Belle And Sebastian – Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance
★★★☆
19 years, nine albums, and a problem: a venerable indie band that was in danger of falling into self-parody. While albums like If You’re Feeling Sinister and The Boy With The Arab Strap set the standard for indie pop in the 1990s, by 2010’s Belle And Sebastian Write About Love it seemed like they were simply putting in work. Solid work, it must be said, but still, it seemed as though Belle And Sebastian were a job more than a band. Five years between then and now, the band has reinvented itself radically. There is a much bigger focus on rhythm than there ever was on previous albums, to the point where tracks like “The Party Line”, “Enter Sylvia Plath”, and “Play For Today” fuse their particular songwriting style with indie-disco to make what for all intents and purposes is great dance music. In fact there are really only a couple of songs – most notably the sweet, string-laden “The Cat With The Cream” – that harken back to previous Belle And Sebastian records. It’s a different kind of album that still manages to hold its own in the band’s discography, a revolution in their sound, a Belle And Sebastian reboot. It works in exactly the same way that Tegan and Sara’s rather similar reboot didn’t; it layers on a slicker, dancier, more fun kind of sound, but it doesn’t sacrifice an iota of their integrity to do so.
California X’s self-titled debut was the best Dinosaur Jr. album recorded by a band that wasn’t Dinosaur Jr., who were incidentally also making great Dinosaur Jr. albums at the time. It’s a great basis for a one-off album, but you can’t do that twice; Yuck tried it, and look where it got them. On their second album, then, California X try that whole “growth” thing, with middling results. They’ve added a second guitarist and seem to have developed a love for doom metal, or maybe just reappropriated Black Sabbath. The heaviness of the guitar work here is appreciated but it’s also oppressive, more suffocating than joyous. When it works, it works well, as on the two-part “Blackrazor” epic, where plodding doom rock bleeds into a kick-ass up-BPM track full of tossed-off Iron Maiden guitar melodies. When it doesn’t, like on “Hadley, MA” or the attempt at capturing magic twice that is “Summer Wall”, it meanders badly. Coupled with the fact that the production over-emphasizes the low end at the expense of clarity and this is a sophomore album that takes the band in a slightly new direction, but doesn’t really do them any favours.
Playing catch-up with the reviews, Consumer Guide style. Here’s everything I’ve listened to in 2014 thus far. As is my usual style, this list will likely expand quite a bit by the time mid-November rolls around. A couple of them (Here And Nowhere Else and St. Vincent) probably deserve the usual individual reviews but such is life.
Cloud Nothings – Here And Nowhere Else ★★★★★
The Cleveland band’s fourth album finds them scrubbing away a lot of the pop elements that Steve Albini had left on them during the process of their 2012 breakthrough Attack On Memory. It’s a triumph of 21st Century punk rock, eschewing the sunny California-inspired pop stuff that has mired the form for most of the last decade in favour of a hard-scoured feel-bad attack. The album also has the cojones to use the lead single/best song the band has recorded as the final track.
I still don’t get what people find so amazing about this album. I’ve enjoyed the Eighties retread/re-exploration we’ve been on since 2008/2009 as much as the next person but this isn’t doing anything radically different than the next band. I’ve heard better synth drones, I’ve heard craftier melodies, and the vocals remind me in a vague way of Xiu Xiu, and not in a good way.
Candy-coated riot grrl punk, like Sleater-Kinney-Lite, or maybe an alternate-history Josie and the Pussycats that has a bit of actual substance. Musically inoffensive and lyrically righteous, not a great album but certainly a good one. Nothing original but you can sing along.
The German band had a breakthrough back in the long-gone year of 2002 with Neon Golden and have consistently flown just under the radar with every subsequent release. Close To The Glass is not likely to change this particular fate but it, like the other albums, is a solid record of warm experimental pop music that balances melody with a mix of textures that change from song to song. Deserves more than it will end up getting.
Glacial, whispered art-folk, highly recommended to anyone who enjoyed Grouper’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. Beautiful like a foggy frosty morning sigh.
Born in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia (90km from Halifax) to a musical family, Joel Plaskett discovered the joys of rock ‘n’ roll at a young age. After moving to Halifax he formed his first band in 1988 at the tender age of 13, a power trio called Nabisco Fonzie that featured Rob Benvie and Ian McGettigen. By 1992 they’d added drummer Michael Catano and renamed themselves Thrush Hermit, a name that would within seven years be something to conjure with. From his humble beginnings recording to commercial cassette he has risen to become a nationally known icon of Canadian music, and a champion of the East Coast musical scene. He’s won a stack of awards, including a Diamond Jubilee Medal from the Queen in 2012, and has scored three Polaris Prize nominations. His music is a lesson in the timeless appeal of rock music as a driver for pop melodies and as a perfect example of the Beatles-by-way-of-hard rock that exemplified the white-hot Halifax rock scene of the 1990s.
