Latest Posts

Bubba Crumrine Shares Experimental New Release

August 8, 2019

How Brightly Can You Burn?, Bubba Crumrine’s twelfth solo release since 2011, finds the Ithaca avant-garde artist experimenting with melding electric and acoustic instrumentation, vacillating between gorgeous melody and discomforting, atonal noise. Shrouded in mysterious vocal howls, droning chants, and the occasional verse, Crumrine’s vocals provide a layer of accessibility to the album’s soundscapes, giving the listener a foothold amidst the avalanche of ambient pads and incessant bells and washboards. Crumrine describes the album as “the sound of transitioning from one generation to the next and the pressure, excitement, and loss that surrounds,” and listeners can feel that in the album’s meandering streams of consciousness and pensive chord choices. The atmosphere within the songs carries the tropical heaviness one feels in the cumulus stage of a thunderstorm just before lightning cracks the sky in two and heavy rains descend on a boiling and humid summer day below, bringing both relief[...]

STCLVR – “Gutterlungs”

June 4, 2019

Jamestown, NY’s STCLVR is back with a throbbing new post-industrial single, “Gutterlungs.” Seemingly taken from a DJ set performed by Lucifer Himself, the track combines Hacienda-ready drums and synths harkening New Order and Happy Mondays and pairs them with Helvete-approved guttural screams soaked in fuzz and reverb. George Moore, the mastermind behind STCLVR, laments achingly over its concise three and a half minutes, dragging listeners further down the void with each bone-breaking drum loop and every lung-tearing scream, all melding together in a twisted maelstrom of gut-crushing pulses and thuds: “In a sweat-soaked bed, so old and dead, gutter habitat, expressionless stare.” Like sitting cross-legged without affect staring blankly down the middle of a crowded, sleazy nightclub dance floor in the strangest part of town, the completely polar dichotomy between the track’s danceable backbeat and the hopeless, nihilistic dread within Moore’s wails proves to be the song’s biggest strong suit.[...]