#FeatureFriday – Bandcamp Friday 01-05-26

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#FeatureFriday – Bandcamp Friday 01-05-26

Alpha Chrome Yayo, Eveale and Stunt Lover

A Huge Problem To A Sane World by Stunt Lover

Stunt Lover’s new album, A Huge Problem to a Sane World, is an exercise in creativity, a deep dive into what traditional instruments can do, how riffs and melody can be deconstructed, rebuilt, disassembled, studied, manipulated and regurgitated It show how political diatribe can become an angry mantra,it radiates a nuclear energy that burns like a dying sun.

It plants it’s feet, one foot behind the other to get ready to run or push back, takes a stance against stupid opinions and dangerous political polemics, it stretches time signatures to the brink, stretches them to breaking point, it plays with rhythm, like a scientist studying a simple pattern and distorting it and as a consequence it challenges your musical sensibilities. but it never veers off into pretension.

This is an album of surprises, a millennium leap forward from their previous album, Aldona’s Daughter, which was a much more linear punk rock album. Where that was an instant punch to the chest, this is a much more cerebral affair. It takes patience, for that is rewarded with the abundance of ideas and attention to detail. It’s a snarled lip, a smirk, a biting political manifesto married to off-the-rails Bill Hicks stand-up routine. It has humor under the railing, it has references, it quotes, it deciphers, the lyrics for each song  have a rhythm of their own, delivered by a weary vocalist fighting for air, to breathe, to exist. This is some musical statement and the more I listen the more I hear.

Mixing disturbed Punk guitar, fluctuating time signatures, it’s an organized chaos, a document of a hateful world.
True punk, it has spittle and disgust for a world that refuses to grow up, instead it just rolls back.Becoming every more childish with each day and Stunt Lover is  fighting back, At times it strikes me like beat poetry soundtrack by disassembled bass lines, reconstituted guitars and found sounds, field recordings, audio experiments, jazz horror.

I love this album.

I hate the world that lead to it’s creation.

Ultimately though, this is a work of art.

Buy it.

Untidy Music

Lament of the Dryads / The Enemy by Eveale

Since we’re about to get their first full album, let’s have a look at the debut release by Eveale.
As the project of Steve Wiener and Alex Loach, Eveale went back deep into the history of Black Metal, as their sound in this reminds the listener of early examples in the genre, being more on the atmospheric than on the dissonant side of things. It is melodic, with frantic tremolo-picking on the guitar, furious blastbeats and predominantly harsh vocals.

Where these two songs shine the most, however, is in the lyrics. The band’s themes are based around topics of nature, both in the sense of the cycle of birth-growth-decay and in a more anthropomorphised one; where artificial and unnatural notions of humanity succumb to the natural order of the world. Instead of the nihilism and fatalism that is so prominent in Black Metal, the audience hears songs about resilience, balance and personal growth. That doesn’t mean that there is no sorrow or introspection happening in the songs, far from it, but there is a certain bend to them; one that leads to the idea, that good things are possible.

From the technical aspect, this is about as good a recording as you can hear. The muffled, fuzzy “raw” sound that’s typically associated with the genre is wholly absent, leaving a crisp and clear sound; something that I really appreciate.
This is a difficult release for me to recommend fully. When I heard it the first time, I liked it, but didn’t love it; it was very well done, but simply nothing that I had not heard before. Since then, it has definitively grown on me, but it was still the reveal that it was Alex and Steve behind this, that had the biggest impact on my enjoyment of the band. So far that is, since what I’ve heard of their new LP has been a tremendous step up in every regard.
I think that is another theme in Eveale’s music: new things come from old ones, they grow and improve, and what comes after will be better than what came before. Yes, I think that’s quite fitting.

Florgoth

Hidden Earth by Alpha Chrome Yayo

I’d gotten to know about Alpha Chrome Yayo on Twitter back in the day where he posted one of his songs overlaid on an old ‘Shadowrun’ TV advertisement which I thought fricken’ rocked as that rockin’ Synthwave really fitted that Cyberpunk vibe. So what do you do then? You follow them and check out the rest of their music of course. And what I found was wild! His discography was filled with a variety of stuff in all kinds of different genres. I guess this is why we have the term ‘eclectic’ right? He covers everything from Synthwave to City Pop to rap and even a ‘Sunset Riders’ themed western album. It’s wild.

And all these genre-excursions are never treated as a throwaway pastiche either as the subject matter at hand is too lovingly and respectfully treated for it to be labeled as such. And sure, someone with a more ironic disposition might be tempted to label this music as cheesy, but Alpha on the other hand, while fully realizing it might be viewed as such, treats his music fully in earnest. And the music is all the better for it. Some people emulate their favourite artist but Alpha just isn’t built like that and will say “Hell yeah, this New Age CD slaps! I wanna do something exactly like that!”

And funny that, because that’s exactly the genre he tackles here, New Age, just like those CD’s you used to find at Sea Life’s souvenir shop or at your local organic produce shop. I always had a fondness for Alpha’s more introspective side cause he’s really good at that and I just love the beautiful soothing sounds he conjures up. And this New Age excursion ties into that side of him nicely as it is a very Ambient-leaning sound. Armed with a healthy sense of experimentation and some lovely Asian instrumentation he creates some lovely soundscapes here. Soundscapes that do not just emulate the whacky New Age sound of yore but actually have some emotional depth to them as well where some of the tracks on offer here are just downright touching and moving. Just stunning stuff.

And I’d like to conclude this review by saying that in exploring all these genre-excursions Alpha teaches us to… just enjoy stuff. You know, unironically. Live cringe, live free and all that jazz (he does excellent loungey Jazz too by the way). Life is just too short to worry about music or anything really to be considered “cool”. Fuck guilty pleasures!

Eveyweveydevey

Updated: May 1, 2026 — 5:28 am

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