A favorite pastime of mine is to take long walks in the Buckman neighborhood, trying to determine from where the echoes of practicing musicians are originating. Depending on the day, an acoustic performance thrums through a barricade of bushes behind my yard, where an unseen troubadour routinely serenades the streets in anonymity. Multi-home applauses are typical at the conclusion of this unknown musician’s songs (sometimes Neutral Milk Hotel covers, sometimes what I perceive as originals), and a neighborly essence seems to form during those fleeting moments.
One time on a neighborhood walk, I heard the faint tinkling of keys that with each step sharpened to a full-bodied boogie-woogie piano avalanche, the kind of barrelhouse tunes Fats Domino or Dr. John purveyed. I stood at what I thought was a polite and reasonable distance from the joyous noise, and remained in awe at the skill being unleashed on that unseen instrument. I think about it often because I can’t remember exactly which house or block it originated from, so I am in constant search to find it again. I am always looking for the thrill of music in the unpretentious wild, as if arriving for my ears alone.
This week’s albums came to me not through copious digging, but primarily by random chance. Lucky for you, they’ve now been released into the wild.
Phosphene – Velveteen
For fans of Alvvays, Two Sheds, Cocteau Twins
Portland duo Phosphene—Rachel Frankel and Matt Hemmerich—upend the hazy reins of indie-pop on their fourth full-length, Velveteen. In the band’s third collaboration with engineer and co-producer Greg Francis, the duo expands the sonic breadth of their sweeping, piano-forward opuses through a suite of tunes that are fragile and defiant in varying measure.
“Warding” is a classic breakup song somehow brightened by buoyant keys and Frankel’s soaring vocals, which articulate the marrow of post-split anxieties with lines like, “You don’t see me now / Goddamn, I wish you would / Eating like a bird / Telling everyone I’m good.” Splashes of lilting guitar lead punctuate the tune’s inevitable tail-end spiral, with ghostly vocals decrying, “As if I could / Just make it go away.” Later, LP single “Wire” arrives with a foreboding and stealth that helps unpack the ebb and flow of Phosphene’s dusky pop acumen, with misty shades of Midwest emo peppered in to wash it all down.
The attention to arranging effective instrumental moods alongside the album’s vulnerable lyrical sphere accounts for the bulk of Velveteen’s magnetism. It’s a record that sounds both personal and triumphant, its mercurial harmonies and clever melodic left turns illuminating at just the right junctures. To wit, “Disappear” executes Phosphene’s alchemy of sound as well as any track on the album, pairing forefront piano aside unguarded lines about following someone around like a waif and bawling at the radio.
Despite that inherent frailty, Velveteen boasts its share of furrow-browed rippers, too, like album opener “Heaven” and the mid-LP stomper “Black Ring,” the latter of which folds in more of Frankel’s hypnotic melodies and the dynamic seesawing of the band’s light and dark sides. On “Lupo,” a propulsive guitar guides Frankel’s lithe vocals through symphonic gauntlets of dreamy synth-string, while Hemmerich’s steady backbeat steers the lyrical ambiguity to a safe landing before the rollicking dream-pop album finale, “Everyone.”
Velveteen was self-released May 19 and is available in vinyl and digital download formats on the band’s Bandcamp. Phosphene are performing an unplugged performance for Milwaukie, Oregon’s Porchfest, Friday, July 24 at 6:30 pm at Sauna Glo, more info here.
Lip Critic – Theft World
For fans of Trigger Object, Sea Moss, Gilla Band
The violating aftershocks of an identity theft permeate the seismic resonance on Lip Critic’s second album, Theft World. The artistic reaction is not always clear conceptually, but with a wall of glitch-hop beats and verses as destructive/addictive as they are here, feel free to put up the blinders and just go absolutely apeshit.
Theft World is a dissonant mash-up of dog-eared electronic hardcore from the Brooklyn crew refusing to be defined or corralled, with vocalist Brett Kaser’s spoken word missives dissecting a loopy thematic throughline of thievery, regret, and chaos. Announcing its riotous arrival through ominous synths and sinister percussion, “Two Lucks” finds Kaser spitting defiant rhymes atop a techno-adjacent foundation that essentially demands control over the movement of your appendages. Occasional incendiary screams pock Kaser’s vocal approach, pushing the LP’s noise toward some semblance of post-industrial clatter.
As the album progresses, its indefinability morphs into its superpower, with every nuance of its multi-genre thrust imploring wormhole reimaginings of place and purpose. On the dizzying “Jackpot,” a high-tempo electro crusher unloads like an 8-bit confetti bomb, with copious tempo shifts and moods, and Kaser’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics confounding the focus. “Debt Forest” appears to embody the brainspace of the perpetrator of Kaser’s stolen identity fiasco, whose loopy reasoning for the thefts guide the majority of the album’s pulse, singing, “Standing at the ATM / My pocket’s the sunken hole / Somewhere along there I lost control.”
The finale of “Talon” rips through like a digitized thrash-metal breakdown before the dancefloor hijinks of “Charity Dinner” traverse the cavernous hodge-podge of sample snippets, drilling further musical disorder along the album’s chorus-less fringes.
Choruses or not, Theft World is as intense and anarchic an album you’re likely to hear anytime soon.
Theft World released May 1 via Partisan Records. The album is available in vinyl, compact disc, and digital download formats on the band’s Bandcamp. Lip Critic is hitting Portland Tuesday, June 9 at Polaris Hall with Flatwounds and Bejalvin, more info here.
Khun Narin Electric Phin Band – III
For fans of Khruangbin, Sinn Sisamouth, Pen Ran
The blown-out bliss of Thai psych-rock powerhouse Khun Narin Electric Phin Band is fully blasting on their third album—the first in a decade—appropriately titled III.
Armed with a multigenerational cadre of players and a monstrosity of a homemade sound system, the band’s modular vibes carry through the trippy opener, “Poet Wong Part 1,” a medley of movements whose title translates to “band opener,” and is based on a traditional song for processions in the group’s rural Thailand village. There’s a permanent fuzz coursing through the speakers throughout the LP, with the sharpness of the phin—a traditional three-stringed lute instrument from Thailand and Laos—cutting through to its rightful spot as central melodic lead. The single “Sut Sanaen” feels like a perfect accompaniment to a sun-soaked day in the valleys of the Phetchabun Mountains, where Khun Narin hail from, gliding along on hand drum-backed percussive chills.
Pulling from traditional rural Thai folk as well as global psych, the band has the capacity to dazzle, as heard on the disco-tinged “Siang Ta Noi,” a propulsive rocker retaining swells of the phin’s reverberations to agreeable degrees. The all-instrumental tracklist continues its acidic morphing on cosmic groover “Phuthai JP,” a heavy-lidded adventure of throbbing keys and interstellar tolls that sparkle and glow amidst the song’s easy-does-it timbre.
Cinching it all up, Khun Narin drops a party-ready cover of Peter Green’s “Black Magic Woman,” though more in line with Santana’s famous rendition, replete with vocal yips and hollers to accent the classic psych masterpiece into new sonic stratospheres.
Play this album all summer long for all occasions—you can thank me later.
III was released May 15 via Innovative Leisure and is available in vinyl, cassette, compact disc, and digital download formats on the band’s Bandcamp.