Last month, Kal Marks announced their new album Wasteland Baby and released the lead single “Insects.” The noise-rock crew is back today with an anxious tune titled “A Functional Earth.”
“‘A Functional Earth’ really helped cement the new album into a more colorful groovy direction,” vocalist and guitarist Carl Shane said. “We listened to Pet Sounds after a long writing session day. I’ve heard the album thousands of times, but the intro of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ bounced around in my head in a much darker distorted way than normal. Instead of writing a trippy song about flowers and sunshine we wrote a trippy song about the end of the world. Sometimes it feels like the end is right around the corner and in truth for some people it is very true. Some are watching their families die. Humanity invented its own damnation with its unending thirst for power. We can’t stop drilling holes into the ground, releasing toxins into the air and water, or raining bombs on innocent people. The planet is pretty awesome on its own, just some people can’t stop and smell the fucking roses. I’m not saying anything new.”
Watch the video for “A Functional Earth” below, shot and edited by Pat Ronayne with lighting and special effects from Kieran McShane.
Kal Marks just keep getting better. Exploding In Sound Records has had the pleasure of working with the band for over a decade now and they've never ceased to amaze us. Wasteland Baby however, the band's upcoming album, takes things to a whole new level, a masterpiece in the making that expands on My Name Is Hell in many ways, while also wandering into brilliant new territory all together. Due out on September 13th, the record is available for pre-order now, together with the album's first single "Insects" and the amazing music video directed by William Hart.
Speaking about the single, Carl Shane (guitar/vocals) shared:
"'Insects' was an excruciating song to get right. We were listening to a lot more danceable music at the time. Anything from Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, “Rhythm Nation” by Janet Jackson, Cerone and DAF. We wanted to make something danceable and poppy but have it make sense in our world. We also loved the duality a lot of this music had with dark lyrical themes with upbeat propulsive rhythms. It’s a grim tune to tap your feet to. A lot of frustration in it."
Bay Area slowcore trio Sour Widows are gearing up to share their new album Revival Of A Friend at the end of the month. So far, they’ve released a few singles including “Witness,” “I-90,” and “Cherish,” and now they’re giving a final preview of the record with “Big Dogs.”
Sour Widows cite bands like Duster, Bedhead, and Slint as major inspirations, and you can definitely feel their influence here. “Big Dogs” starts with some spare, meandering guitar riffs, looping behind Susanna Thomson and Maia Sinaiko’s vocal melodies until it grows into one gnarly wall of sound. Of the song’s meaning, Sinaiko explains in a press release:
Once upon a time there were two twin brothers named Albert and Henry. They lived in a beautiful house at the end of a long quiet street. Albert and Henry were very big and strong, so big and so strong people were almost scared of them when they walked by. But on the inside, Albert and Henry felt small, like children, afraid of the world and the people in it. That’s why they stayed in the beautiful house at the end of the long quiet street. Out of sight, undisturbed, the twin brothers ran free, rolling in the leaves on the lawn, chasing birds, or cats into trees. Because they were dogs. The biggest dogs I’ve ever seen.
Today, the Chicago-based project Babe Report shared their third and final single off their debut album Did You Get Better out on May 31 through Exploding In Sound. The album's weighty centerpiece is defined by its soaring guitar lead and muffled, murky vocals. What might have begun as an experiment in crafting a Yo La Tengo-esque song quickly comes into its own, marked by a frenetic tempo shift that is more indicative of the album's fervent nature, never allowing the listener to rest on their laurels.
On the song, member Ben Grigg adds: "There’s no grand theme behind the words here, they just always felt right. Like, these were the right sounds to make. The song to me is a vehicle for that soaring guitar lead line, which gets reprised after the tempo change."
"Allergy 2000" arrives with a music video directed by the band and follows up previously released singles "Turtle of Reaper" and "Universal," which earned the project notable support from Bandcamp, Billboard, BrooklynVegan, CREEM, FLOOD, Small Albums, Various Small Flames, and many others.
