IHN004 // William Carlos Whitten – Burn My Letters
by William Carlos Whitten
New music to you is still new music. Released in 2018, Burn My Letters is new to me, and it is now one of my favourite recordings. In my 20s, I had a black leather jacket with lapels, ripped pockets, and was weather worn. It was cool, a cloak of cool. It made me 50 percent cooler. It gave me a swagger, almost put some New York in my trainers.
This album feels like that. It has a lean to it that feels New York. It occupies that slipstream where Iggy, Bowie, Eno, Lou Reed lived but you can throw in that art rock that doesn’t grate with it’s pretense.
What I’m trying to say is that it lives and breathes a confidence in its songs that only exists in New York that Iggy and Bowie adopted. It also feels like it’s throwing a casual nod to German rock of the early 70s.
It’s melodic, discordant, plays with dissonance enough to tickle your eardrums, but somehow every song becomes a nicotine infused earworm. Each time I play this, I hear something new. It develops, sometimes it’s that New York groove, sometimes it’s German inspired elctronica, at points it’s early 2000s outsider rock like Merciury Rev or Grandaddy and then it’s late 70s Lennon, drunk and angry at a piano(that’s not an insult).
Music that inspires this much cinematic thought is good right?
Then the song, Poor Thing plays and fuck me. That’s a song I wish I was designed to write.
If you enjoy your music, buy this today. Thank me later.
Deral Fenderson Is Way Cooler Than Graham Smith
by @fendersonia.bsky.social
I’m very much someone, who is enjoying structure in music. Hearing how an artist is moving within a framework, how they bend or even break said structure and give their creativity an audible form, is one of my joys in life. But sometimes, you just want to experience something that’s less constrained, more free in it’s expression.
Deral Fenderson is an artist, who does exactly this. His music feels more like a collage of scavenged sounds, than songs in a traditional sense and “Deral Fenderson Is Way Cooler Than Graham Smith” is even one of his more conventional albums.
The listener is presented with clanging glass or tapping on a table for percussion, soft guitar strumming, spacey synths, spoken-word soundbites out of context, I believe I even heard Deral blow into bottles! But despite this, the tracks do not feel random. There is social critique, a lot of humor and a lot of joy in the simple act of making music in this album. Every song is coherent in it’s intent and message, no matter how weird it gets on the way.
Overall, this is an album that is hard to make a recommendation for. It will be too strange, harsh or crass for many people, but on the other hand, the fun Deral had creating this shines through every song. There is an understanding of the conventions of music in them, the artist just elected to ignore them. I would hope that more people give this a chance and let themselves infected by the creativity on display. I definitively had a good time with it!
Anhedonia by Citizen Audrey
It’s #FeatureFriday and also #BandcampFriday, which means that today we each pick a different artist to spotlight. My choice this time is a single that just dropped yesterday. “Anhedonia,” by @citizenaudrey.bsky.social
Check out how the intensity builds and explodes in this awesome song!
- Scrapyard Boyz: Ultra Despair Duo – Grizzly, Slogan
- The Nirvana Fallacy (or, Mania and Her Sophomore Slump) – Saint Louie
- The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, And So Are You
- X by Everything’s a Crime
- Take to The Streets by Eparapo
- Ashenheart – Faded Gold
- Underground by Trina Chakrabarti
- Happy New Year #Feature Friday
- Adrift by Angry Blue Planet
- Hells Bells – Dallas Orbiter’s Spaceman Things