I suppose that yet again you’re going to require some kind of editorial introduction to this page? You always do, why is that? Next you’ll be demanding we proof read the damn thing or telling us we keep repeating things, here’s some more album reviews, here’s another band called Scions…

Scions – O (self release) – I will admit it was the announcement of a new band from Canada called Scions and their fine shoots that reminded us we hadn’t covered the rather impressive album Australia’s Scions released back in the Spring this year (when Scions were actually growing), and I see Spotify is already rather confused and has merged the two bands into one today with the release of the other Scions’ debut single. Now I’m not taking sides here, if indeed there are sides to be taken but why don’t new bands do a tiny bit of research when they pick a name? Why is it almost always seemingly a case of “My my, hey hey, let’s call our new band The Who?”, “Hey greet idea, great name, shall we Google it just in case? Shall we maybe just take a moment to see if anyone else has a band called The Who already? Nah, there won’t be another band called The Who, let’s just go with it, no one will get fooled again” and I’m guessing Australia’s rather beautiful Scions got there first, but hey, who am I to call it? O came out back on March 27th, it is a rather fine album, here’s the story of O, it is a rather good one…

“O Bearers of the Curse, ye who are dead yet still live. Make pilgrimage across the Void to the foot of the great Tree and let thy fate be revealed.”

In the beginning, there was only the Void. Then came Fire…and with Fire came the seeds of disparity: heat and cold, life and death, light and dark. But nothing lasts forever, yet nothing is lost. Those are the words used by the band, it does rather tell you the story of O – okay, that’s enough of the Anne Desclos/Pauline Réage references, this is a massive album, just in terms of sound that is, just in terms of ambition, in terms of vision, this is a very big sound, I guess we’re talking post something or other again, expansive Godspeeds should you need them, never just another one though. Yes, there are rather a lot of Godspeeds around and You! Black Emperor know all this, i must admit to getting bored with most of them, Scions have something more in their slow moving dramatic beauty though, in their graceful power, their brooding boldness and O really is a powerfully rewarding album, properly progressive and well worth climbing into. something clearly growing from those shoots…    

Scion, a young shoot or twig of a plant, especially one cut for grafting or rooting.

Escape Thy Fate is gorgeous, don’t skip to it though, this is a proper album, a proper piece of work, you need to climb all of it, no jumping ahead and really, there isn’t a standout track, it all stands tall. May The Winds Deliver Thee suggests there really is a story here, while the closing ten minutes that is From The Calamity leaves you with more questions than answers. O really is a strong album, an epic album, a forward looking properly progressive album, an album that has a tension, an album that’s about far more than what’s to be found on the surface. At times it is almost a post rock or or even a post metal thing, some of it tastes of epic space rock, some of it a darker shade of Pink Floyd, all of that is rather lazy of me though and really this is an album that doesn’t deserve a pigeonhole or a throwaway comparison, they are but lighthouses, guiding stars to point you on the way… 

Bandcamp

Lea Thomas – Cosmos Forever (Triple Dolphin Records) – Now if you like mellow slowcore warmth and quietly dynamic music that takes all the time it needs to leisurely go wherever it needs to go then this rather gorgeous new album from Catskill, NY-based, Hawaii-born songwriter Lea Thomas (pronounced “lay-uh”)is an album for you. Today, ahead of the album release in a couple of weeks, a rather dreamy 8mm filmed video has been released, this time shot in Japan on a trip to visit family. More on that below

“When we were recording this album, we set up in the round, tracking live in a room where the windows overlooked the woods. I remember it was really quiet outside—no wind, and there were no leaves left on the trees to rustle anyway. Every sound we made felt amplified against the stillness of the season. I had the intention of leaving room for my band to stretch out on the recording of this song in particular– and I feel like that specific time and place influenced us to be more intentional and responsive to each other because we were able to really listen.

The accompanying video was filmed on 8mm while I was visiting family in Japan. Growing up half-Japanese, I often felt like I lived between cultures and I’ve spent a lot of time exploring how this perspective has permeated my life story. This song was inspired by my own reflections on how geography and ancestry shape our experiences as individuals, and also how all of the rivers that run through each of us are always just rippling and colliding together into this greater flow of time and space”.

Cosmos Forever itself is seven tracks and around forty minutes of warm beauty – quite, slow moving, strong, full bodied, inviting, easy on the ear, never delicate, never fragile, whatever she might be singing, this is a strong album, a bold statement, an exquisitely gentle piece of work that sounds very much as if it is at peace with itself. It feels natural, in tune with those natural things – 

“For the recording, Thomas, her co-producer John Thayer (YAI, Ezra Feinberg, Arp), and three other bandmates travel/ed to a house at the end of a mountain road in the woods. There, in a hushed landscape, they discovered a peaceful respite over the course of about a week, during which something benevolent and clear-eyed had enough time to be born”.

 There is indeed a lot of space to move around in these compositions, it feels a touch wild, song or compositions that are going their own way, finding their own structures..
 
