This week in music - Vol. 4

Sean

Well, I was bound to miss a few weeks. The days seem to come at me agonizingly slow, but life comes blazingly fast. I was getting by alright, then I blink and I’m suddenly gasping for air after 3 weeks of getting pummeled into submission by my health. Fortunately, I’m returning to some normalcy again. Due to the nature of my health problems, I am actually feeling marginally better now than I was before my recent flare. I know that’s vague, but I reaaaallly don’t want to talk about my health problems in details on here. I’d prefer for this to be more of an escape from my reality.

I’m now trying to think of what has happened since I last updated this. I did go to a concert a couple weeks ago. In hindsight, it was not a good idea since it exacerbated my flair, but I appreciate doing normal people things when I can. I saw nothing. It was really boring. Just kidding. I actually saw Nothing. They’re one of the pillars of modern shoegaze, alongside peers like Whirr and TAGABOW. To be totally honest, I’m not a huge fan of their music, but I love seeing shoegaze live, so I enjoyed myself. They played extremely loud and literally took my breath away a few times from the soundwaves on the bass. My dad had no idea what to expect, but walked away quite happy. His main prior concert experience was seeing the Dead 37 times, so this was an entirely different sonic assault for him. I also caught Fully Body 2 opening which was really rad. I really think they’re next up in the ever-expanding shoegaze world.

The Giants also started their season this past week! Since I’m so isolated day-to-day, it means a lot to be able to connect with communities and events happening in the real world that I can follow just like anyone else. Baseball was my first love as a young kid and has remained a steady presence ever since. I know it’s boring, slow, and not much happens, but goddamnit if America’s pastime is not comforting and nostalgic as hell. Kruk and Kuip on the call. Hating the Dodgers. The crack of the bat. The smack of the glove. And losing. Lots of it. I came of age during the Giants dynasty from 2010 to 2014, but since then, all we do is lose. In proper fashion, the Giants got swept in their opening series against the Yankees and scored a grand total of one run. It’s fine, really.

Anyways, I guess the point of this thing is to review music, so let’s do that. I’ve been listening to a lot lately and my potential album of the year came out a couple weeks ago. Get hyped folks.

Live From Red Rocks - Quinn XCII (Electropop - Mutual Friends - 2025)

I’ve got a strange history with Quinn. Objectively, his music is pretty bad. He operates only slightly outside the realm of Imagine Dragons, Jon Bellion, Noah Kahan, and other similar soulless pop artists. But after hearing Another Day in Paradise in the outro of a Mikey Manfs Youtube video in 2017 (please click at your own risk), my 13-year old brain got hooked. At the time, most of his music was not on streaming services, so I remember downloading files off Soundcloud and Youtube to compile a master library on my phone. Throughout the past 9 years, I’ve watched him go from an artist that a few kids in middle school would whisper about to building a genuine career off his music and having some songs go viral. I don’t follow much of his new output these days, but I noticed this live record from last year and had to take a look. Oof. It’s pretty bad. While his studio albums are cheesy but endearing and catchy, this live album really encompasses all the things I hate about overly commercial pop music. Every couple songs, there is a vapid “really special moment” where Quinn feigns sincerity to tell everyone to turn their phone flashlights on or put their arms around their neighbor and jump left to right. Most songs have shameless backing tracks and others have their verses nixed in favor of pleasing the crowd with the chorus 5 times in a row. This all reads like I’m being a massive hater, which I guess I am, but not for the man himself. Quinn is like that old friend you have grown apart from but still want to see succeed. It looks he is succeeding, but yeesh, this album was a bad look. 2/5 - best song: uhhh, none?

Double Nickels on the Dime - Minutemen (Hardcore Punk, Art Punk - SST - 1984)

I first bought this album to be cool. Embarrassing, but true. I knew it was punk and really liked the album cover, but I had no idea what the music sounded like. I distinctly remember putting on the vinyl and being dismayed that the entire thing consisted almost entirely of simple songs shorter than 2 minutes. At the time, peak coolness was the 10 minute droning jam of Trucker’s Atlas or the 8 minute noise explosion of The Sprawl . How could the cool album be cool if the songs were so short and straightforward? Thankfully, after my health forced me to move back in with my parents, give up my hobbies, and leave college, I forgot what cool was and picked this thing up again sometime last year. Since then, it’s become a staple in my rotation. It’s punk, yes, but it’s so sneaky cerebral that you can’t help but fall in love with it. Each song is a messy, often humorous vignette covering themes ranging from the Vietnam war to linguistics while sonically dabbling into punk, blues, country, funk, and spoken word all at the same time. It feels very personable and intimate. And there may not be an album with better quotes. “We learned punk rock in Hollywood / Drove up from Pedro / We were fucking corndogs.” Well by golly, I wanna be a fucking corndog too! 4/5 - best song: political song for michael jackson to sing

I’ll Be Waving as You Drive By - Hayden Pedigo (American Primitivism - Mexican Summer - 2025)

It’s rare I find an album that not only do I really like, but also introduces me to an entirely new genre of music. That was the case with this album last year. I remember enjoying “Instrumentals” by Adrianne Lenker and subsequently scouring the RYM charts for anything similar. After lots of fluff, I discovered Hayden sometime around April. At first, I had a hard time connecting with the purely instrumental music. I’m usually a lyrics person, and even for music where that is less of the focus, I tend to get lost in waves of distortion or complex musicianship. This music is simple, but over time, it’s beauty was revealed to me. American primitive guitar is an instrumental fingerpicking guitar style pioneered by John Fahey in the 1950s. After an initial flurry of activity, the genre has remained relatively dormant until Hayden picked it up recently. It’s hard to describe, but there is so much life, color, and emotion in his guitar playing. Hayden takes a limited palette and turns it into a beautiful mural of wide open America and technicolor sunsets over the Texas plains. Last October, I saw him play most of these songs live in a tiny Santa Cruz cafe to an entranced crowd of only about 40 people. It was magical. I even spoke with him afterward and he signed a copy of his recent collaboration with the sludge metal band Chat Pile. I’m a big Hayden guy over here. 4/5 - best song: long pond lily

An Undying Love for a Burning World - Neurosis (Atmospheric Sludge Metal, Doom Metal - Neurot - 2026)

It’s a great time to be a neophyte metalhead. Converge, Poison the Well, and then out of fucking nowhere, Neurosis. They were one of the original 90s pioneers of post-metal, a genre that was rooted in traditional heavy, but expanded the influences beyond the traditional metal conventions and eschewed traditional song structures. I haven’t had time to dip into their back-catalogue yet, but I understand they released several landmark albums then seemingly disbanding after their original vocalist was found guilty of abuse. They lay dormant for 10 years before teaming up with vocalist Aaron Turner from another legendary band, Isis, to release this album with absolutely no press or prior announcements. And wow, what an album it is. This is the kind of album that feeds families and brings together communities for decades to come. After starting out with a short spoken word track, the songs shift from subdued, ambient passages to guns-blazing sludge riffs that bury you in a thick layer of gunk. The songs are all long, complex, and fully developed journeys that really convey the title of maintaining love for a world that is self-destructing before our eyes. Sometimes, it feels like that is what is happening to my body over the last couple years. There is even a great moment at the beginning of In the Waiting Hours that reminds me of what I had hoped the aforementioned Hayden x Chat Pile collab to sound like. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t shed a tear to this already. Legendary. Probably my album of the year. 4.5/5 - best song: in the waiting hours

Made it! It’s nice to be able to express myself through my music choices, since I’ve lost many other outlets. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.