As of April 30th Plaskett has signed with Toronto’s Pheromone Records to record his next album, due out in early 2015.
Nobody’s Famous (1992)
★★☆
An interesting trip back in time, if nothing else, Nobody Famous is an artefact of the nascent Halifax pop scene that would explode within five years. The first two tracks, “The Topic Being” and “This One’s Mine”, are what would become de rigeur: punky pop songs with wistful Beatles-esque melodicism and a nearly innocent sense of place. “Tedious” is, unfortunately, what the name suggests, a four-mintue slog through downtempo guitars slathered in chorus. The final track, “Picturesque”, brings the tempo back to the norm, although the results resemble something like Sponge’s “Plowed” more than, say, “North Dakota”. All in all a pretty decent debut; had I gotten this cassette pressed into my hand as a sweaty indie kid at the dawn of the 1990s, I would have been pretty excited.
John Boomer (1993)
★★☆
John Boomer can really be considered the first real “Thrush Hermit” release – all of the element of the sound are in place, from the crunchy fuzz-guitars to the hard-edged melodies that Halifax would become known for. Songs like “Marya” and “Simple Universal Leader” are early indicators of the band’s strengths – pop experimentalism that erupts into simple, shout-along hooks quite often. A track like “Quartermark” is a lot noisier even than later noisy Thrush Hermit would be, and the nostalgic lo-fi analog production carries a lot of that noise. Remember when home recorded guitars sounded like that? They sound so professional today. As far as the EP goes, it sounds similar to a lot of other alterna-indie “first efforts” recorded at the time; a close cousin would be Smeared, the debut from Sloan that would be released the next year.
Counted typically as the first “official” Thrush Hermit release, Ammo is a three-song EP of fast-tempo material: “Pink Is The Colour”, featuring with distorted guitars and a searing mid-song primitive solo; “Cookie”, with melodies that would be Thrush Hermit’s stock-in-trade; “Rosebody”, a reprise from the John Boomer cassette that deals in smash-and-grab three-minute pop-punk. The difference between this and their later full-lengths is stark; the dynamic changes that would characterize Sweet Homewrecker are not here, and in their place are frenetic rhythms that really speak to how young the band is here.
Another reprise of cassette material, the Marya EP features three more tracks from the John Boomer cassette: the title track, “Simple Universal Leader”, and “Cott”. These tracks are closer to what the band would eventually be than the Ammo EP, especially “Marya” – simple hooks and complicated dynamics.
Signed to Sloan’s Murderrecords, Smart Bomb is the real beginning of the Thrush Hermit sound, especially on the opening one-two punch of “Hated It” and “French Inhale”, which serve as two of the greatest artifacts of the Halifax scene. “Hated It” would end up in Mallrats and “French Inhale” would show up on MuchMusic (in those long-dead days when Much took risks and championed the national indie scene). Coming to university I’d never really heard much of the band and my roommate had a copy of Smart Bomb. I must have played the disc enough to wear a line right into the plastic. The EP would feature more old material (“Cott” and “Pink Is The Colour”) but the majority of it was new, and radically different than what the band had been peddling prior to the album.
The Great Pacific Ocean is different from Smart Bomb in that there is a lot more mid-tempo chugging going on. The title track (and its end-song reprise) outlines another Thrush Hermit factor: the mid-tempo epic. The theme would later be given even greater attention on Clayton Park. The ideas here – pop muddle that bursts open into chant-along hooks – would form the basis of their first LP in 1997.
Sweet Homewrecker is a debut LP that delivers on the promise that the band had built up over the previous five years. The wiry teen-punk anthem-attempting from their original cassettes is all but scoured away, replaced by a heady mixture of Beatlesque garage-pop and Seventies hard rock. The band’s previous success with “Hated It” and “French Inhale” are the keystones here, although the success of the Halifax scene at the time certainly plays a role in the sound as well. Opener “Skip The Life” definitely owes a debt to the aforementioned scene, coming off like a heavier Sloan, but the next song undoes all of that. “North Dakota” has a crunching riff that rivals Black Sabbath, and the band marries it to the sort of wistful melody that Joel Plaskett would make his name on over the ensuing two decades. The rest of the album bounces back and forth between these two ideas; unfortunately, most of the crunch doesn’t live up to the promise of “North Dakota” and a lot of the heavier pieces fall flat about halfway through, muddling along to the last chord. Still, aside from these missteps there are some very strong classics on here: “Noosed And Haloed Swear Words”, “At My Expense”, “Darling Don’t Worry”, and (my personal favourite) “I’m Sorry If Your Heart Has No More Room” are all songs to build a name on. The latter in particular; the roommate I mentioned in the Smart Bomb write-up used to belt that one out when we were drunk in our first year, which was often. The album was released on Elektra but when it didn’t sell to expectations they were dropped and signed to Sonic Unyon for their second (and last) album.
