THE REPORT: 1/24/25
FINALLY: HARSH NOISE BEAUTY VLOGGING
Quick Note: For readers in New York City, longtime John’s Music Blog favorites Extreme Animals are playing a rare show on Saturday at HEART in SoHo. I will right now drop a link to the Paper Rad homepage as a reminder of the history. Also on the bill: The JMB-approved meta music lifers Callahan & Witscher and DJ Cool Groceries. When’s the last time you went to a gig in SoHo? Not to be missed. Tickets here.
It’s a multi-generational harsh noise collaboration that uses an online makeup tutorial as its sonic base. Here is the final track, which puts some corroded rumble under an eyeliner demonstration. It’s a one-note move, maybe, but the two elements work pretty well together. The result is downright hypnotic. Put it on in your headphones and enter full brain wipeout mode.
18 years ago, I played a Western Mass living room with Bromp Treb. Now it’s 2025 and I’m happy to say that the dude has not lost a step. He’s currently living in Los Angeles, but that woozy New England skuzz style still coats his choons, like this one, a minute-long double vision nugget. Two noise tracks in a row this week? Sort of fitting.
I enjoyed reading Noz’s rundown of some of his favorite rap of 2024, and I didn’t not agree with his assessment of the Bay Area head LaRussell, which makes note of the rapper’s “palpable corniness,” which Noz chalks up partly to a business sensibility. But there is corniness in the music, too—a charming kind of corniness that sees the rapper straining to squeeze life into the kind of musical tropes that have marked everything from electro to hyphy, the kind of tropes that lend themselves to the kind of tune that could theoretically be slotted into a mix on one of those “throwback rap” radio stations that are always going on and off the airwaves. Jack FM rap. Halftime show rap. “Can I Kick It” references a song that is 45 years old and a song that is 34 years old. Roughly speaking, what’s the rock equivalent of this impulse? The generous read: The Gories. The not-so-generous read: Greta Van Fleet. Maybe it’s actually more like the next band I’m going to write about.
One release I missed in 2024: The debut record from Alvilda, who are four Parisian women making perfect power pop and singing it in their mother tongue. Oh, you don’t like choruses? You only want to listen to mopey guitars over breakbeats? Stay away from Alvilda, then! Execution—sometimes it matters.
It’s sort of amazing how many rappers have flipped the Vanessa Carlton classic “A Thousand Miles.” The song might be entering into a new place in music, one where it exists as a fundamental tool, not unlike, I don’t know, a bed squeak sample or a “Grindin’” trash can hit. But it’s not either of those things. It’s “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton. Here, it gets chopped up and slowed down and thinned out over hefty kick drums. Kahleation adds a John Brannon-like bite to the proceedings.
MIX OF THE WEEK: Danny Daze “Live @ The Womb Miami 2003”
A few weeks ago, Miami mixmaster Danny Daze dropped a piece of circa 2003 archival magic onto YouTube: A DJ set first streamed on the now-defunct website womb.com. The mix is 30 minutes of pure turn-of-the-century electro executed while looking out at the Miami Beach streets. He’s also wearing some pretty cool pants and a pretty cool bandana. Just some more inspiration for the middling A24 rave movie I’ve been writing in my head over the past few years.
I once watched The Rita play at an art gallery on a giant open patio, overlooking Vancouver Harbour. Moored were two giant superyachts, one of which I was told was owned by Sergey Brin, although I believe this to be wrong. The sun was setting, I had just played a bunch of UFO& Thin Lizzy records while wearing a sleeveless Kreator shirt.
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