We are in the dog days and I hope you are all staying relatively cool. It’s a chill week, relatively, in Indie Basement though that’s a descriptor you’d never use on Nashille’s Snõõper who just released their hyperactive debut album. Also reviewed this week: Canada’s Freak Heat Waves, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, Lindstrøm, and DECIUS (the acid house-inspired group featuring Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi).

It’s a chill week in Notable Releases, too, with Andrew also reviewing five albums including Palehound, J Hus and more.

It was not chill at all, however, as far as music news was concerned and like most weeks after a National Holiday, we were flooded, including new album / single / reissue / tour announcements from Vanishing Twin, Yard Act, The Drums, Lush, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Modern English, Grails, The Church, and much more. I also reviewed a couple big outdoor concerts: The Smile and Noel Gallagher/Garbage.

Plus: The State are back and I’m scrounging up $240 for pudding.

Head below for this week’s reviews.

ALBUM OF THE WEEK #1: Snõõper – Super Snõõper (Third Man)
Hyperactive debut from these Nashville mutant punks is a sugar high blast

Do you remember the episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse find a $20 bill, go to the Kwik-E-Mart, order a squishee that is entirely made out of syrup and proceed to “go crazy Broadway style?” That is what Snõõper’s debut album sounds like. A pure sugar high, where you ate your entire Halloween candy haul — mostly Pixie Stix — fly entirely off the rails, the best time of your life, and then crash in a pile on the carpet after 20 minutes. Formed in Nashville during covid lockdown by Connor Cummins (Spodee Boy) and visual/video artist Blair Tramel, Snõõper went quickly from a home taping project to a full band with the addition of drummer Cam Sarrett, guitarist Matthew Campbell, and bassist Happy Haugen. They’ve been working off that pent-up, stir-crazy pandemic energy ever since. Following a handful of self-released Bandcamp singles, and gaining a reputation as an unmissable live band, Snõõper were snapped up by Third Man who put them in an actual studio which didn’t slow them down at all; instead it just made their short blasts of mutant punk more powerful.

Most songs on Super Snõõper hover manically around the one-minute mark, and play like wind-up toys with an overwound key, cramming in memorable choruses, hooky riffs and surprisingly nuanced arrangements, spinning nearly out of control before the spring is sprung and they stop abruptly. They are perfect little creations, more mosquito than earworm, but no less catchy. This would be a 15-minute record if it wasn’t for the closer, “Running,” which slows things down to a mere 160 bpm and slashes and burns in surfy West Coast punk style (shades of Dead Kennedys / Agent Orange). It’s also entirely fitting they have a song about fruit flies that, as you may remember from biology class, have a very short lifespan. How long will Snõõper last? It remains to be seen but they’ll be buzzing full blast till then.

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ALBUM OF THE WEEK #2: Freak Heat Waves – Mondo Tempo (Mood Hut)
Terrific fifth album from VIctoria, BC electronic duo mixes beats and atmospherics, plus a fantastic collab with Cindy Lee

Thomas Di Ninno and Steven Lind have been making dance music for more than a decade, melding a variety of disparate but compatible elements into distinct style. They’ve always been on the mellow side, usually keeping tempos set to “groovy” and the temperature set to chill. Not chillwave though: there is a prominent post-punk element in what they do that keeps things a little antsy. Likewise, while there are nods to various ’90s downtempo styles, FHW avoid making what I call Euro Hotel Lounge music. Mondo Tempo is their fifth album, first in three years, and most relaxed offering yet. If 2020’s Zap the Planet was a midnight drive through a quickly gentrifying industrial city, this is an escape from the urban wasteland to the tropics just before sunrise. (The script font emblazoned on the album art lets you know before you even hit play.) Saxophone slides up next to warm synth basslines and snappy percussion, while the scene is set via well-placed samples and sharp, considered production. The obvious standout is “In a Moment Divine,” their collaboration with Cindy Lee (Patrick Flegel, formerly of Women), an inspired, ethereal pop song infused with a melancholic longing that sounds a bit like one of those leftfield fluke hits from the late-’90s (White Town, Primitive Radio Gods). Its surrounding tracks, “The Time Has Come” and “Endless,” are also pretty terrific, as are the four songs on the album’s back end, but “In a Moment Divine” is so good, the obvious reaction is “we need a whole album of this.” Freak Heat Waves and Cindy Lee are touring together this summer, so maybe that’s not out of the question.

