The Firehose #4

Welcome to The Firehose, where a guy who listens to too much music recommends the best albums he heard. You can follow me on Bluesky or RateYourMusic if you haven't already done so. Let's get to it.

The Most Important Thing

Chastity Belt - Live Laugh Love

After absolutely loving Chastity Belt's early output (2013's No Regerts, 2015's Time to Go Home, and 2017's I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone) I was pretty underwhelmed by their 2019 self titled release. The album felt less like an indie record and more like the band spent a few years listening to too much Slowdive. That's fine! But that's also not what I went to Chastity Belt for.

When their singer Julia Shaprio released two solo records in 2019 and 2021 I assumed that was it for Chastity Belt. That the band had run its course and the members are scattering into their own projects that match whatever sound they've decided to follow. I would be absolutely fine with that, I'd like to think I'm not so self absorbed that I want every artist I like to be frozen in amber, stuck at whatever sound they made when they first found me.

All of this is to frame that I wasn't planning on listening to their new record, Live Laugh Love, with any urgency. I'd maybe get around to it, but they're now in the "band I used to like" zone. I was listening to something unrelated, and "I-90" came up on autoplay after the record ended. Shapiro's vocals are pretty unmistakeable, so initially I thought this was an older deep cut that didn't ring a bell. Nope, it's one of the singles from their new record. That upended my planned listening for the week, where I spent a few days just listening to "I-90" over and over and over again.

The entire record combines is a summation of where they've been heading this whole time. There's still some riffy loudness that I really fell for from the early records that's tempered well with their more shoegaze/slowcore vibes of the self titled record and Shapiro's solo output. Case in point, tracks "Blue", "Hollow", & "Chemtrails", could easily fall into a slowcore malaise, but the lead guitar really brings back a sense of urgency during the chorus that keeps me interested. They're not going to make their version of Sonic Youth's Goo anymore, but they've settled around Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped. I'm good with that.

Recommendations

Night Sins - To London Or the Lake

There's a threshold goth and darkwave music crosses, where it commits so hard that it goes from "this is good" to "damn, this is cheesy" to "never mind, this is great." Night Sins is that for me.

Remember last issue where I talked about everything being threaded through the punk needle for me? Night Sins is a perfect example of that. Started by former members of Mother of Mercy, Let Down, and Beware, Night Sins is born out of punk & hardcore but doesn't really tip their hand there. This isn't goth music by punks, this is just cool goth music. Fat synths, Dracula vocals, the whole shebang.

Tommy Boys - Tommy Boys Remix

I promise I'm not trying to regurgitate Brady Gerber's fantastic Ope! newsletter, but I was really taken with Tommy Boys from his Ope! Mixtape #30. The second I put on "College Radio" by Tommy Boys I felt like I was at a dingy Philly all-ages show in 2009 (probably at The Fire). There was a moment in time where every punk adjacent show had a band sounding exactly like Tommy Boys jangly indie/punk crossover sound somewhere on the bill.

Really I'm just looking for a new Algernon Cadwallader fix, and Tommy Boys' give it, kindly.

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers - Revelations

Years ago I was prepping for a road trip to Nashville with my dad to see Colter Wall at The Ryman Auditorium. I was making a playlist of country music we both would enjoy, weathering my print copies of No Depression and going real deep into the Western AF YouTube channel. Somewhere in there, the ghosts in the algorithm sent me to Sarah Shook & the Disarmers' "Fuck Up," a darkly funny jaunt about being the titular fuck up. I've always been a sucker for self-deprecating lyrics in a country song, so this quickly made the playlist and I've been following their career since then. Their sound evolved a bit since "Fuck Up," 2022's Nightroamer was a bit more polished, I loved "It Doesn't Change Anything" and went back to that song a lot in the years since.

Revelations completes that evolution (so far as anything is ever complete). These songs are among the best that they have ever done, and as an album I find myself letting the whole thing play and then just starting it back up again. The record opens up with the title track, "Revelations," which would be a rock song not out of place on the public radio circuit if not for Shook's southern drawl and the steel guitar sneaking in and out of the song (genres are funny like that). "Motherfucker" goes more traditional, and feels like the other end of "Fuck Up." Revelations closes with "Criminal," a real stomper that competes with "Motherfucker" for my affections. A great album through and through that feels like a culmination of Shook & the Disarmers' discography to this point.

If you like country music I can't recommend enough. A great album, one of my favorites this year so far.

Liquid Mike - Paul Bunyan's Slingshot

Another one stolen from Ope! A few weeks ago I fell into a Cheap Girls hole, I assume because I needed some mid-tempo indie rock to keep me going through March. After Brady talked about American Caveman in Ope! I fell real hard for that song for similar reasons, and over the next couple days the rest of the record infected me like a virus (but a good one).

Music Writing I Liked

Didn't read as much as I wanted to but both of these pieces ruled.

Metal’s Stadium Class Is Less Metal Than Ever (Eli Enis/Stereogum) I loved this. I deeply cared about metal as a younger person and mostly left it behind when I got into punk, but I think a healthy metal scene is good for punk and vice versa.

Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene (Alexis Ong/The Verge) c/o Ope!. I actually own a couple records on floppy, but I admittedly don't have the hardware to play them (crucify me, floppy nerds).

Here's a running Spotify playlist of everything I ever feature here.

I am a lost soul // I shoot myself with rock 'n' roll // the hole I dig is bottomless, but nothing else will set me free