Hello and welcome back to KXSC’s new adds! It's been a few months, but we've come out of hibernation and are thrilled to be back on the album review grind. For this first edition of the semester, we've got a review from each member of the KXSC music department: Music Director Sean, brand new Assistant Music Director Barbara, and yours truly, Music Writing Director Lucy. Enjoy our eclectic tastes, and look forward to another semester of music writing stylings.

- Lucy Talbot Allen, Music Writing Director

Just Fern - Feminology (2019 Remastered Version)

Pittsburgh is a funny city, idyllically situated at the confluence of the Ohio, Alleghany, and Monongahela rivers, its two altitudes quaintly connected by a rickety commuter funicular like some alpine ski village. It’s not a day’s drive from New York or D.C., yet it’s thoroughly rusty and Appalachian, a world apart (in the public imagination, anyway) from the hubs of the so-called Coastal Elite. And yet, the miles of land separating it from the Atlantic haven’t managed to shield it entirely from gentrification’s vicious line of fire.

The insidious force of revitalization is woven through Pittsburgh power pop artist Just Fern’s album Feminology—overtly, in the aptly-named “Neighborhood Dissociation,” which laments “fifty year family shops turning into vapor dens” and “cops clos[ing] that place where the queer kids perform,” and more subtly, as in the poignantly anthemic “Dollar Store.” On the latter song, Fern Burgess paints a bittersweet picture of a summer night both freeing and stifling in its promiselessness. “Hard cider, drink it at a stop light / I wanna own this night just like the rich kids do,” Burgess sings plaintively over an upbeat guitar riff that calls to mind the Strokes’ “Last Nite.” An elusive wistfulness emerges throughout the album, often cut with wry mischief and defiance; “We're full blown femmes / And we know how to gab with girls while shaking off the police,” Burgess sings on the chugging, garagey “We Smoke Stems.” Her music sounds persistently familiar; influences from early 2000s alt rock and 60s pop form hooks that quickly become earworms. The melancholy muted organ that kicks off “Drunken Sunken Twenty Something” hearkens back to Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” but a drum machine quickly moves the song into new territory. The talk singing and steady bassline and drums of the story-song “My Familiar” evoke Iggy Pop’s “Candy,” but the song relays a narrative of emotional stiltedness and histrionics with a winking self-awareness.

The 2019 remaster of Feminology doesn’t differ too significantly from the original 2018 release, though the addition of the self-reflective and deflective “Queen Unicorn Reject” (“I stay away from danger / My body's like a stranger to me”) rounds the track listing out nicely. Both editions are bookended with tracks—titled “Hard Cider” and “End Credits” on the 2019 version—that excerpt lyrics from “Dollar Store” and stretch them languorously over a fairground organ and distant crowd sounds. They structure the album perfectly, imbuing it with the simultaneous whimsy, exhilaration, and lurking ominousness of a night at a carnival.

- Lucy Talbot Allen, Music Writing Director

RIYL: The Strokes, Car Seat Headrest, Girlpool, The Cars
Recommended Tracks: 2, 3, 5, 6
FCC: Explicit (7, 8, 10)

Omni - Networker

On their debut album with iconic independent label Sub Pop, Omni appear to contemplate their future at a time when their music careers are more upwardly mobile than ever. Now labelmates with the likes of Beach House and Sleater-Kinney, the band’s third album was set up for release into indie-punk success and visibility.

Sure enough, Networker delivers a half-hour of pleasant post-punk, indie jams. The actual definitions of these broad genre categorizations don’t mean much -- and in this context I mean them in their broadest sense, given the record’s sheer moldability into an array of disparate sounds. Most of the tracks would feel right at home on an album by any number of classic post-punk bands such as Wire and Gang of Four. While it’s Omni’s consistently tight musicianship that allows comparisons to bands of this notoriety, the lack of variation or unexpectedness between the album’s eleven songs can make them seem more like background noise and less on par with punk music’s essential spirit.

However, what they lack in musical nuance they make up for in witty lyricism and cultural critique. Their punk-leaning instrumentalism blends seamlessly with more modern, contemplative lyrics reminiscent of Courtney Barnett. The band tackles the issues faced by Gen-Z and millenials, like job insecurity and online dating. While we may have heard their sound before, they inject modern relevance into a genre that is, unfortunately, starting to age. Lyrics such as “if you don’t like what you see / the pretty face on the screen / scroll on by” are uniquely modern, and distinct from the material of Networker’s forebears, which is increasingly un-relatable to a new generation of listeners.

