on the pulse - 2021 - #27 - roddy ricch, dessa, ethereal shroud, solemn brigham, caro♡, crimson dimension, orla gartland, spectral wound, foxes

And this is it, the last episode for 2021 - an odd spread we have here, don’t try to look for any common throughline beyond the last Patreon request leftovers and the remains of my backlog, so let’s get On The Pulse!

Foxes - Friends In The Corner - Am I the only one who feels like Foxes kind of deserved a better run than she got? She’s got a great voice, a real knack for hooks, and even if I thought the writing could get shaky, you could at least tell she was willing to go for broke with anthemic gusto that might have compensated for instrumental ideas that could feel a little derivative within indie pop. But after an underrated album in 2016, she just seemed to slip out of the spotlight - getting dropped from RCA from the looks of things - but she’s got a new EP and… well, it’s frustrating because I don’t think this is bad at all… but I also don’t believe this moves the needle for Foxes in the slightest. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still a phenomenal singer with a huge, expressive range that can sell a big hook, and even if the mixing and mastering can be a bit spotty across this project - why is ‘Hollywood’ weirdly quiet compared to the rest of the EP - there’s some solid piano-driven melodies that could anchor a solid pop project. But man, like that Amy Shark album from earlier this year, it just feels dated to a specific, percussion-heavy millennial pop sound between 2014 and 2016 where Foxes’ vocal personality just doesn’t add more to the good but not unique production to set it above, and that’s not counting the moments where she’s really trying to play into Dua Lipa’s vibe on ‘Love Not Loving You’ and ‘Dance’. And it’s a similar case when we get to the writing, where I’ll appreciate an arc that comes with bottoming out and regaining one’s confidence after getting disillusioned with the industry… but it’s not quite unique enough to differentiate it from projects that play in very similar territory. So light 7/10 - I hope that album next year sticks out more, because while this is good, I think she needs a little more out of the corner than this.

Spectral Wound - A Diabolic Thirst - Yep, this has been in my personal backlog for way too long, as a Canadian black metal act that plays closer to the genre’s classic routes that’s just jagged and raw enough to pick up the texture but not to the point where it compromises the melodies or sounds like a complete disaster. They saw their breakout in 2018 with Infernal Decadence, which kicked a decent amount of ass, so now onto this project… well, this sure as hell is some ferocious and raw black metal alright. This is one of those projects where you know Spectral Wound are not reinventing the wheel - the melodic tremolo riffs seethe and roar, the drumwork is wild, the screamed vocals are visceral, the solos are impressive as hell, and unfortunately the basslines and grooves don’t have the punch they really need - but it’s so rock solid in its singular focus and cutting intensity that it’s hard to care! Now I do wish there were more coherent dynamics to help differentiate these six songs from each other, which is why I like the acoustic break on ‘Frigid and Spellbound’ and the surprisingly bouncy ‘Soul Destroying Black Debauchery’ - or any sort of hook in a pinch, maybe just help the lead work jump out a bit more effectively - and I’m not going to say the lyrics really grabbed me much here either; a streak of masochistic decadence that doubles as the inevitable highway straight into darkness; instead of mourning some great degeneration, why not accelerate it especially if we can all see it coming? And it’s not embracing Satanism either - Lucifer is outright mocked as a devil of a different age, where one sordid individual cannot encompass evils that have entrenched themselves within modern organized religion, or even just life in general in the modern age. But overall, while I like the poetry, I struggle to see what puts this above and beyond when it comes to black metal, especially when it’s as indebted to the classic sound as it is. Definitely good, netting a solid 7/10 from me, but unless you’re head over heels for this sound in particular, it’s more consistently solid than great.

Orla Gartland - Woman On The Internet - This has been circling the edges of my radar for a bit, mostly off of snippets I caught on Bandcamp and the videos of music critic colleagues. And since women have been running the table when it comes to guitar-driven indie rock this year for me - hell, even just outside of the stuff I like the critical acclaim has been racking up - I wanted to give this debut album a proper shot and… why does this remind me a little too much of a quirkier indie pop rock project that might have slipped out between 2008 and 2014? Well, that’s not quite apt - the jittery, programmed percussion and lilting vocals that seem to be splitting the difference between Imogen Heap, Feist and Sara Bareilles definitely occupied one chipper corner of indie pop, but Gartland is also pairing it with jagged, burlier riffs and grooves that are smooth enough to fit within these mixes, but give these tunes a muscle that gives them more punch - it shouldn’t be any surprise she’s gotten compared to HAIM, for better and worse. And it’s interesting having those older 2000s reference points, because for me it allows Gartland to come across as a little older in her framing - it certainly feels more millennial in its tangled, but earnest sentiments of trying to pull her life together and bowl through her problems, be they emotionally stymied guys, frustrated friendships, exes showing up at the wrong time, or just getting out of her damn head. And all of this is set up to make a pretty damn solid record… so why doesn’t hit greatness? Well, I suspect it might be because Gartland seems to be hitting the middle ground between hitting greater lyrical depth or plowing into reckless explosiveness at full speed - it’s a little too smooth and tasteful to erupt with full, crushing explosive force, even if she’s got the guitars to do it, but you might find yourself a little underwhelmed by the writing not quite cutting as deeply when the personal details don’t quite coalesce as strongly, or you don’t get that added bit of nuance or complexity. Don’t get me wrong, this is a debut with promise and a few legit good to great songs, but after repeated listens it still feels in the shadow of its influences, and doesn’t quite pay off its potential - solid 6/10, though, and if you’re in the mood for this sort of material that leans towards adult alternative, give it a listen.

