Local artist Tina Beef‘s newest cassette has six songs of brooding, yet hopefully romantic tracks that will make the listener reach for more. The standout track is “Icarus” with a haunting melody, delayed vocals, and counterpoint charm to perfectly disarm the end of this summer season and look ahead to fall. Beef’s sound on “Warning” is reminiscent of LiLiPUT‘s post-punk track “A Silver Key Can Open An Iron Lock Somewhere” but is so uniquely her own, with her vocal melody and slow-paced drum machine. Time Becoming feels on the verge of post-punk circa 1982 alongside shoegaze undercurrents. Much of this release gave me the eerie sensation of being inside a Gregg Araki film, but one where nothing ever goes wrong and we’re living in a state of hopefulness, with all ghosts at bay. —Sara Nicole Storm
There is a tale that many of us are told at a young age, which goes something like this: Life follows a linear trajectory and, if you connect the dots in the “correct” way, your life will have the outcome you desire. This is, of course, bullshit—life is a cyclical process of growth and loss, with much beyond our control. New Zealand indie darlings The Beths have built their latest album, Straight Line Was A Lie, around this concept. The rollicking title track establishes the album’s central thesis: Even though we may not be able to triumph over every obstacle we face, we also do not have to let them defeat us. Lead singer and songwriter Elizabeth Stokes sings about depression, health, loss of ecosystems, and changing relationships with both candor and compassion. Though this is heady material, The Beths deliver it through their jangly brand of indie pop, imbuing each song with a sense of hope and even joy (from “Til My Heart Stops”: “I wanna know what I’ve got / I wanna love til my heart stops”). Straight Line… is an album that I will share with the young people in my life, and an album that I wish was around when I was younger myself. Thankfully, with the circular nature of things, the insights it holds are just as relevant now. —Mary Beth Campbell
London-based band Bleach Lab’s newest EP is a dreamy, shoegazey reckoning with feeling trapped by life and love. Originally formed by Josh Longman (bass) and Frank Wates (guitar) in 2017 as a duo, it became a fully fleshed out band with the addition of vocalist Jenna Kyle and drummer Kieran Weston. They proceeded to release three EPs in quick succession, culminating in their 2023 debut album, Lost In A Rush Of Emptiness. Close To The Flame is their first formal release since then (with the addition of guitarist Louis Takooree) following a turbulent year-and-a-half-long gap, but the band emerged the better for it. Close To The Flame feels the most alive of anything they’ve put out thus far, with more energy, emotion, and range than previous releases. Kyle by turns searches desperately for relief (“Feel Something”), professes a love so deep and abiding it consumes (“Close To The Flame”), and surrenders entirely to grief and guilt (“If I Could Be Anything”). Kyle’s voice is soft but always at the front of the mix—her delivery sometimes listless, sometimes vibrating with restrained passion or rage. Her vocals and the surrounding instrumentation—the band’s first attempt at self-production—mimic the simultaneous emotional distance and fragility of The Smiths, one of the band’s biggest influences, with a smooth indie-rock sheen. Close To The Flame is Bleach Lab’s first step toward finding out who they are now after a chaotic time and all the changes it wrought, and it seems to be the right direction. —Robyn Kopeny
Featuring a familiar cast of characters within the New Orleans indie scene, BRUCEY is comprised of Nick Pope (The Fruit Machines, Island Days), Brittany Silva (Night Medicine), Rob Landry (BAD OPERATION, Mesopeak) and Annie Cespedes (The Fruit Machines, Island Days, Night Medicine). Naturally, when you throw all these folks into a room together to write songs, you get indie rock a peg above your typical fare. Between their already substantial output as individual musicians and Pope’s experience as an audio engineer, the quality is immediately recognizable from the moment a gentle guitar pluck opens the record on “Feel It Sway.” The project features both Silva (downtrodden alto) and Pope (crooning baritone) as lead vocals, combining the lyrical styles of their respective projects. BRUCEY in particular seems to be a fusion of Night Medicine’s alt-country and The Fruit Machines’ synth-pop in many respects. They lose some of the electronic elements of The Fruit Machines but gain the often heartbroken lyricism of Night Medicine. The end result is a distinctly New Orleans slacker-pop band that sounds straight out of the ‘90s, like if Guided By Voices was fronted by Daria Morgendorffer and Wayne Campbell (and I mean that in the best way possible). —Dalton Spangler
