Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Efrim Menuck returns with Pissing Stars

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Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Efrim Menuck returns with Pissing Stars

Without the press release, there’s nothing suggesting that Efrim Manuel Menuck would have taken interest in a celebrity romance. However, there is a dichotomy swirling around Pissing Stars that could also be found on American entertainment news. There’s ugliness and beauty at play simultaneously. One track here is called 'The Beauty of Children and the War Against the Poor'. As a father, he’s got to be positive despite rampant corruption, war, and poverty.

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So Much Fun It'll Give You A Headache - Shopping's Third LP

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So Much Fun It'll Give You A Headache - Shopping's Third LP

You can’t listen to The Official Body without dancing, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s fun at first, but eventually you’ll need a breather. Seeing the band on their current tour would be the best way to experience these songs. However, if you’re partied out, The Official Body is headache-inducing in its reliance on the UK’s well-established socio-political post-punk tradition.

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Gregg Kowalsky presents an ambient antidote to modern life on L'Orange L'Orange

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Gregg Kowalsky presents an ambient antidote to modern life on L'Orange L'Orange

The seven tracks on L’Orange L’Orange are anything but human sounding. They take their cues from places where the dramatic mind can’t go. Need to take the edge off at the end of your day? Gregg Kowalsky is a fine replacement for a tumbler of bourbon.

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Esmerine are impossibly heavy and pretty as they cast 2017 in a dramatic post-rock haze on Mechanics of Dominion

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Esmerine are impossibly heavy and pretty as they cast 2017 in a dramatic post-rock haze on Mechanics of Dominion

No matter how mathematically and compositionally sound the record is, it’s still impossibly heavy and pretty, casting its drama in a thick haze of intermittent drums, neo-classical geekdom, and various other idioms of post rock. Mechanics of Dominion is too heady for its own good, but still holds ground as a wonderful combination of influences and post-genre style. It takes time for it to reveal itself, and it’s usually worth the investment.

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Protomartyr sacrifice some dynamics for a denser set of encyclopedic and confounding post punk on Relatives in Descent

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Protomartyr sacrifice some dynamics for a denser set of encyclopedic and confounding post punk on Relatives in Descent

Relatives In Descent packs as much content into each song as possible. Within ‘A Private Understanding’ alone, there’s talk of Elvis’ final days, lead-poisoning by snide men in Flint, and Heraclitus the Obscure, a philosopher who cried endlessly about the awful state of the world. If punk rock was originally intended to inflame and inform the underserved masses, Protomartyr haven’t fallen off the mark; just be sure to keep an encyclopaedia next to your headphones.

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