Music: Wiggly Air, by Kurt Gottschalk

Stranger from paradise. Sarah La Puerta spent five years working on her first album, in the process moving from Austin, Texas, to upstate New York. The result, Strange Paradise (available on vinyl, cassette and download from Perpetual Doom), is a wonderful, personal, inviting, distancing, obscure, sweet, sappy, wistful set of simple songs rich with layered emotions. La Puerta performs most of the album on her own, accompanying her unaffected voice with a circa 1970s Baldwin Fun Machine home keyboard and sparse, added instrumentation by producer Craig Ross. It’s to her credit that the music works so well. The instrument—an electric organ with bass and rhythm presets and simple synthesizer functions—certainly has a roller rink feel, and La Puerta doesn’t try to hide it. Rather, she embraces it as her imperfect emotional support animal, crafting varied accompaniments to romantic, philosophical and occasionally mythological musings. Like any good debut, it leaves you wanting to know who she is and already waiting to hear more.

The dark Drone continuum. Years can pass by without hearing from Spain’s Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere, so it came as a surprise to see a new title pop up in November, their second release for 2021. The new Life-Death Continuum is one of the band’s most approachable releases in its more than 20 years and over two dozen releases while holding true to the rich, metallic, dark ambience that makes Earth and Sunn O))) seem fussy and busy. LDRTFS always maintain an organic band sound (i.e. no crap synths—there may be synths, but not crap ones) and even on this album of tape manipulations, the slow grind holds fast. The record (streaming in full on Bandcamp) doesn’t quite have riffs, but there are emergent themes that serve as mile markers on the long crawl.

Spontaneous popsplosions caught on the rebound. While neither a new release nor a recent reissue, Chris Stamey and Kirk Ross’s The Robust Beauty of Improper Linear Models in Decision Making keeps calling me back. The North Carolinian guitarists (Stamey formerly of the dB’s and Ross of Lud,) recorded a set of instrumental improvisations in 1994, joined by percussionist Ed Butler and (on a few tracks) Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan. The little, off-kilter experiments sit comfortably alongside such other moody albums of abstract rock improvisation as Robert Quine and Fred Maher’s 1984 Basic—an album sorely overdue for reissue—and Alan Vega, Alex Chilton and Ben Vaugh’s 1996 Cubist Blues, repressed by Light in the Attic in 2015 (although hunting down the 2006 Last Call Records release will get you a bonus live set). The digital-only Bandcamp reissue from last summer divides the original CD into two volumes, segregating the tuneful from the ambient. There’s nothing exactly challenging about either side of the equation, but it’s all charming enough to invite repeat (if passive) listens.

Singled out. Last month, I lamented the lack of a new Shilpa Ray full-length since Door Girl, words that were soon stuck firmly in the craw of my mind. While I do hope there’s an album brewing in her brilliant, bitter teapot of a brain, she did put out four singles and a live EP since 2017—not a ton of bandwidth but nothing to complain about. I ruminated about how singles have always been a staple of rock’n’roll and are just as valid in the digital era, and came up with a list of a half dozen favorite singles from 2021, all available on Bandcamp (as are the above albums) for your cheap streaming thrills. Some came with physical releases, although those are probably all long gone.

Suicide Squeeze, home base for the most excellent Atlanta band the Coathangers, matched the punk power trio with L.A. Witch on One Way or the Highway, a pair of faithful but amped up covers. The Coathangers put a little extra amphetamine into their version of Blondie’s “One Way or Another” and L.A. Witch add some bottom to the Gun Club’s “Ghost on the Highway” without weighing it down. … Montreal’s eminently lovable NoBro posted a couple of new tunes in the final months of 2021, bringing their catalogue count to seven and their number of perfectly punkish pleasures to two, which ain’t bad odds. “Don’t Die,” the lead track on their 2020 EP Sick Hustle, marveled at surviving the rock’n’roll lifestyle. The new “Better Each Day” is a peppy anthem for problem avoidance. Those two are enough to keep me hooked, but in December they posted the frenemy love song “Julia,” one more slice of living the life. … With all the Beatle hubbub of the last few months, one thing we haven’t had much of is a fan song revival. Songs about the Fab Four were once a small industry, and the Brazilian/Danish garage duo the Courettes have helped to update tradition with their lo-fi love song “R.I.N.G.O.” “Forget John Lennon / George, well, he’s OK / Done with McCartney / I want Richard Starkey,” Flavia Couri chants as her hubby keeps it steady on the drums. Yeah, yeah, yeah. … In addition to the full-length Cavalcade, Britain’s Black Midi issued three digital singles last year: the veritable hit “John L” with a bonus second track, an advance of “Slow” titled “Slow (Loud)” and the non-album slow-burn “Cruising.” Since the album isn’t streaming in full, the singles offer an inroad into their magnetic realm, alluding to latter day Scott Walker and 1980s King Crimson with a postpunk drive and a healthy abandon. … L.A. guitarist Sarah Lipsate dropped a surprise in September under her stage name Noveller with a video and single of her take on the hauntingly familiar Twin Peaks theme. The surprise was doubled in November when she released versions of two more of Angelo Badalamenti’s themes from the original run of the show, “Laura Palmer’s Theme” and “Audrey’s Dance.” Many have recorded the tunes but Noveller really gets the dark beauty. She doesn’t try to transform the tunes but her faithful and loving settings for electric guitar are exquisite. … And as of press time, my New Year’s party track was the new tune by the L.A. duo El Ten Eleven. “New Year’s Eve” keeps up the infectious complexities of their past layers of guitars and drums and loops and electronics but with a more lighthearted bounce for the cold last night.