Crimson Dimension - Crimson Dimension - Alright, this is the last of the Patreon requests, the debut album of a progressive raw black metal band out of Finland, with just four tracks to cycle through but running nearly an hour… well, it sure as hell sounds a lot cleaner, with the synthetic arranged elements building up swell behind the much sharper and more prominent leads and the frequent progressive drum breakdowns, even if for some reason it can’t muster a consistent, compelling groove to save its life and one of its slappy kickdrums sounds distractingly flat in comparison with the rest of the kit. You can definitely tell this is a project that wants to lean way harder on the progressive side of its compositions in terms of melodic switch-ups with its liquid, Opeth-leaning passages and twinking pianos and touches of organ… so why do I get the uneasy feeling that this feels way less memorable than it should be? There are melodic ideas here on the four tracks that all run long, but without much in the way of interesting production texture or coherent transitions - especially on ‘Black Mass’ it feels bizarrely clunky - it feels like it’s playing to a theatrical interpretation of black metal rather than something with more grisly punch. Granted, a lot of that has to do with the vocals and content, the former sounding like they’re trying to force the difference between a growl and a shriek and coming up really short of both, and then the writing… while there’s a part of me that wants to be charitable if English is their second language, the poetry feels almost embarrassingly basic in its nihilistic Satanism that doesn’t bring anything new or remotely transgressive to the table. Honestly, the best words to describe this album might be ‘amateurish’ or ‘shallow’ - it’s got some technically sound riffing and drumwork, but none of the four songs here have the focus, flow, or enough standout moments to justify their length, and from a compositional standpoint, they feel more like grabbags of ideas not structured well enough to add to more. Hate to say it, but this one is mediocre - 5/10, you likely missed it this year, and you didn’t miss much.

caro♡ - Heartbeats/Heartbreaks - I feel like I’ve had such an up-and-down relationship with hyperpop the past few years that I really wanted to find something this year that jumped out at me a little more, something with some sparkle to really stick for me. So why not go to Bandcamp for the debut album from the singer of Planet 1999, the first act that got signed by PC Music and who are known for tones that lean a little more on shoegaze and krautrock? Now if you read liner notes, you might also recognize caro♡ for cowriting and production on Charli XCX’s self-titled album, but now on her own here with a project that she wrote and produced herself all the way through… and I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy this a decent bit. What’s interesting is that caro♡’s approach to blissed out hyperpop - complete with a thick cushion of autotune, an omnipresent metallic sheen to the synths when they don’t sound like they’re pulled from the castoffs of vaporwave, percussion that sounds a half step removed from clanking, trap-inflected pop - generally eschews the more blown out, in your face approach to the genre for something way closer to modern dream pop, with a few passing glances at Purity Ring and even Porter Robinson along the way. It sprawls across the haze and distance, where caro♡’s sweet vocals are a solid vocal point to pull you across the flurry of sampled snippets and swells of synth, but intentionally seem a half step away at all times, and that distance becomes a palpable factor in both the compositions and the content. So much of this album on the surface seems to play to pop cliches, but is more about trying to cross what seems like a vast gulf between our dreams and reality while preserving the idea of who we are, and I like how well this album plays with ambience and space to accentuate how isolating that can be, or just how fruitless it can all feel. Honestly, maybe even a little too well, because despite some impressive vibes and consistently likable production, the pacing can feel a little sluggish, especially as caro♡ peppers her ambient instrumentals across the project and many songs can feel a little drawn out, or at the very least feel a little lacking in climax or firepower. Part of this is intentional because of the midtempo, soft-focus presentation, but without much immediacy, this is an album that requires you come to it rather than meeting you halfway. And yet this one hooked me - probably closer to dream pop than hyperpop proper, but the gentle yearning haze really coalesced in a way a lot of her peers haven’t for me - solid 7/10, this was really quite good, give it a shot.

