The release sees a continuation of the dreamy atmosphere of the previous EP, the vocals and instrumentation managing to sound at once carefree and heartsick. In this way, the album’s title is the perfect image. This is alienation and detachment teen-style, the sense of being fundamentally not-of-this-world and reacting by going to hang out anyway, slurping soda through black lips and staring down the old folks stupid enough to look in the wrong direction.

This interplay between the strange and the processed is what marks the Wellness sound, the poppy vibes supported by an ominous undercurrent. Opener ‘Fake Flowers’ is a great example, the upbeat rhythm and relatively confident vocals unsettled by background synths and strange, dark lyrics. Again, the result is a sense of estrangement, as though the narrator doesn’t feel happy or comfortable in the world.

“I’m paling in the sun
I shake a hateful fist
At every single orange strip mall fascist
And their spray tanning baptists
And it hurts so good
But not as good as this
As I scold my tongue for these scalding words
Please slap me on the wrist

A bouquet for your concern”

‘Moon in Libra’ mixes surf rock with post-punk in an almost haunting manner, before ‘Get Me Out of My Way’ goes full retro with a punky new wave energy that refuses to slow across its 90 second runtime. Without much of a pause, ‘Sippin on Sadness’ carries this momentum through, the vocals again riding a kind of carefree vitality, though as the title might suggest, the song is anything but a happy-go-lucky pop hit. Again the mood feels decidedly adolescent, wrapped up in a kind of affirming, energising sadness, a mood to define an entire youth. Which goes some way in explaining the twin emotions of assurance and melancholy—the disaffection here is not a debilitating lack of anything, but rather the foundation for an aesthetic, the basis of a persona.

‘Killer Instincts’ is both the most confrontational and unhinged of the tracks on the record, the confident embrace of violence and things on the edge lending a dangerous feel that is only heightened by the dreamy backing and ferocious percussion. And things get even stranger on closer ‘Purge’, where the dream vibe is pushed into a hallucinogenic brand of shoegaze, the vocals losing all of their edges to become smoothed out and shimmering.

Mall Goth is out now via Forged Artifacts and you can get it from the Wellness Bandcamp page, including a lovely cassette edition.

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“The cassettes have been emptied of their disgusting post-war shmaltz, and are now full to the brim with the best contemporary underground pop music attainable”

To whet your appetite, they have unveiled a track from 18 year-old one-man-band Zebrafi. ‘Bad Vibes’ takes after Pavement and Kurt Vile, the vocals flat and cool and the instrumentation prone to bursts of noise. Have a listen below:

You can pre-order Sentimental Journey from the Memorials of Distinction Bandcamp page.

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Human Behavior are an experimental, genre-bending band from Tucson, Arizona, led by chief songwriter Andres Parada. Following 2013′s Golgotha, Bethphage is the second album in a trilogy which combines classical folk music with drone and spoken word and Bibilical imagery to explore dark themes like death and unhappiness. In an interview with Valley Hype Parada was asked how Bethphage differs from his previous work:

Long answer: This album was written in sequence, a technique we’ve never done. It is two long tracks, split up by chapters. We tried to make this album a cinematic experience. It is also our first studio album, which allowed us to experiment in ways we haven’t before.

Short answer: It’s weirder.

Weird is a good word to describe Bethphage, with each of the various ‘Chapters’ flitting between styles and genres at will. For example ‘Chapter 2′ begins as a traditional folk song before morphing into a spoken word poem that itself gradual changes into a hymn. ‘Chapter 3′ is a western soundtrack akin to Ry Cooder which is peppered with abstract samples, from a man yelling “hey!” to a strange droney conversation between an adult and an upset child. The use of white noise over a classic folk sound is unsettling, a weird modern confusion against the comfortable nostalgia that folk music offers, changing a romantic lonliness to a sharp a threat of isolation, a seething radio silence. ‘Chapter 5′ is minimal yet expansive, bringing to mind vast empty spaces with nothing but dust, and ‘Chapter 6′ grows out of this, beginning with gentle vocals before becoming a ramshackled punk-folk song with the repeated refrain: “The end is nigh.”

Bethphage does not sit comfortably but its purpose is not to comfort, at least not explicitly. That said, the use of folk music as a medium to explore things such as depression and suicide and Catholic guilt suggests that Human Behavior are not nihilists. If they wanted to convince us all that everything is worthless and stupid and fucked then there are plently of other more suitable genres. Instead they attempt something more constructive, something that pulls no punches while criticising traditions while also acknowledging that they can form part of the solution. Bethphage is too honest to take a distinct and definite view of anything.