Island Queen Satans Flower is a multi-talented local artist and her latest release Devotional explores the space between ambient and new age music. She begins with “for pavo” which is reminiscent of early cassette culture releases such as Roberta Eklund and Michele Mercure, with its lo-fi looping of synths and magical arpeggiation that is fit for lying in bed and dreaming. “roast” is a nine-minute exploration of sound that pivots on meditation and the imagination. While the “new age” moniker may not be used often these days, Devotional seems to fit the genre with its musing, reflective use of electronics to traverse one’s inner monologue. Island Queen Satans Flower could be paired with artists such as Pauline Anna Strom and B12 and is a must for fans of minimal synth. —Sara Nicole Storm
In dreamlike dual debuts, ambient music project Saint George’s Sword conjures pensive panoramas from found sounds recorded exclusively using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone X. Despite New Orleans-based artist Fraser Wright using the same iPhone samples in both the EP Mermaid Music (for Jade) and the LP Other Recordings, the two evoke profoundly different moods. On Mermaid Music, listeners drift through meandering musical currents shaped by plaintive piano, lapping waves, sheets of rain, and distant thunderclaps. Momentum is carried effortlessly from track to track through the EP’s watery soundscape. But the same iPhone samples are given a much more dynamic treatment on Other Recordings: The LP’s much longer tracks focus in on, crack open, and amplify the voices that color an altogether different environment. A gently joyful opener segues into eerily linked songs “American Gladiator” and “Bureaucratic Kindness.” Harmonica, guitar, playground voices, and birdsong appear, then fade into ominous overtones. Its tone is more assertive than the EP, but both projects do what ambient music should do, according to Brian Eno’s liner notes in his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music For Airports—induce calm and a space to think. As Eno explained in those writings, “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Saint George’s Sword explores found worlds with finesse. —Terra Durio
Cutthroat, the fourth full-length from U.K.-based shame, does not waste any time delving into the album’s main focus: the way corruption and cowardice infect our lives at both micro and macro levels. The album starts off with the incendiary title track, an indie dance rocker that turns a discerning and mocking eye toward the fragility of performative masculinity. Rockabilly, Brazilian folk music, dark synths, and Americana supplement snarling rock’n’roll. Always talented musicians, the band has expanded their repertoire on Cutthroat, as though the post-punk of their earlier albums was not enough to express their energy. “Spartak,” a takedown of pack mentality, is Wilco filtered through 1970s U.K. punk, and “Lampião,” a tribute to the polarizing Brazilian folk-hero, borrows from Brazilian folk music. Cutthroat closes with “Axis of Evil,” a deliciously vicious, Depeche Mode-influenced dance number skewering the pursuit of power and material wealth (“You’re too common to die. / That’s why you always buy / So much stupid shit”). While they’ve never been afraid to be confrontational, shame is especially emboldened on this album, their biting wit sharper than ever. The stakes in the world are higher, and if there was ever a time for musicians to unleash punk rock fury, it is now. —Mary Beth Campbell
Debacherous, heretical, and self-aggrandizing. This is how Sick Thoughts, the one-man rock’n’roll band composed of the singular Drew Owen, is described again and again. New Orleanian by way of Baltimore, Owen started the project as a teenager, releasing home-recorded punk shredders that would go on to get the attention of Maximum Rocknroll, Pitchfork, and many others. Since then he’s only improved his craft while diversifying his sound. Another Piece Of Plastic is no different. This mini album (as he calls it on Bandcamp) never feels one-note yet always feels cohesive. Owen wrote and performed every part of the album whether it be the blasting drums on “Just Die Fast” or the trashy bassline on the title track. But above all, Owen loves his guitars (if the pseudo-love song “Me And My Guitar” wasn’t evidence enough). Every track places the guitars front and center with tons of riffs, dive bombs, and panning. It’s straight-forward rock’n’roll in that way, especially on the over-the-top track “19977” (not a typo). The final and grooviest track “The Doom” is one of his longest tracks and sees Owen experiment a bit with his vocals, alternating from his usual high-register snottiness to a deeper talk-singing voice. Record after record, Owen continues to demonstrate he’s a garage rock force of nature who can’t be stopped. —Dalton Spangler