Solemn Brigham - South Sinner Street - I didn’t forget about this one! No, after Solemn Brigham surprised me twice over with his Marlowe projects with L’Orange, I definitely did not want to let him slip by me with this solo project, especially given that he was growing considerably as a lyricist. And as such… well, to some extent it feels a lot like Solemn Brigham is locking into many of the same grooves and vibes as on the Marlowe albums, and he’s such an amazingly elastic, melodic, and naturally charismatic rapper that it’s easy to get pulled into his vibe. This time, however, there’s a lot less of a conceptual structure brought from the samples and instrumentation - incidentally, while the production palette is still shaggy and textured it’s way less consistent this time around - which places more focus on Solemn Brigham talking about his own come-up and struggle to both give back and help his hardscrabble hometown, but also survive while doing things his own way, especially when the shortfalls can feel increasingly apparent - he said it’s not a rags-to-riches album and that’s absolutely true, as he seems to struggle to run in place while the world decays around him. But this does highlight two issues, one persisting from the Marlowe albums and one new, and the first is that for as much as Solemn Brigham is a great goddamn rapper in terms of flows and melodic construction which lets him pull together hooks pretty consistently, I’ve been waiting for him to take a deeper step with his content to bring a little more detail to his storytelling or for all of his well structured bars to add to sharper punchlines; kind of the opposite problem to Bruiser Wolf, come to think of it, but in both cases I’m left thinking that for as many flows are being dropped, it should stick more, although with the more personal, downbeat ending, he also comes really close to sticking that landing. Granted, you also need to consider the production, where minus L’Orange for all but one song, the boom-bap production is just not as gritty or colourful or carries the same flavour or groove - generally okay minus a few poor synth choices like on ‘My Way’ and ‘Future Brutha’, but for a rapper as vibrant as Solemn Brigham, I’ll repeat what I said with Marlowe in that you want production that matches and amplifies his character, not drags him back, even if that’s the point of this project. Don’t get me wrong, I do think this is pretty damn good… but it hasn’t quite stuck with me as much as the L’Orange projects, and I think a change-up is probably needed here. Very light 7/10, I do feel that’s generous, but if you like this brand of hip-hop, you’ll probably still have fun with it.

Ethereal Shroud - Trisagion - Okay, one last black metal swing before the end of the year, and this one-man black metal project from the UK has been racking up critical acclaim within circles that know, even if I’m not exactly a huge fan of the doom-inspired fringe of this subgenre. But I went back to check out the remaster of the 2015 album and… well, the closest to doom elements are the extended track lengths, for the most part this plays to the roughest sides of symphonic black metal, and is surprisingly pretty damn credible as a result, even if the lo-fi mixing has some hiccups.and it’s hard not to feel like songs eclipsing the twenty minute mark could be tightened up. But okay, we only have three songs in that vein this time…. and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find myself liking this again! Now that comes with the massive asterisk that all of these pieces could be trimmed and tightened up - if you’re more into doom or drone, I can imagine the length won’t bother you, but it’s not a good sign if you think songs have reached natural conclusions and then go on for another seven minutes, even if you can tell that each song was composed with distinctive movements in mind. But that being said, sink into the tremendous swells of explosive blast beats, rumbling grooves, tremolo leads that know exactly when to bring in the sizzling texture to roar across the murk, and frontman Joseph Hawker has exactly the guttural howl that works across a mix like this, especially being precisely placed within the roars to be audible but still caught within the cacophony. And that works really well for the writing, which I have to highlight as a real standout: Trisagion was inspired by Hawker’s disillusionment and contempt for the larger world that is clinging to short term consumerism, regressive and corrupted religious strictures, and even looking backwards towards fascism. But what’s powerful about the album is that Hawker knows how to ground this cynicism with a real emotional conflict - because he doesn’t want to feel any of this! He doesn’t want to hate his fellow man, which whom he knows he needs to survive, so the emotional conflict is rooted in a dogged and forged sense of righteous optimism against… well, the reality of everything crashing down around him, and goddamn if I can’t get behind the conflict here, especially by the end where he knows just how easy it is to succumb to numb depression and burnout… but he has found his center, and he will weather this maelstrom. And again, between some some of the terrific melodic groove passages, the striking integration of keyboards and especially viola, just how well the transitions are managed for a project that could have easily fallen into the background… this was the sort of black metal I’m thrilled to find before the end of 2021 - 8/10, absolutely deserves consideration.

Dessa - Ides - I know a whole lot of you might think that’d be all over this. An artist who has made some of my favourite albums of the 2010s, dropping an EP at the end of the year, surely the project that would be a guarantee to slip onto my best list at the last possible second, right? Well, I’ll admit I had serious doubts with this one, mostly because this is more of a compilation of songs that Dessa had been drip-feeding across the year, of which I hadn’t really kept up with because I really dislike this release strategy - the entire project had effectively been released by mid-November, hang any sort of coherent throughline or theme across the project! Well, maybe that’s not quite fair: Dessa is still impressively good at sketching out dense, noir-inflected stories where she’s playing the hard-drinking, hard-living woman scratching out successes hand-over-fist and the challenge is for everyone else to keep up… but since it’s Dessa, she’s going to keep such a wide angle to see everyone impacted or caught in that orbit, from the crime kingpin family robbed by the nanny to watching a guy spend too much for a golddigger sucking him dry out of boredom, before then focusing on the women playing that femme fatale to highlight a capitalistic system where even some of the trappings of pop-feminism exacerbate a system everyone becomes accustomed to surviving. But even then, the most prevalent feeling is that this feels fragmented in both content and stylism, which she even acknowledges by the final track, throwing so much at the wall and blowing all apart to feel something real when you’re adrift, which could be read as a criticism of Chime was well… but Ides doesn’t have anything close to that album’s best hooks, and it’s in the execution where I think Dessa stumbles. I know she’s been playing with pop as of recently, but the chirpier autotune and presentation of a cut like ‘I Already Like You’ doesn’t play to her strengths, and minus even more organic texture, a lot of Lazerbeak’s fragile synth mixes backing the trap progressions can’t always carry the muscle or flair that could give some undercooked compositions a little more staying power. Yeah, the strings on ‘Talking Business’ and ‘LYTP’ off the gleaming keys are nice touches, as were the rougher clatter of sampled drums on ‘Rome’, and I like the spare groove behind ‘Life On Land’… but this really just feels like a sampler for diehards who were hoping she’d put out something given the mess of the past few years, and while it’s a light 7/10, it’s not great. I think I’ll just wait for that next album.

Roddy Ricch - LIVE LIFE FAST - …maybe this was my fault? Maybe I was just expecting too much - I was mixed on Roddy Ricch when he saw a bit of album success in late 2019, but that translated to his commercial breakthrough the next year with a few songs that would grow on me by leaps and bounds, which led me to remembering that debut a decent more fondly. And he was showing a lot of versatility and flair on his guest verses, to say nothing of taking his time with a sophomore project, all of which stood to imply that Roddy Ricch was cooking up something special even if ‘Late At Night’ was the definition of underwhelming… which might as well be the goddamn tagline of this album, because wow, this was a letdown. First off, for all the talk of Roddy Ricch taking his time to put together a masterpiece, outside of some of the arranged elements sounding more expensive this feels shockingly bog standard when it comes to mainstream trap - occasionally we get some decent acoustic progressions or a west-coast synth bounce or that nifty intro on ‘moved to miami’, to say nothing of the drill flourishes that I’d say would feel out of place if not for being some of the most potent moments on the album, like ‘murda one’ with Fivio Foreign, but there’s a distressing lack of urgency or flair, with very little in the way of hooks that stand out on compositions that often feel like they’re missing a little spark. Maybe that’s why Roddy Ricch cedes so much ground to his guest stars, with decidedly mixed results - yes, 21 Savage is fine, but why are Gunna, Future, and especially Kodak Black even here if they’re going to drop verses with no interesting flair - but I’m increasingly realizing that the bigger problem on this album might be Roddy Ricch himself. In comparison with his debut he’s a lot less melodic, defaulting to trap flows that at best feel intriguingly offkilter and at worst feel outright incompetent and lacking the tune to give them a foundation. And here’s the thing: without that added tunefulness and catchiness, you can’t tell me that Roddy Ricch’s come-up flexing is all that distinct, especially given how often he cribs from Young Thug or slips towards a lot of obvious name-dropping - that Lakers reference on ‘all good’ is going to date that record so badly, especially when that team implodes. And while his paranoia is still here but even that’s relaxed in favour of a lot of mid-tempo sex jam hookup vibes that play closer to ‘late at night’, and even then, with less actual tune behind him I’m not even sure the sensuality is delivered convincingly. There’s an interlude with Jamie Foxx and Alex Isley midway through where you get the impression that Roddy might deliver something with a little more opulent stylism… but it never materializes, and unfortunately this feels like the sort of sophomore slump that comes with the best ideas rammed all onto the debut, leaving the follow-up to play to trends instead of the potential he had to shape them. So yeah, a real disappointment to end out 2021 - 5/10, I’d say take it or leave it, but given that the public has been lukewarm at best, I think we got our answer.