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Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog – Connection (Knockwurst)
Fifth album from Marc Ribot, Shahzad Ismaily and Ches Smith is particularly fired up, both lyrically and musically

Marc Ribot has been an in-demand guitarist for over 40 years, since his days in The Lounge Lizards, having played with just about everybody, including Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Marianne Faithfull, Joe Henry, T-Bone Burnett, and loads more. On his own, Ribot is mostly associated with jazz but has the Downtown No Wave scene in his DNA. With Ceramic Dog, his trio with drummer Ches Smith and polymath Shahzad Ismaily, he gets his hands dirty via bluesy, noisy indie rock while using it as a pulpit for his proudly leftist socio-political convictions. (See great 2018 solo album Songs of Resistance.) Connection is the fifth Ceramic Dog studio album and finds Ribot, Ismaily and Smith sounding particularly fired up, both lyrically and musically. Rabble-rousers like “Subsidiary” and “Connection” do not sound like the work of someone pushing 70, and give folks like no wave compatriots Jon Spencer a run for his money. Prime example: “Soldiers in the Army of Love” is a dismemberment of the Declaration of Independence that is angry as hell but also hopeful and, more than anything, fun. When Ribot lets loose with the falsetto chorus, followed by an enthusiastic “weoowwwww!’ — joined by some wild playing from all three Dogs — it’s hard not to smile. Same goes for “Ecstasy,” the album’s poppiest number which features organist Anthony Coleman and backup vocals from Syd Straw. At nearly an hour long, Connection might’ve benefited from a little trimming but it’s on the long ones — “Order of Protection” and “Swan” — where the band really cook and that’s what many Ribot fans are here for, and when they’re clearly enjoying themselves like they are here, who are we to say “let’s wrap it up.”

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Lindstrøm – Everyone Else Is A Stranger (Smalltown Supersound)
The Norwegian space disco king is floating in familiar but confident territory on his seventh album

After a trip into ambient galaxies on 2019’s On a Clear Day I Can See You Forever, Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is confidently back in his cosmic disco orbit for his seventh album. Everyone Else is a Stranger, a title cribbed from John Cassavetes’ original title for 1984 film Love Streams (actually, that would also be a good name for a Lindstrøm album), features four lengthy jams that don’t push boundaries but nonetheless deliver the goods you want from this Norwegian producer: four-on-the-floor beats, pulsating synth basslines, warm melodies, “pew pew” sound effects and lots of the swirling atmosphere that gives club-goers the feels. There are also some nice playful touches, like the choral samples that coexist alongside some R2-D2 type noises on the title track, and the subtle strings that color the background of “Nightsiwm.” (While designed for the dancefloor, this is clearly a headphone album too.) Best of all is opener “Syrene” that might have you thinking it’s a cover of The Strokes’ “You Only Live Once” before it lifts off into the stratosphere. Everyone Else is a Stranger may not not the place to start for Lindstrøm neophytes, but fans will find lots to love in these familiar, assured grooves.

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DECIUS – DECIUS TRAX EP II (self-released)
Acid house-inspired group featuring Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi are back with their second sweat-soaked EP of the year

Fat White Family seem to be on extended hiatus but frontman Lias Saoudi is staying busy with other projects, currently DECIUS, his ’90s acid house-inspired group with brothers Liam & Luke May (founders of Trashmouth Records), along with Warmduscher’s Quinn Whalley. They’ve been around for nearly a decade but really ramped up activity in the last couple years, finally releasing their debut album in November 2022 and have already followed it up with two EPs this year. Both of these DECIIUS TRAX EPs are Bandcamp only, with the group saying they’re got “too much HEAT for Spotify.” In EP II‘s case that may be trying to avoid “The Heat” on tracks like “Dearly Be Lovers” which makes good — possibly uncleared — use of the intro to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” These three tracks (plus a dub version of “Acid 4 U”) are for serious ravers, loaded with squelchy acid 303s, electro handclaps, cowbell and soulful vocal hooks that all but reek of hours of sweating, which is certainly a state Saoudi enjoys being in. As usual, clothing is probably optional.

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