Slothrust's principal songwriter, singer, guitar player and unrepentant aesthete Leah Wellbaum, with drummer Will Gorin and bassist Kyle Bann. On their fourth full-length album The Pact, Slothrust constructs a luscious, ethereal cosmos perforated with wormy portals and magic wardrobes,demonstrating more clearly than ever the band’s deft shaping of contrasting sonic elements to forge a muscular sound that’s uniquely their own.The album was recorded in Los Angeles with producer and mixer Billy Bush (Garbage, Neon Trees, The Boxer Rebellion).Cultivating their potent brew of classically informed, soulful rockin the fertile Brooklyn indie scene, Slothrust released their debut LP,Feels YourPain, in 2012, followed by 2014’s Of Course You Do. The band expanded their fervent following via the song “7:30 am,” selected as the theme for the FX Network show “You’re The Worst”. Their 2016 Dangerbird debut album Everyone Else established the band asa breed apart, capable of serving up deceptively clever epics that veer satisfyingly between incandescent riffing and pop hooks, winsome anxiety and powerful heft.Throughout 2016 and 2017, Slothrust lit up audiences on sold-out headline tours, festival dates and support tours with Highly Suspect in the US and Manchester Orchestra in Europe. The band closed out 2017 with Show Me How You Want It To Be, an EP of of unexpected and inventive covers of songs by artists as diverse as Al Green and Britney Spears, Black Sabbath and Louis Armstrong.
There are certain ineffable qualities to being a punk band that exists meaningfully. In the most simplistic terms, within the music there must be some sort of art practice, something communicative. Even in its most barebones brashness, precise construction goes a long way. This has never been a problem for Philadelphia’s Mannequin Pussy. With two full-length albums, 2014’s G.P. and 2016’s Romantic,inspiring critical acclaim from places like Pitchfork, NPR, Stereogum, the A.V. Cluband more, it’s something impossible to describe and impossibly easy to notice. “Being in a punk band where you don’t want to take yourself too seriously while trying to aggressively make art through your music,” frontwoman Marisa Dabice explains of the band’s objective, “I think people sometimes expect kitschy-ness and I don’t want to do that.” There’s no danger of it.
Winter Bear is the latest project from Erin Dorbin, the multi-talented singer/songwriter/guitarist from the sorely missed Cave Weddings, who takes the reigns here and knocks out a series of summertime classics, brimming with the sunshine-soaked pop perfection you should expect from this underground pop songwriting champ. After relocating to the Milwaukee area after the demise of Cave Weddings in 2009, Dorbin spent a few months in the all-girl band The Spectras before settling in for the colder months and writing her spectacular solo material, in our opinion some of the best she’s ever produced. The snarling girl group toughness shines through the heavenly layers of vocals like a diamond in the dark, combining to form a tightly wound pop rocket, conjuring a Nikki Corvette fronting The Reigning Sound, or Shangri-Las meets Shannon & the Clams sound running through the outtakes of Buddy Holly’s songbook. – Victimoftime.com