New Orleans local Jane Hill, under the moniker Very Supportive Mother, has been putting out music since at least 2021, according to her Bandcamp page. In July, she put I Love You, Jane Hill, as well as a collection of demos—the stitches that hold together the former are stronger and more cohesive, while the latter skews experimental and eclectic, with what sounds like lots of tape looping involved. On I Love You, Jane Hill, Hill hits us strong right out of the gate with opener “I’m not dead,” a slowcore-esque tune with a repeating guitar riff as the primary melody and the title as a repetitive refrain. The rest of the album follows in a similar vein: low, mellow guitar melodies paired with Hill’s either pop-punk declarations like on “Suicide Won’t Work No More,” or shoegaze murmuring like on “Houseplant.” “Dawn,” “Great Dane,” and “Who Cares?” make much stronger use of chiptune-sounding synthesizers, while “Victims (Coma Cinema)” (credited to Mathew Lee Cothran) contrasts Hill’s refrain of “I wanna die” with a gritty, fuzzed out guitar stroke on the downbeat of each bar. While Hill really caught my attention with the opening track, I’d love to see future work crisper and cleaner, sonically speaking. She brings to mind bands like Low, Sorority Noise, and early work from Adult Mom, but her sound gets a bit too lost in the muddle from her 4-track cassette recorder. That said, I Love You, Jane Hill is still a wonderful and weird heartfelt hallmark of bedroom pop, which is what lo-fi is all about. —Daniella Cherner
The EPK for Chris Vincent’s newest release boasts that its 12 songs were all recorded in one take, “with no overdubs, punch-ins or studio trickery,” reflecting the pride the old-school blues musician takes in his recordings being an honest reflection of his live performance. But the album’s title is Good Crook, the band is called the Raw Deals, and on the cover we find a devious blonde subverting Vincent’s tender embrace with that age-old sign of chicanery: her crossed fingers. It’s safe to assume there’s a trick or two in store. Vincent is tricky with his guitar, for one. A skilled slide guitarist drawing on decades of experience playing Delta blues, he gets so much sound from his 1947 Gibson L7 it’s sometimes easy to forget it’s just him holding down the guitar parts (backed up, on about half the songs, by bassist Dean Zucchero and legendary drummer Johnny Vidacovich). He’s tricky with his words as well, whether it’s putting a new spin on an old come-on in “Snakes” (you can almost see the mischievous grin as he croons, “Hate to see you go; love to watch you pass…”) or finding a compelling way to describe a vodka-soaked day with “Bloody Mary Monday Morning” (we learn this becomes a “Greyhound Monday afternoon” in a reflective solo piece where the earnest, conversational delivery of the lyrics almost veers into spoken-word poetry territory). But while Vincent owns up to a bit of outlaw behavior on his part with some casual grand theft auto in “Screwdriver Keys,” it’s really his paramour (perhaps our cover blonde) who is the “Good Crook”—the one with the tricks up her sleeve. “I heard you the first time– yellin’ don’t make it true!” Vincent reasons with her in the titular opening track as he’s punching a metaphorical timecard to mark the end of the relationship. By “Half Block Cadillac” he’s assuring, from the driver’s seat of an enormous car: “I don’t give a damn about the wrongs you done.” And isn’t the best crook of all the one who gets away with it? —Angela Calonder
Early in The Gorgon of Los Feliz comes a scenario found in countless crime novels of the past century: A wealthy Los Angeles man, concerned about his daughter Tiffany‘s disappearance, hires an investigator to track her down. But this investigator isn’t the typical private eye. She’s Cameron Kilbride, a serial scammer, occasional punk DJ, and marginal Instagram personality. Tiffany has formed what internet pop psych would call a parasocial relationship with Cameron, swallowing her stories about a custody battle for a made-up kid, purchasing her soiled bikinis, and telling her family they’re friends. Cameron takes the case, dreaming of earning enough to buy a permanent home, even if it’s only a forlorn bunkhouse left over from a wildfire-ravaged summer camp. As is typical in such stories, nothing is what it initially seems—the father is actually a stepfather with a third-generation family business, made obsolete by automation, who’s as interested in Tiffany’s own family money as her well-being. Though it sometimes feels like it could have used another round of editing, Nolan Knight delivers both a great hardboiled tale—complete with a brief New Orleans scene—and an especially bleak view of contemporary capitalism, where the only path to economic stability is to inherit wealth or steal it. —Steven Melendez
While little is known about composer Erik Satie, author Ian Penman has told his tale in three parts in Erik Satie Three Piece Suite. Part one: his life. Part two: an encyclopedic byline of Satie’s friends, composers, and people inspired by his work. Part three: Penman’s diary of hero worship ideas, connections to Satie’s compositions, and daydreams. Satie is primarily known for his composition “Gymnopédie #1,” written when he was 19 years of age, which most people have heard but cannot name the artist. Penman posits that Satie’s ideas of “Furniture Music” as background music is perfected by a listener not giving importance to who the artist is, but what is being played, while the listener goes about their everyday business. This idea of “Furniture Music” is now what has been called Muzak, ambient music, or elevator music. Satie was a forerunner to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies instructions with his own for “Furniture Music” such as: “do not go to sleep without or you will sleep badly.” Who knew nearly 50 years later sleep machines with white noise would be invented? While Three Piece Suite has a small section on Satie’s life, the art history held within this book is worthwhile for those interested in avant-garde music and the history of surrealism. —Sara Nicole Storm
