This week in music - Vol. 7

Sean

Bunnies. That was the theme of this past week. Bunnies. And in a twist nobody expected, they were not my bunnies. On Tuesday morning, my brother showed me a video he had taken out of his window of a white bunny grazing in our yard. Wild bunnies are not white, and the lifespan of domestic bunnies left to roam is 72 hours, so we immediately agreed to be on alert if we saw the bunny again.

That evening, we saw the white bunny in our yard again. Not being sure who to call for help and with this poor, helpless creature tugging on our heartstrings, we wandered around like the Three Stooges trying to catch this finicky little bugger. I got him to eat out of my hand a few times, but we couldn’t get him in our carrier. The poor thing had fleas all in its ears and looked emaciated. We were determined to try again the next day, but I was already feeling pretty flared up from walking around and bending over to feed the bunny.

Overnight, our local Nextdoor started to erupt with people seeing the bunnies out and about. Bunnies plural? As it turns out, there was also a slightly larger, darker bunny running around as well. Sigh, we figured this was a dumping situation. Bunnies are often marketed as simple “starter” pets, which they are very much not, so there is an epidemic of bunnies being dumped after owners figure out they are way more complex and sassy than the cute little fluffballs they see online. Now we had to catch both, but the emotional toll was already creeping up on us. I suddenly felt responsible for the lives of these bunnies when I can barely care for myself.

Sure enough, the white bunny came back the next morning, and, after much finagling, we trapped it in an exercise pen along our house, scooped it into a carrier, and brought it into our spare bathroom. One down, one to go. After much stressing and more flaring up of my health problems, we spotted and tracked down the other bunny later that evening. Now, we were really responsible for their lives. While doing the bunny hunting, catching them was about as far as I had thought ahead. I figured we could call an animal shelter and get them moved along quickly. Well, that was not to be.

While out hunting the second bunny, we came across a sign on a nearby door saying that the bunnies belonged to their neighbor and were being allowed to roam free, play, and “seemed to stay out of danger.” To put it into the perspective of pets that most people know about, that’s like releasing dogs into an enclosure with hungry tigers and saying “well, they seem to stay out of danger!” Very irresponsible.

After many debates and questioning our morals, we decided to bring the bunnies to a shelter instead of return them to negligent owners that were basically abusing them. So, I called the rescue where we adopted our bunny to see if they would take them. Lo and behold, they had no space. I called another bunny rescue. Lo and behold, they had no space. I called the county animal shelter. They didn’t take bunnies. The stress was starting to build up. Finally, I was able to work out a deal with the original shelter where they would take them in 2 weeks. However, as if this couldn’t get any crazier, while fielding a call back from another shelter, I learned that the original shelter was currently under investigation for running a covert money laundering operation and all the rabbits rescues had beef with each other. What the fuck man. I just wanna help some bunnies.

Routine is paramount to my health, and at this point, I had lost all sense of routine. My health was really deteriorating from both the emotional stress of being responsible for the bunnies and the physical work of caring for them. We also brought them both to a vet and they had fleas, so we had to give them flea medication. After much deliberation, we decided we could not get involved in local bunny politics and simply had to extract ourselves from the situation in the simplest way possible: by giving the bunnies back to the original owners. We tried to reason that we had already done lots of good by rescuing them from imminent death and getting them checked out at a vet, but were worried that the original owners would go right back to neglecting.

So, finally on Friday morning, about 60 hours after bunnygate began, we knocked on our neighbor’s door to return their bunnies. Thankfully, it could not have gone better. They were a well-meaning, but uneducated family that seemed to really care about their bunnies (named Chocolate and Vanilla). They were new immigrants who likely came from somewhere with different standards on treating pets, so they were simply unaware. They were more than happy to take our recommendations for bunny care and seemed genuinely interested to learn. I think we vilified them too early.

And thus, bunnygate had come to a close, but not before taking it’s toll on my health. It seems a bit silly that a couple bunnies could do so much harm, but my health and nervous system are so fragile that these little guys had wrought havoc on me. I’ll be unraveling the fascial tension these bunnies added to my neck for awhile longer. Sigh. Morally, I think we did the best we could while also balancing our health and wellbeing. I never imagined that it would be so hard to find someone willing to take in stray bunnies! Moral of the story? Don’t rescue bunnies, I guess.

Thankfully, nothing much else happened this week. Having debilitating health conditions and planning for neurosurgery is stressful enough. Time fo da moosick!

(i’m including album covers this time)

In Streams - Centaur (Space Rock, Alternative Rock - Martians Go Home - 2002)

Along with Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse) and Karly Hartzman (Wednesday), Matt Talbott, front man of Hum, totally changed my perception of music. Matt is the reason I care about metal, space rock, and am forever in search of guitar tones as butt-clenchingly amazing as his own. Why am I singing Matt’s praises? Well, Centaur is a Matt Talbott side project, formed just after the dissolution of Hum in 2000.

