weekly spotlight
Captain Monk
Feelings
Gritty, grungy, full of piss and vinegar and swagger for days, the third studio album from Bay Area multi-instrumentalist wizard and producer Jackson Allen is one of the most complete artistic pictures, and one of the most unique and refreshing musical statements, you’ll hear in rock music this year.
Filthy grooves give way to contemplative lyrics and unexpected depth of emotion as the record shows off the full range of Allen’s talents. This would’ve been a contender for the best studio album of any number of vastly more well-known bands.
If there’s one example we can give of just how much you shouldn’t write off the state of music in general just because corporate mainstream culture has stagnated, it’s Captain Monk.
This album is a revelation.
Red Cavalry
Alas, So Long
As they’ve dropped one single after another, with their attendant B-sides, Red Cavalry has morphed into something comfortable and familiar, a trustworthy companion to a range of moods, and Alas, So Long displays a cheeky but savvy artistic cleverness in its subversion of expectations.
The tracks here never try to do too much, despite what must have been a fair amount of temptation to do just that.
Some of the intros, the riffs, the motifs, would’ve sent me down a rabbithole of trying to turn it into something gigantic, stadium-sized, and that is usually a futile effort.
But in Red Cavalry’s hands, we instead get tidy, pretty little pop songs that do what they come to do and then flutter away.