haircuts for men—nothing special, nothing wonderful

There is a quintessential vaporwave sound, informed largely by Vektroid’s genre-defining Floral Shoppe, which non-listeners will forever associate with the genre. That nothing special, nothing wonderful (the new album from haircuts for men) fits this formula so snugly is not to its disservice. Rather, the album spools out like a virtuosic jazz cat playing standards.

The fundamentals—screeching saxes and looping, apathetic, and beat-driven funk riffs—are executed in great style here. Dreamy synth tones waver subtly below the surface of tracks, deepening their texture. Samples are selected and deployed well. The album keeps a bitter-sweet edge, rather than suffusing to sardonic, insufferable cynicism. Beats are littered with just enough frills, fills and flourishes to maintain interest for the duration of nothing special….

On tracks like ‘my wife is on tinder’, the combined effect of these elements is something that sounds like an MF DOOM beat. Funky, but a little jagged and misshapen. Rich, warm; shot through with the tension of balancing humanity and inhumanity. It also boasts a deep house feel which is continued throughout the album—something like Coil’s recent reissue of The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex, and many a porn soundtrack of yesteryear. The track is sensual but oddly disengaged (something you could say about a fair few vaporwave tracks). It benefits from an unusually powerful mix, which emphasises some massive kicks without losing high-end clarity. It’s not the shopping centre’s tinny ceiling speakers—it’s a boombox across the street.

Elsewhere, ‘sweatpants’ combines its samba beat with vast reggae dub bass—a pool of sampling material almost unheard of in a genre defined by 80s pop and funk—to magnificent effect. And some soaring, disconnected vocal samples carry the album’s house throughline for some internal consistency.

nothing special, nothing wonderful attempts to nullify its own existence with that title. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking or unfamiliar on the album. But if that’s what you came to vaporwave for, maybe you’re missing the point. As haircuts for men says, “everything is plundered.” But, as plundering goes, this is more of a casino heist than a drunken scrump.

nothing special, nothing wonderful is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Shady Nasty—Bad Posture

With Bad Posture, Australian group Shady Nasty have produced an EP that feels like a bodily experience; one which strongly emphasises tone, power and rich production. Overdriven, half-distinguishable lyrics sail above bass which feels like it’s fracking brain juice from your skull. As a result, the (easy) comparison most will make is to New York punks Show Me the Body. But where SMTB’s lyrics border on the polemical, Shady Nasty’s pack a more confessional punch—and they prove that sometimes, by narrowing the scope, you can hit a target twice as hard.

There’s a natural desire to make reviews comprehensive, broad and detailed. But Shady Nasty nail the fundamentals so completely here, function so symbiotically, it barely needs to be said. Instead, I’ll waste even more words trying in vain to describe how gargantuan this EP’s sound is. Earlier this year, Abronia’s The Whole of Each Eye placed the deserts of desert rock—vacuums which demand legends—front-and-centre. Bad Posture feels like those same deserts, but crisped and shimmering in the haze of global warming; as hot as the hood of a car left sat in the sun. It’s that heaviness everyone is aiming for, the one you need to turn up and down in equal measure. If ears could squint, that’s what they’d be doing.

This is music which rejects genre labels, sprawled comfortably across multiple styles, for which “rap-rock”, “punk”, “post-hardcore” feel reductive—even insulting. Bad Posture is experiential, raw, technically faultless and impeccably recorded. As accessible as they are unfamiliar, Shady Nasty have established themselves as a band with hundreds of miles of road ahead of them.

Bad Posture will be released on Feb 21st. Listen to ‘Jewellery’ here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Katie Gately—Loom

Katie Gately’s Loom arranges some disjunct experiments beneath a pleasing umbrella of bizarre balladry. Raw materials of concrète and noise are here refined, reshaped, and given a new life as sturdy foundations for tightly-structured melodic pieces.

‘Ritual’ establishes the album’s tone; a sweep of processed, half-distorted vocals and synthesisers which chatter like sealife. It earns its title, seeming to raise the album from nothingness, conjure it from the air either side. It’s also deceptively complex, layering vocals atop each other in a harmonic stack which feigns simplicity through how well each vocal line complements its peers.

‘Allay’ throws a new element into the mix, with Gately’s maximalist lyrics. Her pedigree as a songwriter and producer for (among others) serpentwithfeet is as clear in these dramatic lyrical lines as the off-kilter production which supports them. Gately leans in even harder on ‘Waltz’; a song which elevates its emotive power through what sounds like the pageantry of a medieval court, but infected nonetheless with a kind of nervous energy. ‘Waltz’ wouldn’t be out of place on Richard Dawson’s Peasant—the disquieting itchiness of thorns surrounds a big red heart.

The album’s centrepiece is ‘Bracer’, a ten-minute single which escalates from almost-whimsical reeded sections to a bludgeoning conclusion. Like most other tracks on Loom, it stands at the threshold of being “too much”. But it’s a threshold Gately seems to relish standing at. The level of control she displays in production, and track’s textural and melodic invention, allow it to sidestep becoming self-important crescendo-core.

‘Bracer’ signals a transition from the album’s first half to its second, which begins with ‘Rite’. A conscious mirror of ‘Ritual’ before it, this track quietens things again with some ramping down that, Disasterpeace-style, could be the glissando of some profane orchestra. It’s a beautiful track which is full of apprehension.

This apprehension is carried through into ‘Tower’, a funereal march which describes digging a hole “you would fit right…into”. The contrast drawn between a coming-together and lowering into a hole lays bare that in any relationship—with any attachment—we invite not only connection but inevitable loss into our lives.

The album is rounded off with ‘Rest’, a piece which holds itself in stasis. Loom leaves us uncertainly wavering at the gate of heaven, as one chord is sustained through three minutes of angelic arrangement. Whether the track is defiant, anxious, accepting, depends on who’s listening. But what’s certain is its reflection of Loom as a whole: as work which confronts death in hope, trepidation, thankfulness and with great power.

Loom is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe