Dig ‘in: Tough Age, Feeble Little Horse, Wireheads
Check out what the No Wristbands team is listening to and what’s in our show calendars this month on our latest Dig ‘in.
INCOMING
Tough Age - Waiting Here (Bobo Integral LP)
Jarrett Evan Samson’s and Jesse Locke’s relocation from Toronto back to Vancouver, where Tough Age started out, also saw them reuniting with original bassist Lauren Smith. Judging by the ebullient sounds they hatched for Waiting Here, the reintroduction was a seamless transition. Smith makes her presence immediately apparent with a lead vocal turn on “Paradise by Another Time,” and fetching back-up to Samson on “Time & Again.” Samson sparkles on the jaunty “Give It a Day” with its insistent jangle strum and punchy beat from Locke. Part of Tough Age’s appeal is not allowing their songs to go on for too long, generally clocking in between two and three minutes in length. The six-minute-plus “Getting Closer” is an album highlight though, with a lengthy instrumental lead-in that segues perfectly with Samson’s vocals that emerge nearly halfway through the song, creating a zen-like feel with a dynamic ebb and flow. There’s pure pop bliss residing throughout the record that’ll trigger a dopamine release to serve your body and mind oh so well. -Bruce Novak
Feeble Little Horse - Girl With Fish (Saddle Creek LP)
Emerging from Pittsburgh’s DIY community and having self-recorded and produced their second LP, Girl With Fish, Feeble Little Horse has needed a reset. Scrapping their summer 12-date tour for a mental health break indicates the perils of young adulthood where jobs, education and performances are all competing for time and attention. On their song “Healing,” Lydia Slocum observes “My skin still left a mark / Even after the healing stops / How long until it scars?” For Feeble Little Horse, definitive answers aren’t always forthcoming. With a religious upbringing, Slocum has struggled to reconcile issues of faith and hypocrisy. That dynamic gives the band’s songs a feeling of turbulence that’s echo’d in the shifting guitars of Ryan Walchonski and Sebastian Kinsler. Recorded piecemeal over several cities, Girl With Fish is a satisfyingly polished-sounding record with grit to go along with pop sensibilities. It sounds like the band we’re in a good state of mind during its creation, so hopefully it’s a place they’re able to revisit again soon. -Bruce Novak
Wireheads - Potentially Venus (Tenth Court LP)
The city of Adelaide in South Australia gets overshadowed by its more buzz-worthy counterparts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. All of which seems to suit the non-conventional outfit Wireheads just fine. The sextet is fronted by Dom Trimboli, who’s wry observations and matter-of-fact delivery provide an element of edginess to the band’s versatile sonic palette. After recording five albums in relatively quick succession starting in 2014, Potentially Venus arrives six years following their last release, Lightning Ears. That record, and the preceding Big Issues album, were recorded in Washington state with Calvin Johnson as producer, who’s spartan approach appealed to Wireheads’ sensibility. Potentially Venus continues their analog recording approach, but utilizing Castlemaine, Victoria’s Sound Recording studio instead of trekking out to Johnson’s compound. The album highlights Wireheads’ ability to vary tempos and texture. “Hook Echo” and “1000 Red Venomous Snakes” are accelerated and agitated. “Hanging Garden” exudes a serene beauty with striking pastoral observations and “Life After Winter” is charmingly unhinged to match its lyrical content. Potentially Venus is diverse but cohesive—the kind of under-the-radar effort that deserves to be explored and exalted. -Bruce Novak
UPCOMING
Momma
Where: Square Roots Festival / Directions
When: July 7, 9:00 PM
The ’90s are cool again. We are seeing the rise of ’90s altrock/grunge as a significant influence on younger bands that are coming up. From the countryfied grunge of Asheville, North Carolina’s Wednesday, to the arena aspiring grunge of LA’s Momma. Momma formed as a duo founded by high school friends Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, and they take their inspiration from ’90s touchstones like Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Liz Phair. Momma writes under the guise of being rockstars in order to talk about deeper ideas like their relationships and changes that everyone in their early 20s goes through. Unlike the pervasiveness of disdain for upward aspiration that existed in the ’90s, Momma wears their inspirations and their lifer goals on their sleeves through songs like “Rockstar” and “Speeding 72.” The industry quickly caught on to what they were doing, and they signed with Polyvinyl to put out last year’s album Household Name. I am excited to hear how their songs sound live and see if we are lucky enough to hear any new music, like their most recent single “Bang Bang” which was released in March. -Mark Joyner
Big Joanie
Where: Empty Bottle / Directions
When: July 13, 9:00 PM
Being black, female and queer, the members of London’s Big Joanie have had to overcome assumptions about their identity. In her excellent feminist music history tome, Revenge of the She-Punks, Vivien Goldman examines how the music community struggles to look beyond the hip-hop, reggae, grime or R&B genres that’s associated with “black music,” to brush aside punk and riot grrrl influences that it typically deems as “white music.” Drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone explains, “How can you say we make ’white music, when we are so obviously black and our politics are black centered? We are far more radical than some hip-hop artists who aspire to ‘succeed’ within a white supremacist gaze, consciously making their music palatable for middle-of-the-road white audiences.”