Omni represents a new generation of post-punk: both for its creators and its listeners. “Are you nervous for your career? / are you insincere?” they sing on album opener “Sincerely Yours.” These are questions that plague the college students of 2020--a group of people who can now see themselves reflected in a style of music that was once considered strictly the domain of those before them. Even though the band still has room to experiment, their first record on Sub Pop leaves a lot to be excited for. Their access to the label’s cultural tastemaking abilities makes me hopeful that they will continue to set themselves apart from the past and come into their own sound -- giving 80s and 90s music fanatics like myself some new music to get excited over.

- Barbara Rasin, Assistant Music Director

RIYL: Wire, Courtney Barnett, Parquet Courts, Gang Of Four
Recommended Tracks: 1, 2, 3
FCC: Clean

Yamaneko - Spirals Heaven Wide

Yamaneko’s music is something I’ve come back to time and time again to track my growth as a person, and now that winter is ending slowly here, something in me feels like it’s time to approach his newest project, Spirals Heaven Wide.

I don’t really remember how I first heard of him, but I found the project in its infancy around 2014, and ended up listening to his earliest mixes, “Pixel Healing Spa” and”Pixel Juice Mix” on repeat for what felt like months. I was 18 and really into games, and when I could, I went almost weekly to my ramshackle local vintage game store to scavenge for whatever 90s detritus I was able to get my hands on. At times, the minutiae of 20 year old cartridges was my only escape from a crushing workload and a destabilizing uncertainty about my future and life to come. This, congruent with an emerging general interest in music, made me latch onto these mixes--and Yamaneko’s debut album, Pixel Wave Embrace--as not only my port in a storm during this period of my life but also a means to dive deeper into their influences and cast the boilerplate for the music I’ve come to love through to now — grime, hardcore, techno, house, ambient, new age and of course, video game OSTs.

It was my sophomore year of college when Project Nautilus [Keygen Loops] quietly released. Things had sort of moved along steadily with me. College was going about as well as it could; I was enjoying being part of radio and meeting new people who were equally as passionate about loving music as I was. Yamaneko pivoted with this release into the eponymous influence — the many keygen and cracker tracks included with warez and in compos. Far more straightforward, far more icy and far more beat-centric; it complimented my then-affinity for going out and losing myself at random club nights. No denying this takes from eskibeat to boot, which I was fixated on — the 8-bar loops, clicks, and sparse instrumentation were not only my interest but his influence. Of course, the trademark ambience Yamaneko is known for was present here and gave a much-needed respite at various points in the album, as a soul restorative, which sat very well.

Now I’m fast approaching the tail end of my college days — in a matter of months I’ll be gone and this position will go to someone with more pluck and more opinions than I. Reflecting on my time here is really bittersweet, and the what-ifs that come with the end of an era have begun in full swing. It’s hard to assuage those fears and regrets, but Yamaneko’s music is now what it always has been for me: a salve administered by a friend in mind. This album is his longest yet and goes through the whole cycle of emotions that have burgeoned in me this year — melancholia, wistfulness, reflection, loneliness, acceptance, joy and elation. The title track sets the stage for the rest of the album by drawing on new age wind and synth padding to transport listeners into the Yamaworld, and “Hikikomori” instantly brings the lachrymose JRPG piano to play, moving me to reflect. My favorite song on this record is “This Spring of Love”: the violin draws recall the loops of Ekkehard Ehlers’ “John Cassavetes (Part 2),” a totally foundational song for me. “Fall Control” is the anchor of a long journey into the record and is certainly the most structured and evocative song on the album. The synths swell and peak into the song, almost enveloping you into the folds of it, panning, disorienting, and at once soothing.

Yamaneko himself doesn’t do much press, primarily because he wants to remain clear with his message. In a 2018 interview with Clash Magazine, he explains his non-participation in “social media discourse”:

“…Unless it’s 100% sincere I just don’t get on with it, unfortunately.”

Adjoining the interview with Clash, he briefly talks about a mantra of gentle positivity that was printed on posters around Rye Wax during his night there:

“Everything is going to be alright.”

- Sean Morgenthaler, Music Director

RIYL: New Age, grime, Ekkehard Ehlers, strong emotions.
Recommended Tracks: 2, 4, 8
FCC: Clean

Thank you for guiding me through my early adulthood. Your works matter more than you might ever know.

NEW ADDS: Just Fern, Omni, Yamaneko