwriters and range as musicians, above all How to Get Away with Nothing attests to Abel’s exceptional ability to harvest a poignancy in all that they create. You can listen to it everywhere now.
Today, New York based noise outfit Docents released their latest EP Shadowboxing via Ten Tremors. A turbulent and tightly packed five track listen, Shadowboxing is a fervent push and pull, eliciting a ragged fun house of eerie post-punk experimentation as Docents obscures the line between controlled and erratic.
The earliest rendition of Docents traces back to Noah Sider (guitar / vocals) and Matthew Heaton (drums) playing together in college upstate, adding Will Scott (guitar / vocals) in 2018 and Kumar-Hardy (bass) in 2021. The project is driven by an emphasis on noise that feels almost sentient, toeing drastically between minimalist and maximalism without being haphazard. “There’s a pendulum that swings between writing straight-ahead-ish punkier “rippers” and, at the other end, maybe some “thinkers,” and a lot of our songwriting sessions constitute where we’re trying to place ourselves now”, Heaton explains. “There’s no principal Docents songwriter – these are very much struggle sessions, and there’s a lot of material in the discard pile. Our favorite tracks tend to either take six months to finalize or half an hour.”
The EP starts with the melodically winding “Garden”, where jerky sonic elements find grounding in assertive omens and warnings of “the land will pass judgement, it’s body keeps the score”. It’s unclear if the track “Shouldn’t We” is posed as a question or a proclamation, as Docents fervently chants the statement over a swelling of pulse-raising noise. The EP ends with “Workout”, where Docents offers both a resolution to the disorientation and a new dose of unease. An abrasive clutter of “what ifs” are countered by tranquil utterances of “then what, what now”, the dialogue unraveling against pounding walls of foreboding and flammable sound.
“Shadowboxing is our first release that feels like a cohesive unit since our first full-length from 2023, Figure Study. We recorded Figure Study to sound like a really clean version of a Docents live set – our incredible engineer Sasha Stroud ran a tight ship – Dan plays more of a producer role in our sessions. This led to more experimentation and iteration in-studio, especially on Shadowboxing”, Heaton says of the release.
Shadowboxing is out everywhere today, and can be purchased on CD via Ten Tremors.
There is an aspect of growing up when love becomes a step-by-step process rather than starry-eyed, on-and-off episodic moments of life we see in movies. Bristol artist Fenne Lily allures her newly determined definition of love through charming and light-hearted folk songs on her new album, Big Picture.
Fenne Lily’s overall themes are no stranger to the overstimulated idea of love. Lily’s previous release, BREACH, a collection of songs entrapped by heartbreak, was released in 2020 during the pandemic, squashing her ability to tour and share what she worked so hard on. This induced severe writer’s block, that Lily discussed, took a long time to shake. What makes Big Picture different from other Fenne Lily releases is that all ten songs were written and cultivated within the bookends of a relationship. Lily goes through stories and phases of new love, branded ideals of giving yourself up to someone else, and then the final fall out to make an entire album something familiar and truly convoluted.
One thing that Lily wants to be clear on is that Big Picture is not a sad album. Lily has talked about the oversimplification that has branded so many artists into a new and now popular sub-genre; sad girl indie music. Although Lily has always been boxed into this corner with artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski and Lucy Dacus, she wants to be clear that slow music does not equal sad music. It takes personal growth and emotional maturity to come to this conclusion not only as a listener, but as an artist too. The ability and confidence to blend songs of hopeful intuition with a soft and slow burned sound creates an active voice to relate to life’s more complex feelings honestly and candidly. That brings us to Lily’s overall point on her new album; emotionally honest music can be a muse for self-soothing and the reintegration of joy back into life.
How does Fenne Lily make a collection of songs entirely about a failed relationship into an album of reassurance and self-fulfillment? Lily states, “these songs express worry and doubt and letting go, but those themes are framed brightly”. What it comes down to was refusing to fixate on the overripe feelings’ leftover from an expired love and to take away what felt needed. That being either memories or lessons learned to carry on. “So it’s alright/if you don’t want a shoulder/If you don’t wanna get over it all”, Lily sings on the song “Dawncolored Horse”.
The album begins with a subtle pop bass line that molds into a soft and playful track titled “Map of Japan”. Lily sings about the hindsight’s of a relationship with an airy vocal approach and electric guitar that grounds the lightness of the tune into the reality of the tough situation. What follows track after track is a beautiful, warm expression of Lily’s understanding and self-acceptance of where her life was currently at and displays it within lighthearted folk songs with mature melodies and conscious instrumentations. “Lights Light Up” is sung as a hardening conversation between two lovers who are not on the same page, but surrounded by bright and static guitar work that embodies both restlessness and independence. The dilemma of wasting time and the time it takes to heal is calmly addressed on “In My Own Time” where Lily sings “In my own time/I’ll brighten up the corners/Temporarily”. A nod to the impatience of healing and the universal fear of a wasted life.
Big Picture is also a demonstration of Lily’s creative growth from her first two albums in that she took on a collaborative approach with people that she trusts and loves. As past projects go, Lily has been very adamant about doing everything herself. But in the case of these 10 songs, Lily wrote and demoed each track herself and then brought them to her live band to flesh out together. The entire album was recorded live in Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio with special help from artists like Katy Kirby, Melina Duterte (Jay Som), and Christian Lee Hutson. In the case of the track “Red Deer Day”, Lily wrote the song after the rest of the album was finished and her relationship was over. All-in-all, what Lily offers is the clearest analysis of a breakup that she has, yet it is the most confident and self-projecting song on the album. “I’m alright or I will be in time” sums up the cleverness behind Lily’s pre-determined ambition to a hope-filled album. It is such a perfect conclusion to Lily’s Big Picture, that friend and musical contemporary, Christian Lee Hutson, helped record the whole song in one day to assure its inclusion to the project.
Big Picture is flushed with love songs that are emblematic of what it really is; confusing, vulnerable, arduous, fragile, blissful, affectionate and desirable. There is no complete linear story starting at the initial crush to the inevitable breakup that Lily experienced in the process of writing the album, but more of a stream of consciousness that occurs when a relationship isn’t working. The back and forth between passion and doubt leads to more complex feelings of guilt and personal endowment that is truer to a love story than what is usually glossed over. “I tell you I don’t know but sometimes I can’t help but picture a whole different life” Lily sings on the album’s closing track “Half Finished”, barely wincing at this decree.
It’s refreshing to hear an artist rework the social constructs that surround the slow song. Even upon a passive first listen of Big Picture, there is no hiding the subtle expressions of joy and contentment that poke their head out often. No drama is white knuckled and no names are dropped, provoking an album of soft contemplation and euphonic understanding. The contrast between these beautiful and laid-back instrumentations and the cut-throat lyrical persuasion that Lily embodies aren’t there for contrast’s sake; but for a deeper and more mature way to accept a failed love.
the ugly hug 