This X-Men book set in New Orleans continues to fully embrace the setting by directly involving mutants in City politics. New Orleans Mayor Mikki Sapporo officially welcomes Rogue’s team of X-Men into her office. Hilarity ensues seeing all the X-Men dressed in suits, led by married couple Rogue and Gambit, with Wolverine complaining about having to wear a suit in the office of Mayor Sapporo as well as him cursing in their meeting. The X-Men’s story in New Orleans feels fun and natural—Mayor Sapporo pitches a mutant village home, only to include the deal with tourism and entertainment services provided by the mutants themselves. This landmark meeting shows that even though the mayor declared New Orleans a sanctuary city for mutants, her pitch for the X-Men’s home is less about heroism or education and more about concert-like entertainment as a tourist attraction. While Rogue’s X-Men fight with Deadpool is hilarious, it pales in comparison to the comic book connections formed with the New Orleans mayor’s office. —Jamal Melancon-Hill
When I was 21 and more lovesick and full of yearning than any other time in my life, Jeff Buckley carried me through. His voice was a razor that slit a pathway straight to where longing is stored in the body—somewhere between the chest and the pit of the stomach—excavating everything inside that you tried to cover with dirt. It’s almost nauseating. So when I learned about Amy Berg’s documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley I was giddy to sit in a dark room and let the overwhelm wash over me and purge whatever was hidden within. And while I will never pass up the opportunity to learn about or listen to Buckley and his music, I left underwhelmed. The documentary follows a standard structure: We hear from his mother, his lovers, and his bandmates, and we follow his life from childhood until his untimely death, with the anxiety of fame as a looming undercurrent throughout. Animation is interspersed seemingly to make something visually interesting appear on the screen. The interviews are personal, and the story is a good one, but is that really enough? For covering someone like Jeff Buckley, whose voice is so wild and uncontainable, who refused to neatly fit within album-selling metrics, this documentary felt formally stale, to the detriment of capturing the essence of its subject matter. —Marisa Clogher
The Lovers on the Bridge is a French film from 1991 starring Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant in a romantic story about two people down and out who meet at the Pont Neuf under excruciating circumstances. Binoche plays Michele, a homeless artist losing her vision, who meets Alex, an extreme alcoholic wandering the streets who gets into an accident. The two continue to meet throughout the desolate streets and find ways to bond despite their hatred of their circumstances. The film’s visual prowess or its doomed romantic tale may appeal to some. I personally found this film to take a slow dive into monotony pretty quickly without finding characters compelling enough to gaze into the void for two hours. Perhaps I have missed something that you won’t and you can tell me what you loved about it when you see it. (Gap Tooth Cinema presents The Lovers on the Bridge at The Broad Theater on September 10.) —Sara Nicole Storm
In August, the Joan Mitchell Center Residency Program marked its 10-year anniversary and the centennial of Mitchell’s birth with the exhibition History or Premonition: A Legacy of Artistic Practice at the Joan Mitchell Center. Located in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, the program has hosted 343 artists-in-residence to date, including 130 artists from or currently living in New Orleans. This exhibition featured 40 alums and was curated by alums Josiah Gagosian (New Orleans) and Nyeema Morgan (Chicago), with valuable insights from Stephanie Pearl Travers, the Artist-Centered Program Manager and former director of local arts nonprofit 912 Julia. The exhibition was installed throughout the center’s 10 artist studios. History or Premonition’s title was inspired by a collaboration of the same name between Mitchell and poet friend Nathan Kernan. The curators re-envisioned the poem’s themes towards “connection and alienation, of memory as evinced by the experience of a landscape… or hinting at something yet to come.” Intersecting with the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the exhibition also reflects the development of the residency program through offering emergency grants to local artists after Katrina, and how the initiative to support and participate in the art and cultural communities of New Orleans was designed by its first director, Gia M. Hamilton.
