***In a diffuse time of online life and ever-rising rents, the old-school band-as-gang is a rarer thing than it once was. But that’s Vessel’s lifeblood: four friends, breathing the same air, living and working around each other. A casual way to kill time during the pandemic became an ongoing affair, the quartet steadily crafting songs together for two years and beginning to play live when shows returned. Their debut gig was at a friend’s house party in Knoxville; they were still playing under an acronym created with their initials before picking the name Vessel out of a hat of suggestions each had submitted. Soon, they signed to Double Phantom Records and began preparing their debut album, Wrapped In Cellophane. The result is an album that zips along through one infectious idea after another, landing on the more effervescent side of the art-rock spectrum. If Vessel is an organism made of these four players, Alex Tuisku provides the heartbeat: Her drums are the crisp propulsion underneath everything, and her vocals peel out alongside Keron Robinson’s guitar and Isaac Bishop’s sax. Sometimes, the relentless, coiled rhythms the quartet favor can mimic the feeling of those emotions constricting in your chest, but most often Vessel strike playful contrasts. Throughout, you can hear how Vessel patiently chiseled spontaneity into precision. Free-form jams have become punchy pop missiles in their hands—sometimes hypnotic, sometimes kraut-y, sometimes breakneck, sometimes danceable, sometimes pining, sometimes sly. Across Wrapped In Cellophane, Vessel make a sound that could only be the...
LP $22.00
03/29/2024
***Certain Times is a synthpop project based in Brooklyn, NY. The husband-wife duo come from a long musical history in the Atlanta music scene–most notably members of 2010s garage rock band Carnivores and more recently producing records for Sub Pop band Omni. The project is an attempt to exercise collective anxiety through the power of movement shaded by familiar melodies and driving synthesized sounds. Themes of the group’s debut allude to our collective tension between the modern day malaise and the release required to let go and move on. Live, the group combines elements of classic synthpop records with a Criterion-meets-junk culture video collage as the backdrop with the intention of inspiring dance and connection. While applying characteristic synths of classic '80s jams, Certain Times will bring something new and fresh to listeners, craving danceable tunes backed by common and genuine sentiments of now.
LP $21.95
06/09/2023
***Atlanta’s CARNIVORES are geographically in the right place for smelting pop into lo-fi garage post-punk, though the indelible fingerprints of Georgia’s favorite sons only stretch so far. From the skittering drums, the resonant and insistent organ and the lazy surf-bum guitar figures, everything feels like it’s being dragged lovingly into an alternate era. Having spent time on stage with the likes of Best Coast, Black Lips, No Age and Abe Vigoda, their smeary, oblique twitches into echo canyon seem fairly natural. Certainly the New York Times, The Fadar and Pitchfork have allowed them to settle comfortably in various degrees of praise, as well as fans everywhere, from Surfer Blood to Jarvis Cocker. Their latest single “Prom Night” b/w “Second Impulse” merely confirms that all of these admirers are right to do so; sonically adventurous while never reneging on the promise of their personable and stinging melodic haze, Carnivores are the natural successors to the elemental garage-rock sound predators of the past decade.
7" $6.30
09/13/2011