As with any good side project, there is a some excessive noodling, experimentation, and non-commercial buffoonery, but overall, it maintains that fuzzy, spaced-out bliss of classic Hum. Sonically, it’s a smorgasbord of shoegaze, emo, hardcore, and stoner metal all thrown into a blender. Matt’s great guitar tones are still there, but the songs have many elements of post-rock and, as a result, breath much more than most Hum songs. While the album fell flat at first, on subsequent listens, I’ve come to appreciate the weird little nuggets Matt throws in because it’s clear he is doing this for himself, not for climbing the charts or selling albums. Placencia , for instance, threatens to devolve into generic dad rock before morphing into this strangely circular sludge metal riff that was totally unique to me. Some songs are a bit bland, like Wait for the Sun , but then there are songs like The Same Plac e that basically perfected grungegaze 15 years before every indie band started doing it.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the 13-minute, hypnotic closing track, In Streams . While initially seeming bloated and boring, upon relistening last night, it was like I was hearing a totally new song. Why? Well, the synths sound like they came straight from the Twin Peaks theme song, one of the most ethereal and enveloping songs I’ve ever heard. In Streams takes those synths and layers churning, fuzzy guitars over the top to create what I’m deeming a shoegaze rendition of the Twin Peaks theme song. It’s such a specific feeling, that you really need to experience it for yourself. Please, first watch at least one Twin Peaks episode, then listen to this song. 3.5/5 - best song: in streams

Neumann - baan (Post-Hardcore, Sludge Metal, Doomgaze - Self-released - 2025)

Continuing with Hum talk, I’m going to compare this album to Hum. Why? Because they are basically begging for it. The first thing that caught my eye about this album was the cover is undoubtedly a shameless homage to Hum’s debut Electra 2000 . And in the first few seconds of the first song, you can tell these guys take lots of influence from Hum, like so many other modern indie bands.

However, while I have previously criticized modern groups for sounding so similar because of uninspired vocals buried in the mix, baan cuts manages to stand out not with good vocals, but with absolutely unhinged instrumentals. The album starts by punching you in the face with crunchy, stoned-out guitars and maniacal, ear-piercing drums then never lets up for the remainder of the 1 hour runtime. Incredible speed, noise, production, and anger. It reminds me a lot of the first Heavy Rocks by Boris, but more unhinged and with more gaze. Yet while Boris does well to mix in breaks from heaviness onslaughts, baan never really does, which means the album lacks breathing room and can sound a bit similar after awhile. This isn’t helped by the largely unintelligible vocals and lack of any song structures.

However, baan is made of up young 4 young kids from South Korea with 1.1k listeners on Spotify, so I’ll cut them some slack. I’m excited to see them clean things up a bit in future releases, but I sure hope they don’t get rid of mind-blowing riff explosions and sludgy chaos. Bright future, these ones. 3.5/5 - best song: early bird dies fast

Bleeds - Wednesday (Alt-Country, Noise Rock - Dead Oceans - 2025)

Ah, Wednesday. As mentioned previously, they were one of few musical revelations I’ve had throughout my life so far. The likes of Unwound (post-hardcore) and Merle Haggard (outlaw country) sound like something a random artist generator would spit out, but Wednesday has synthesized such disparate influences into something genuinely novel, a rarity in 2025.

They have been slowly building their sound (dubbed “creek rock” or “countrygaze”) since their debut in 2020, but Bleeds is probably the foremost realization of that sound. It takes you on a rapid-fire journey of all the sounds they have explored over their past 4 albums, jumping from noisy grunge ( Wound Up Here) to straight-up pop country ( Elderberry Wine) to hardcore punk ( Wasp ) to folk ballads ( Carolina Murder Suicide ) so fast that you may get sonic whiplash.

The instrumentation is great (noise rock with a slide guitar? sign me up!), but this band would be a shell of itself without front woman Karly Hartzman’s incredible songwriting. One of my favorite things about great albums is that each time I listen, I uncover something new that sticks with me, whether that be a lyric, guitar lick, creative synth, or just some new way of thinking about the music. With all of Karly’s work, but especially Bleeds , every time I listen, I hear a new set of lyrics that stick with me. I’ll list some below:

“Grocery store sushi / You’re chopping ketamine with a motel room key” (Bitter Everyday)

“We watched a Phish concert and Human Centipede / Two things I now wish I had never seen” (Phish Pepsi)

“Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline / You saw a pitbull puppy pissin’ off a balcony” (Wound Up Here)

“Guy rounds the corner in a fisherman’s hat / And he hits you in the face with a baseball bat” (Gary’s II)

While none of these contain flowery metaphors or deep philosophical leanings, they all paint lush and vibrant examples of life in the South. I feel like I’m right there with Karly watching a pitbull piss off a balcony, or sitting through a mind-numbing Phish concert (sorry Dylan). There are so many more threads of praise I could go down for Wednesday’s music, but I’ll save those for when I review other albums in their discography. For now, I’ll just beg with you to listen to bleeds. It was favorite album of 2025. 4/5 - best song: pick up that knife

Okie dokie, that’s another week of writing done. Hope everyone is staying safe. Big hugs :)