God, what a way to start an album. “From The Back Of The Film” is probably my all-time favourite opener, and it sums up everything the East Coast was doing back before it all kind of faded away. Clayton Park owes a heavy debt to the 1970s, as did Sweet Homewrecker, but where the debut tended to muddle and plod through it’s hard rock motion, Clayton Park amps up the riffs and captures the sense of fun that their live shows were known for. This is stadium rock made by guys who grew up in the aftermath of the stadium rock era – which makes for all of the grand gestures with none of the weary crap that infested rock and roll by the dawn of the 1980s. There’s a little something for everyone here: “Violent Dreams” and “Uneventful” satisfy those Sabbath fans who fell in love with “North Dakota”, “Oh My Soul” speaks to the stoner Southern rock fans, the sprawling “The Day We Hit The Coast” is the stadium epic kids used to whip out their lighters for. “Headin’ South” adds a bit of snark and feedback to the proceedings, bringing back the spirit of their early punk rock days without dragging along the obviousness of three-chord muted power chords. Clayton Park is both the apex of the band’s sound and their unfortunate finale; their final tour would be cut short by Plaskett’s poor health and by the grumblings of Rob Benvie about his reduced singing roles and the “boring” direction the band was taking.
A one-off supergroup collaboration between Plaskett and members of fellow Halifax buzz band Super Friendz, Neuseiland is a strangely uneven collection of songs that channel sludgy garage rock, cerebral Krautrock, and a reggae tinge. It’s pretty much out of print now and you can’t find the songs on YouTube currently, so I’m going on fuzzy memory here, but if you can get your hands on it, it’s well worth giving it a spin.
In Need Of Medical Attention (1999)
★★★☆
In Need Of Medical Attention, Plaskett’s first solo album, is the sound of Thrush Hermit stripped down to the bare essentials. Replacing the crunching, 70s hard rock-indebted riffing are reverb-laden, atmospheric pianos, exposed-granite bass lines, slow tempos, and the occasional touch of country-rock. It was released around the same time as Clayton Park and the songwriting follows along similar lines, although the sense of nostalgic wistfulness and witty wordplay comes across stronger in a setting where it isn’t competing with muscular stadium rock gestures. The album contrasts Plaskett’s health concerns with the recent death of his physician grandfather and in this case the ghostly, nearly skeletal aspects of the song seem somewhat deliberate. Songs like “I’d Rather Be Deadly Than Dead” show the way forward for the soon-to-be Emergency while “She Made A Wreck Outta Me” shows the deft touch for gentle East Coast folkish numbers that he would further explore throughout his career.
The first album with the Emergency finds Plaskett and Co. casting about to find their footing. There’s a mashup of styles that tends to run together a bit; it’s a little bit country, a little bit East Coast folk-rock, a little bit stadium rock. The standouts on the album are pillars of hooky rock you can belt out in the shower: the title track, “Maybe We Should Just Go Home”, and of course “True Patriot Love”, a main contender for the new national anthem. The rest of the songs are mid-tempo classic rockers with pysch-country flourishes that are nice enough on their own but, when played together, drag on for longer than is really necessary. It’s a solid album, but the Emergency would go on to put out far stronger efforts as the 2000s wore on.
The Emergency found a real rock ‘n’ roll swagger on Truthfully, Truthfully. Everything that was great about stadium rock in the late 1970s – the stuff Plaskett had figured out by Clayton Park – is rediscovered here. These are songs that would (and do) sound great at twilight outdoor concerts, the kind where you’re gassed on tallboys of overpriced domestic beers and the band is playing to the edges of the shadows. The vintage tube-reverb sound plays into this in part but the real strength of the album is Mr. Plaskett himself. His voice, always an awkward and endearing yelp, seems much more lived-in on the album – check out the smooth vibe of his “murder, murder” croon on “Mystery & Crime”. Every song here is distinct – the hooks are huge and Plaskett navigates them confidently. “Work Out Fine” conjures up a reggae vibe while “Written All Over Me” and “Come On Teacher” slink along with a Stones-level strut. “Until You Came Along” is a devastating ballad that breaks into a hard stomp midway through to great effect. It’s odd – there aren’t many reviews of Truthfully, Truthfully on the web, and it’s a real shame, because it’s an album that should soundtrack any number of beery nights out.