You can buy Bethphage from the Human Behavior Bandcamp page, grab a CD through Diet Pop Records, or a vinyl from Folktale Records.

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However, in the year following the release of their last album, Huebert began to suffer from a severe inner ear condition, a problem which evaded conventional diagnosis. Anyone who has suffered from ear problems will know that they can be far more crippling than you would imagine. You can’t hear other people and can’t tell if they can hear you, leading to a profound sense of isolation and often panic. Indeed, Huebert suffered from anxiety and depression, a problem accentuated by the fact that the one sense he relied on to make sense of his emotions was taken away from him.

In lieu of a clinical solution, Huebert turned to meditation and prolonged silence and eventually began to piece together a new album, rehearsing with his band at very low volumes to ease the pain. The resulting songs ultimately became Nervous, an album that charts the period and explores the interplay between physical and psychological suffering, utilizing a beguiling brand of gothic art rock and the dream-logic of a labyrinthine haunted house, or perhaps of Huebert’s mind during the troubling period.     

The record opens with discordant instrumentation and unsettling children’s choir vocals that swirl menacingly like the theme of an evil cartoon. Huebert’s familiar vocals kick in after a minute or so, whispered through the reappearing choir and Colin Stetson’s sax with an earnest desperation, imploring you to listen. “Sometimes you get caught,” he sings, “sometimes you get away. It goes without saying.” The track sets a precedent of unorthodox song structure, with tracks on the album often morphing into distant relations of their former selves, swerving off in directions unseen.

The second track, ‘Bank Accounts and Dollar Bills’, is the pure embodiment of the aforementioned shapeshifting. It begins with a laidback tropical vibe with breezy vocal melodies, before entering a big, punchy (almost Arcade Fire-esque) chamber pop phase. Around two-thirds through it then mutates again, this time to feature sci-fi synths, before finally reverting to the easygoing slide guitar and thus completing the song’s varied cycle.

‘Violent Motion Pictures’ feels like a dream, with its opaque imagery (“Do you really want to see statues turn all the way around to say hello?”) and abnormal, fluctuating narrative. Stetson’s sax makes another appearance, snaking around like the tendrils of a nightmare and making the childlike falsetto “la la la” chorus sound more than a little ominous. The song switches at the halfway point, escaping its cramped and claustrophobic corridors, a creaky old door opening onto a wide and open plain. Huebert’s whispered vocals ride the swirling air currents, “The devil on your shoulder, it’ll get the best of you”.

‘Oval Window’ is perhaps the most similar to previous Siskiyou releases, a surprisingly upbeat song about the psychological problems linked to Huebert’s ear condition. “Maybe I’m just dreaming,” he sings, “sometimes it’s hard to tell”. The song manages to take a difficult subject and make it somehow triumphant, culminating in the refrain “the roof is spinning around me and I can feel the world below my feet”. The title track begins hushed and restrained (“does it hurt all the time? Yeah, I can empathize”) before turning psychedelic, while ‘Imbecile Thoughts’ is a folk-rock song, like a woodsy version of Wolf Parade, picking up the pace as the lyrics tell the tale of an introvert girl, “you gotta get out of the door girl and go look at the sky and wonder why the sun don’t shine like it should and why you are always so misunderstood”. The song builds and builds as Huebert breathlessly delivers the vocals and drums clatter and guitar feedback wails over everything.

Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.

Nervous is out now on Constellation Records.

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Indelicate takes the unsettling tones of the single and runs with it, putting the ‘dream’ into dream pop. Opener ‘Porcelain’ sets out the stall – a strange, off-kilter song that simmers away without ever boiling over, and is back by what can only be described as understated moans. If a song could ever be described as haunted it would be this one.

The lyrics across the whole album are abstract and unsettling. Their fragmented nature means that you are constantly picking up images and storylines in brief snippets, leaving you to try and piece together something coherent. Kind of like when your brain picks out faces in cloud and wood grain, you unconsciously form a narrative thread or ‘complete picture’, or rather a collection a bizarre Lynchian scenes that slowly merge to form a complete picture. It’s like taking a thousands of weird screenshots from Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet and Eraserhead to make one giant mosaic that is super-weird. Hyper-Lynchian.

You can buy the album over at Bandcamp.

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