Taylor-Stone, along with vocalist/guitarist Stephanie Phillips and bassist Kiera Coward-Deyell (since replaced by Estella Adeyeri), brought their activism full bore in 2013 when the advent of the inclusive First Timers Fest inspired them to start Big Joanie, despite never having played instruments previously. Diverse representation in the London punk scene was hard to come by back then, but has progressed considerably over the last decade. Big Joanie’s visibility received a boost when Thurston Moore caught their set opening for the Ex in 2018 and later put out the band’s full length debut, Sistahs, on the Daydream Library Series label that he formed with Eva Prinz. Last fall Big Joanie put out their follow-up album, Back Home, with a U.S. release on the feminist icon label Kill Rock Stars. The record continues the progression from their early lof-fi minimalism to a a broader spectrum of electronic flourishes while retaining their punk spirit of antiestablishmentarianism. -Bruce Novak
Le Tigre
Where: The Salt Shed / Directions
When: July 15, 7:00 PM
Among her creative endeavors with Bikini Kill, Julie Ruin and Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna hasn’t so much re-invented herself, as she has re-contextualized her performances. At the core remains a committed feminist stance that challenges the patriarchy but also serves as a beacon on a personal level to enable others to identify with issues that would otherwise become self-isolating. It’s no wonder that her influence has become multi-generational with different points of entry along the way for her listeners.
Following a recent April appearance with Bikini Kill, Hanna returns to the Salt Shed with bandmates Johanna Fateman and JD Samson for the first Le Tigre tour in nearly twenty years. The band’s hybrid of electro-pop and dance-punk is celebratory with a co-ordinated fashion front among the trio and video visuals that enhance the experience. With no new recorded output for two decades, Le Tigre’s songs will nevertheless preserve their relevancy when experienced in these present times in a world that’s upside down and spinning adrift. -Bruce Novak
UNCOVERED
X-Ray Spex - Germfree Adolescents (EMI LP)
Like other societal outcasts at the time, Marianne Joan Elliott-Said was inspired to form a band after witnessing a Sex Pistols show on her 19th birthday. Rechristening herself as Poly Styrene, she carved out a unique presence, even for the anything goes attitude that defined the advent of punk. As a mixed race child of a Somalian father and Scottish-Irish mother, she never fit in with her peers and left home as a teenager to pursue a hippie lifestyle. That was the beginning of her journey towards self-discovery, which also found her joining the Hare Krishna movement after the dissolution of X-Ray Spex.
Styrene’s struggle to find her place in conventional society played out in her songs, notably in “Identity” where she observes: “When you look in the mirror / Do you see yourself / Do you see yourself / On the T.V. screen / Do you see yourself in the magazine / When you see yourself / Does it make you scream?” After releasing their defining single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” backed with “I Am A Cliché,” the band followed with their powerhouse debut album Germfree Adolescents in 1978. It remains one of the most influential and iconic punk records of all time, highlighted by Styrene’s expressive wail and crack backing from the band that surges and swings, supplanting their guitar/bass/drums set-up with saxophone for frenzied affect. In addition to exploring identity politics, Styrene also rips into consumerism, science ethics and ecological destruction on the album. Certainly the type of stuff that can send a person over the edge, which happened to her when she suffered hallucinations following a gig and was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic instead of receiving treatment for a bipolar disorder that wasn’t properly identified until over a decade later. She never found much favor thereafter with her sporadic solo efforts and passed away too soon in 2011 at age 53 from breast cancer. Having been reissued numerous times down through the years, Germfree Adolescents represents a tremendous legacy and has served as lasting inspiration for marginalized artists and feminists the world over. -Bruce Novak
We recommend listening along over at our Spotify page. Here’s this week’s content: