Pride Month, like most if not all designated awareness months, ought to just be imbued into the everyday fabric of society. Pride in who you are, what you believe, how you identify, and how you show up is really about the freedom to be whoever and whatever the hell you want to be, with whomever you want to be. The albums in this edition of Spin Cycle talk the talk, walk the walk, and rock the rock—where applicable—representing a diverse cross-section of LGBTQ artists for whom the world is a great big oyster just waiting to get shucked. Listen hard!
Triple Lutz
In the Hands of an Angry Mob
Fans of the most recent Winter Olympics likely have a sense for the majesty of a triple lutz as it relates to physics-bending feats of athletic prowess. On their debut LP, In the Hands of an Angry Mob, Portland punks Triple Lutz bring a “half queer, half femme, and half bald” skew to the game over eight songs of icy-cool mayhem sticking the landing torrid and true.
Propagating a self-assigned “Tonya Harding-core” mystique, the LP marauds a taut onslaught of blistering punk rock attitude cultivated over an ever-changing lineup since the band’s 2017 inception. Nearly every second of the album scorches, with widespread cultural pissiness blazing a path headlong into general rage on album opener “Trigger Warning” and beyond. Like slam-dance protests against asshole rent-gouging landlords? Throw on “Slumlord Millionaire” and try not to break all the windows in your overpriced abode. Dig heretic anthems roasting absentee creators? Blast the album’s central anthem “Don’t Wake Daddy,” a tune smothered in sneers evocative of 1980s hardcore bluster.
“Tricho-Tillo-Maniac” expands the album’s instrumental breadth in seeming homage to Fear’s “New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones,” wherein a healthy mid-song skronk accompanies Triple Lutz’s inherently caustic rawk. Later, “Dead Grass” downshifts into a slower progression, offering brief respite and evidence of smart dynamics and depth of lyricism, including the welcome addition of a watery guitar lead driving a vitriolic chorus, with vocalist Asher Weinbaum asking, “Can I change myself? / Can I still change my mind? / We’re all running out of time / How long can you sit and wait for something to happen?”
By the time you get to album finale “Ultraviolet,” the band trades lightning riffs for a proto-grunge maelstrom before smashing the glass ceiling yet again with a four-on-the-floor assault serving as the tuffest bookend imaginable to about 20 minutes of disorderly delight.
In the Hands of an Angry Mob drops Friday, June 26 via SBÄM Records, and can be purchased on vinyl, compact disc, and as digital download at Triple Lutz’s Bandcamp. The band is appearing Saturday, July 4 at UnMuted: Pride at Full Volume, an all-ages, free block party at the 2500 block of SE Clinton. Visit www.volumebomb.com for more information.
Light Bird
See Her
Just a few weeks before her wedding in 2022, folk-rocker Danni Hoshino came out as trans, marking the beginning of her musical identity as Light Bird. On her debut album, See Her, the Brooklyn-based songwriter earmarks many of the tribulations and personal ascensions of her journey with a new perspective.
See Her opens with a tune about crying on public transit—we’ve all been there for one reason or another. “Williamsburg Bridge” covers Light Bird’s range of emotions in the wake of her transition, a pretty acoustic guitar plucking dulcet melodies out of the ether like rhythms from a rattling Manhattan train. On the title track, a voice memo prompt opens a misty folk song featuring a coil of pedal steel accompaniment. This recording sample serves as an anchor for the LP, reminding Hoshino of her resilience while watching an Emmylou Harris video that compelled her to dance and revel in a euphoria that solidified a true and unabashed sense of self.
On “Big Time Texter,” Hoshino drops a folk-pop gem driven by stray piano and emotive vocals, touching base with the everyday relationship threads she adheres to, including texting quite a lot and falling in love. Layers of lush guitar help frame the song’s uptempo barrage, with Hoshino’s confessions yielding lines like “I just can’t play things cool / I want to be your very best lover / But I moonlight as the fool.”
See Her is teeming with folk-country ballads revealing spacious arrangements and poignant lyricism. It’s an album that arrives raw and fragile, yet defiant in its addressing of limitations breached and old paradigms broken. These are songs full of purpose and poise in the face of new possibilities, and Hoshino delivers the catharsis she’s achieved through a gauntlet of affecting folk confessions.
See Her was self-released on Friday, June 5 and is available in compact disc and digital download formats via Light Bird’s Bandcamp.
Zoon
Happy Thought School
On their third album, Anishinaabe-Canadian LGBTQIA2+ songwriter Zoon (AKA Daniel Monkman) sets the tone to blown-out shoegaze folk that’s as thoughtful as it is elusive. From the jump, album opener “Beautiful II” hits like an interstellar bedroom jam, with tape hiss spectres accentuating the hazy milieu. Elsewhere, disparate bleeps and bloops usher in big-echo tracks like psychedelic downer “One Too Many Nights,” featuring fellow Québécois fuzz purveyor Sam Jr., attempting to sort through the recalibrations of post-relationship doldrums.
The album proffers big bliss tunes for late nights, preferring steady lulls and watery atmospherics to statement pop kicks. But it’s also an indictment of racism in Manitoba, where Monkman attended the titular “Happy Thought School” as one of its only Native students. On “Atactic,” Zoon frees up the guitars to distorted heights, with plenty of wormhole reverberations and space-y accoutrement. In tandem, Monkman’s crystalline vocals parry the waves of feedback with steady swirls of melodic rapture. The hissing persists on “I Was Younger,” where an omnipresent squall permeates the margins of a muffled dream-pop number, with Monkman’s auto-tuned vocals populating the peaks and valleys like an omniscient spirit.
The title track comes across like a horror-film score with an intergenerational audio recording of Zoon’s mother and aunt, doubling down on the dreamscape motif before it gives way to a synth-laden psych-pop dustup on the buoyant “Omni II.”
Across Happy Thought School, Monkman’s falsetto breezes through phases of instrumental moods, offering a lifeline amidst a spidery web of ethereal musical threads.
Happy Thought School drops Friday, June 19 via Paper Bag Records, and is available in vinyl, compact disc, and digital download formats on Zoon’s Bandcamp.