Where the band initially existed as a lockdown-inspired duo, Babe Report became a fully-fledged four-piece on the aforementioned The Future of Teeth EP, with Ben Grigg (Whelpwisher, FCKR JR, Geronimo!) and Emily Bernstein (FCKR JR) expanding their line-up to include Peter Reale (Yeesh) on drums and Mech on bass. Such reinforcements grow exponentially here, and they come to define Did You Get Better. Both a bigger and more accomplished version of the band than we’ve heard to date, the album boasts a woozy concoction of 90s-drenched guitars and melodic grooves.
Recorded over just one weekend in November 2023, using several one-of-a-kind prototype mics at Radon Ranch - Ben and Emily’s humble basement studio - the songs here are both gripping in their immediacy and wholly intoxicating. Embracing disorder throughout, Babe Report funnel their influences into something both boisterous and exuberant; a thunderstorm trapped inside a bottle.
A tumultuous tale, the album is part snapshot of the band’s singular and curious perspectives but also of their surroundings in Jefferson Park, an area that is rife with inspiration. “We practice on Wednesdays when the hyper-local Nadig Newspaper is delivered. We invariably spend the first few minutes of practice reviewing the weekly, idiotic antics of our Alderman,” the band says, while also citing “women driving cars with manual transmissions, the cult of fame and personality, and dreams of throwing your severed body parts into the ocean” as part of the album’s idiosyncratic nature.
However it finds you or you find it, Did You Get Better finds a way to take the reigns, plowing headfirst into its journey and rarely looking back for approval, to even worry if anyone else is joining for the ride. Through its intense rushing and the occasional moments of cessation, it showcases a band in a bold and brilliant new chapter, highlighting the power of growth and collaboration in a way that feels considerably and endearingly forthright.
Today, Bay Area trio Sour Widows share “Staring Into Heaven/Shining” the entrancing new single and album closer from their recently announced debut record Revival Of A Friend, out June 28th on Exploding In Sound Records. The song comes with a video directed by Henry Kinder that was shot across Golden Gate Park and Ocean Beach in San Francisco and Thee Stork Club in Oakland.
"After my mom passed in late June of 2021, I went on a trip in August of that year in an attempt to put physical distance between myself and the pain of what I had just experienced. I was searching for relief wherever I thought I could find it; ultimately, that trip taught me that grief cannot be outrun,” Susanna Thomson explains. “‘Staring Into Heaven/Shining’ is a confessional song, written at a time when I was desperate to gain control over my life through ideas I had about grieving the ‘right’ way. As I tried and failed to reconcile feelings of regret and unanswerable questions, it became clearer to me that all I can do is choose to simply observe the experience of grief. The lyrics are searching, but come to their natural end in a place without resolution; it wasn’t until after finishing the song that I realized there can be hope in accepting that there are things we cannot know about death.”
Sour Widows have expanded their previously announced summer tour dates to include a fall run with youbet. Tickets for the fall dates go on sale Friday 5/10 at 10am ET via sourwidows.com
In the seven years since Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson started Sour Widows, they have survived a litany of tragedies and tribulations. Sinaiko lost a partner to an accidental overdose just before the band began. Thomson’s mother was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which she lived with for four years before passing away in June 2021. As they prepared to enter Oakland’s Tiny Telephone in 2023 to make an album partly of songs about navigating those losses and the lives they shaped, more troubles mounted, including a traumatic breakup and Thomson’s father’s sudden cancer diagnosis.
Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko, Thomson, and drummer Max Edelman, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. Revival Of A Friend, the band’s entrancing and powerful debut album is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making.
Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster and Bedhead, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, Revival of a Friend fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years, the album is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it.
Tour Dates: 6/2: San Francisco, CA - Union Street Festival 6/16: Davis, CA - Davis Music Festival 6/20: San Diego, CA - Voodoo Room ^ 6/21: Santa Ana, CA - Constellation Room ^ 7/10: Seattle, WA - Sunset Tavern 7/11: Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios 7/13: San Francisco, CA - The Independent 7/26: Los Angeles, CA - Zebulon 9/9: Atlanta, GA - 529 Club * 9/10: Nashville, TN - DRKMTTR * 9/11: Asheville, NC - Eulogy * 9/12: Washington, DC - Comet Ping Pong * 9/13: Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's *