“When I was writing and recording the songs for my new album, Cosmos Forever, I was feeling deeply into a liminal space in my life. It was late autumn of 2020, when the world was just starting to stir again. I felt like I had just moved through some massive personal shifts yet I could sense that even greater changes were coming, though I didn’t know what they would be or how they’d manifest. When I called the band together for a few days in a quiet house in the woods, all I knew was that I wanted to see what we could create by leaning into the spaciousness of the unknown. I left open-ended sections in each of the songs so we could let intuition stir our sounds together and we ended up capturing most of the record live in a way that felt true to my intentions.

My hope in sharing these songs now is that they offer a space for someone to sit with their inner knowing and explore the mystery of their own visions. Life moves in cycles. Seasons change. Ego deaths are often followed by renewal and re-emergence, echoed in the incredible pair of paintings by Iruka Maria Toro on the front and back covers of this record. Sometimes, we just need to be still enough, for long enough, to return to trust and maybe even find some excitement in these potent in-between times”.  

Bandcamp

Why the Eye – Inspirex (Exag Records) – This is really simple, really engaging, she says she could listen to it all night. When I say simple it is very clever, that bit there kind of sounds a bit like Battles, that is the area we’re in, Battles messing with the Residents. On the recording of Inspirex, Damien Magnette who produced the album says, “The album is live music based on energy. It has a chaotic side. How do you convey the chaotic, wild, animal energy of live music on record? My point of view is that to achieve this energy, you have to do exactly the opposite in the studio. A lot of layering. Lots of overdubs that we can’t do live. It’s all these elements that give the album its wildness.”

Yes it is wild, a little fidgety, yes fidgety, but fluid, awkwardly fluid, strange, engrossing, really really engaging, brash? Certainly an abstract experience, they say it comes with “a deep yearning to set us free from everyday political confinement whilst sometimes exploding into a wild rage of disorder and mayhem”. At the heart of each track are the DIY instruments band member DjP (Jean Paul Domb) has assembled over the years, some of them directly inspired by the African sanzas. With names such as ‘radiocaphone’ and ‘castabignettes’, the instruments are cleverly connected to different effects pedals and are the heartbeat of Why The Eye. Some of it is indeed snappy in a rhythmic way, skittish, sometimes almost tribal-like in delivery, they claim it comes with a deep-lying punk ethos, it does appear that way. Actually this is really really (really) enjoyable.

Why the Eye are an experimental masked quartet from Brussels, we’re told it is about bodies being propelled into trance during their live performances. They describe their music as “Prehistoric Techno”. Actually it sounds rather unique and those vocals or voices really add something, yes, we’ll have some of this, this is gooooooooooooooooooood… The album is released at the start of October.

– Links / Bandcamp

And then there was Hello Mary….

Hello Mary – Emita Ox (Frenchkiss) – New York City’s Hello Mary have an album that kind of feels like a number of steps up the ladder, not sure where the ladder takes them but they are climbing it. Emita Ox is very much built on that 90s indie alt.rock loud/quiet butter-wouldn’t-melt-oh-yes-it-would framework, some of it is very relaxed, almost delicate, some of it has a hard edge, opening track Float gets gloriously noisy once things get into some kind of stride a couple of minutes in. All of it is rather accomplished, rather impressive in a way that doesn’t really break any moulds or push any envelopes that much – not everything has to break things surely? 0% starts off in a quiet way before taking on some kind of swinging almost experimental noise that’s almost metallic, there’s certainly more depth than expected here, some delicate guitar work that plays around with some very heavy not very obvious base lines that push open the door to let out drummer/vocalist Stella Wave’s primal screams loose before the beautifully sunny third track of the album Three calms things down in a delightful way. Hello Mary sound confident, musically knowing, sharp, assured, actually they sound rather cool. Apparently still in their late teens or early 20s, the Brooklyn threesome are kicking up some classic ’90s-era alternative and indie rock (emphasis on the rock, they certainly rock). Theirs is a sound that finds a fine rewarding balance between that intense edge somewhere near distortion and deliciously ethereal atmospheres..

Speaking about Emita Ox the band said: “We are proud to finally release this album. In many ways, it feels like a debut, since it’s a departure from the songwriting and production styles of our other released music. We wanted Emita Ox to be cohesive, but our first focus was to give each song the specific attention it required. The songs being somewhat different from one another is something we may have shied away from previously, but now it feels the most true to our tastes and vision.”

Hello Mary are a three-piece rock band from Brooklyn, NY comprised of guitarist/vocalist Helena Straight, drummer/vocalist Stella Wave and bassist Mikaela Oppenheimer. Their new album is a rather fine set of 90s flavoured alt.rock statements, some of it is rather beautiful, some of it very powerful, it all kind of comes together when you have the whole album in one place, the more you listen to it the less obvious it becomes, less obvious is a good thing. (sw)

Bandcamp / Website