Wiggly Air by Kurt Gottschalk – This month’s musical muse

The slog days of summer. In the wake of a new Sunn O))) album and the second volume of the Lou Reed feedback tribute Metal Machine Music: Power to Consume (both in April) and reissues of the first two OM albums (last month), a person might think the season couldn’t get heavier. But to borrow from an even older song, sumer is icumen in like a sledgehammer. New albums this month from Fucked Up, BIG|BRAVE and Horse Lords will help beat the heat like, like, like something that beats things, like a battering ram or whatever.

First up is Toronto’s Fucked Up, who’ve been waving the hardcore hammer (and celebrating their punk peers) for 25 years. Over that time, the five-piece has grown into something that would run the risk of being bloated and heady if they didn’t stay so true to the basic tenets of immediacy and urgency, volume and vitriol. Year of the Monkey is the second part of the Grass Can Move Stones trilogy that makes up the final quarter of the band’s massive zodiac cycle. The new album sees release on June 5 (double LP from Tankcrimes Records or download via Bandcamp).

Guitarist and principal songwriter Mike Haliechuk reveals Pete Townshend tendencies across the band’s many concept albums (other serials run parallel to the zodiacs) in epic majesty and relative consistency, but is Grass Can Move Stones better than Tommy? Well, that’s a matter of opinion and you know what they say, opinions stink of onions and pee, but it’s certainly longer, anyway. Monkey isn’t all hardcore, arguably none of it is. It’s closer to old school hard rock, but sections veer toward power ballad, reggae dub and sea shanty, with passages of Greek chorus narration that recall the near perfection of form that is the Residents’ God in Three Persons. The set features more than a dozen guest vocalists but when primary FU singer Damian Abraham takes the fore, he nearly defines the aggro whole.

But back to Townshend. Tommy stands out in the silly field of rock operas as one that makes sense—a goofy sort of sense, but the story’s there. Most other attempts at long form rock narrative, including the Who’s Quadrophenia, are pretty unintelligible, which doesn’t really matter. I can’t imagine anyone has ever said, for example, that they’re just into American Idiot for the story and they don’t like the songs (although somebody surely has). Grass Can Move Stones tells the story of monkey and goat buddies on a mythical journey of self-discovery. It follows a tale written in the 16th century by Wu Cheng’en, and a beautiful booklet is provided to follow along at home.

As with previous installments, however, including 2021’s stunning (and currently sync’d) Year of the Horse, I read the synopsis and then left it alone. The zodiac albums are consistently my favorites of the Ups. They’re amazing and exploratory mega-medleys, despite the 800-pound gorilla of exposition. The cycle concludes in October with Year of the Rooster. Then, maybe, they’ll make the movie.

Meanwhile, also from Canada, comes a new album by Big|Brave, Montréal’s reigning imperators of one-chord dirge. in grief or in hope (CD, LP, download June 12 from Thrill Jockey) opens with a harmonic progression—already unusual—then Robin Wattie’s voice, electronically processed. It sounds like nothing they’ve done before, like something that might have been made by Björk’s secret sister, the one they kept in the attic. It doesn’t take long for familiar strains to overtake—resounding feedback, barely a beat—but even still the vocals are more melodious and there’s not a track over eight minutes. (They don’t break 10 anymore, though, at least in the studio, which is a shame.)

The mysterious horrors and hopelessness of the lyrics are clearer now, too. “Let no hand do any harm, let no heart err / Would you have done worse or would you’ve done better by far? Do you know how you are?” Wattie sings in “the ineptitude for mutual discernment.” It’s painfully slow music, pushed more by looped grinds than conventional rhythms—the guitar and bass trio doesn’t have a drummer. The funny thing is, they seem gradually to be getting more conventional, slowly shedding what I love about them, and I don’t mind. Their records (this is their ninth over 12 years time) seem unchanging—they have little need for so much as a chord change. They’ve built the brand over the years. They’ve collaborated with Rhode Island-duo the Body, and Wattie released a single with Sunn O)))’s The Lord (also overlord of Southern Lord, who released four Brave albums) that’s well worth an ear-gander. But they remain true to their dark and blurry form.

FU and B|B should both be played loudly, as should the new album by Baltimore’s Horse Lords, although it’s a different kind of loud, more heady than heavy, the sort you feel in brains more than bones. They play with a precision that could make King Crimson blush and layered grooves that recall the Afropop connections to the NYC cool of the Lounge Lizards and Talking Heads. Demand to Be Taken Alive! is the Lords’ first album of new material since 2022’s Comradely Objects, save for a collaboration last year with the elder experimental music master Arnold Dreyblatt.

Like in grief or in hope, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! (CD, LP, download out June 12 from RVNG Intl.) (and isn’t this a great month for album titles?) also begins with a vocal surprise, this time that there’s vocals at all. Guest singers Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor sing wordless harmonies woven into the fabric of tight sax/guitar/bass/drum compositions. They dip again into avant gardism as well, enlisting some guests from the contemporary composition world: bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone (a member of the wonderful TAK ensemble) and trombonist Weston Olencki, whose many projects include the aggro-drone duo RAGE Thrombones. The added elements flesh out the tunes in oddly orchestral ways, but the interlocking parts are wonderful and familiar. The band (with or without guests) will be coming to Red Hook’s Pioneer Works in the fall of this Year of the Horse to make us dance between our ears.