In this exhibition the artists use innovative approaches to memory, landscape, and life cycles, invoking cultural tradition, disaster, joy, immigration, colonialism, post-colonialism, racism, ecological racism, identity, and the narrative use of objects. Near the entrance, Studio 1 is dedicated to reflections on Hurricane Katrina. Rontherin Ratliff experienced the storm, later collecting salvage while renovating his grandmother’s and neighbors’ homes in the Upper Ninth Ward. In his sculpture Things That Float (2010), architectural debris is repurposed into a home “levitating” in sustained winds. The bottom half is clear plastic, creating a 360° window to watch Ratliff’s waterlogged family photos dangling from filament. Like a frozen snapshot, family faces peer through mold spots with names and dates written in cursive below. You hope that everyone at address “1418” in another photo is safe. Below, a door is refashioned into a flotilla to meet rising water. The literal silence of Things That Float is a scream into the wind signaling systemic neglect and racism toward Black people living in lower-income communities, unchecked toxic industries, climate crisis, the spectacle of disaster porn, and indifference. It is also proof of life.
Fellow New Orleanian Miro Hoffmann’s ecological-industrial landscapes present plant life persisting poetically through safety fences and the discarded crap of capitalism in equal parts diagnosis, critique, and solution. Andi’s Permaculture (2014) is an urban bucolic vision of growing-it-yourself in a communal yard, painted in voluptuous brushstrokes and planer stencil-work. Elsewhere, a tiny neighborhood devoid of people but full of their effects springs forth from wall plaques in Joshua Mintz’s Our House Swallows Moths (2021-2024). Have you ever had to inventory your belongings, even just in your mind? Empty porches with chairs await someone’s return, ripped apart housing “bleeds” pink and yellow insulation. Mintz employs combinations of salvage (including dryer lint) and variations of ceramics and clay—note the lovingly treated radiator. Yanira Collado’s Untitled/BOHIO appears as an artifact inside a cube of blue ocean, if the ocean could be cut as such. Fabricated of paper mâché, plexiglass, and painter’s tape, the piece sits on the floor and measures just about a foot cubed but feels monumental and even appears to be covered by seaweed biofilms. In Spanish, bohio refers to a home, from bohi of the Taíno people who were indigenous to the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. Collado’s diminutive sculpture remembers the Taíno people who were ultimately enslaved and destroyed by Christopher Columbus, quietly collapsing time between violent legacies of colonialism. Elenora “Rukiya” Brown—a.k.a. Big Queen Rukiya of the Creole Wild West in the Mardi Gras masking community—sews ornately-beaded masking suits to tell stories and honor her Chahta Indian heritage as work of cultural resistance. Brown’s suits are an extension of her soft sculpture doll series initiated as a healing meditation after the murder of her sister. In her 2017 suit Ain’t She a Saint “Hand up don’t shoot,” (pictured) she uses beads, satin, fabrics, feathers, rhinestones, and canvas to create a critique of pervasive gun violence towards people of color. Her two fans document family units in beadwork, depicting matriarchal lines. Fans are employed as the “reveal” process as suits are debuted each year. The suit’s apron depicts a Black Madonna and child, inspired by a scene in the movie Sankofa where a priest gestures toward a similar image, remarking “Ain’t She a Saint.” Anchored yet fluid, Eden 10, Maren Hassinger’s small static group of concrete and steel wire sculptures installed on the floor, intimates movement—it could be a procession or grass swaying. Hassinger, who trained as a dancer early in her career, understands how the body moves through space. In spare linearity of rods projecting from concrete isosceles triangles and squares, a landscape unfolds for the eye to fill in.
History or Premonition reminds us that we exist in landscapes—even in the midst of overdevelopment—and how fragile they are, a constant refrain here in New Orleans with Katrina’s 20th anniversary, expanding climate crisis, and centuries of land grabs, erasure, and resistance. It also reminds us of our strength in being together, in conversation. (The full list of contributors to this exhibition includes Scott Andresen, Katrina Andry, Firelei Báez, Rollin Beamish, Elenora “Rukiya” Brown, Tyanna J. Buie, Juan Angel Chavez, Sean G. Clark, Yanira Collado, william cordova, M. Florine Démosthène, Clifton Faust, Maren Hassinger, Elana Herzog, Miro Hoffman, Horton Humble, Soraya Jean-Louis, Salvador Jiménez-Flores, Shana Kaplow, Camille Farrah Lenain, Kaori Maeyama, Demond Melancon, Joshua Mintz, Carrie Moyer, Lavar Munroe, Anne C. Nelson, Maia Cruz Palileo, Pat Phillips, Ryan Pierce, Robert Pruitt, Rontherin Ratliff, Amy Schissel, Loren Schwerd, Lisa Sigal, Carlie Trosclair, jina Valentine, Samantha Yun Wall, Tom Walton, John Isiah Walton, and Brittney Leeanne Williams.) —Veronica Cross