A solo Plaskett album, and a retreat from the rock ‘n’ roll heroics of his first two albums with the Emergency. La De Da takes a page from his first solo album, 1999’s In Need Of Medical Attention, and reprises the gentle, spare nature of that album. As such it gives a more intimate portrait of the man as an artist – a regular kind of guy who likes to watch bands and lies awake at night wondering if he’s doing the right thing. It allows for some experimentation – like the circus-chant working-class lament of “Television Set” or the lengthy confessional of “Non-Believer” – that would never fly in the long-hair arena-in-your-backyard element of the Emergency. The lesson of La De Da is that Joel Plaskett has a magic touch for songcraft, no matter the label.
A triumph of album-making, the third Emergency album tells the story of the Ashtray Rock, a place in the woods near the Halifax suburb of Clayton Park where the local teenagers gather to get drunk and crank the volume on already-loud rock ‘n’ roll music. Two guys have a great time hanging out at the late-night parties but they have a falling out over a girl. One of them gets the girl for a little while, and the other one forms a rock ‘n’ roll band. As far as ideas for concept albums go, it’s squarely in the Who camp, but Plaskett and Co. pull it off at the height of their powers and it ends up being exhilirating rather than ridiculous. Part of the success in this is that the concept and lyrics are near and dear to Plaskett’s heart and he has said at times that some of the characters are his old bandmates in Thrush Hermit, and that the music-in-common part of “Penny For Your Thoughts” is tuned to his wife’s tastes. Regardless of the concept, of course, it’s an amazing lineup of songs that strike a clear tone and build hooks like skyscrapers. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Polaris Music prize (along with Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible) but eventually lost out to Patrick Watson’s Close To Paradise. This is too bad, really, since Ashtray Rock is the absolute peak of the Emergency, a rock ‘n’ roll triumph whose nostalgic paeans to youth and young love will ring on long after the last notes.
A return to solo album-making in a big way, Joel Plaskett’s third solo album is obsessed with the number three. To start with, the sprawling collection is three CDs, which seems a bit excessive and intimidating on first glance and continues to be as such throughout. There are nine songs on each disc, the release date was divisible by three, the ticket prices and seating arrangements for the Massey Hall album release concert all revolved around the number, etc. etc. etc. It’s all a very cutesy concept but Plaskett has the chops (and the cojones, really) to pull it all off. Each disc follows a theme: going away, being alone, and coming home. There is some experimentation, in keeping with the stretched-out nature of the project, but in general Plaskett keeps to the lighter side of his pop-rock songcraft and moves out into gentle acoustic folk work. It’s a quiet pile of songs that use an arsenal’s worth of instruments but it sticks to the familiar much more than his previous solo work, La De Da, did. Even a song like “Sailors Eyes”, which starts off with some dead-on East Coast folk instrumentation, ends up being a pretty standard Joel Plaskett Folk-Pop Song. By the time the end of the third disc rolls around, everything has blended together into mature adult-contemporary pop-rock and folk, like a sticky mass of dough that still needs to be baked into something tasty. Like most multi-disc albums, the tracklist could easily be pared down to a single disc of great songs. As it stands, 27 Joel Plaskett mid-tempo folky tracks really is a bit much after all.
A return to the Emergency, and a return to rock ‘n’ roll guitar heroics. Kick-off track “Lightning Bolt” slots back in the noisy guitar work that his solo work on Three eschewed and it’s followed by a wistful acoustic romp (“Harbour Boys”) that manages to sound distinct and exciting, which most of Three did not. As a whole it straddles a line between the smokey swagger of Truthfully, Truthfully or Ashtray Rock and the matured introspection of La De Da or Three, and it manages to keep its balance. It’s not as immediately gripping as either of those Emergency albums but it holds its own amongst the contemporary rock scene, scoring a Polaris longlist nomination for the 2012 award. It falls off in the back half, meandering through a series of down-in-the-mouth mid-tempo numbers, but it peaks one final time with the closing number, “North Star”, which reprises the sort of hook-and-melody that made the band their name across the country. It was the result of Plaskett and the band recording and releasing one track per week, and the off-the-cuff approach works well to channel the deeply ingrained love of rock ‘n’ roll that runs within them.
Sometimes I feel like the only person who thought that Sea Change didn’t live up to the massive hype that 2002 dumped on it. At first I thought it was because I was in my second year of university and newly, deeply in love; a melancholy album of musings on broken love and divorce was not on the top of my priority change at the time. As time goes on I still haven’t gone through that range of feelings, which might explain why I still don’t like the album as much as, say, any other Beck album. I tend to prefer Mr. Beck Hansen when he’s balancing the broody musing with the funk, which is why I think the trio of Guero, The Information, and Modern Guilt are much, much better than certain other Hipster Bible’s tend to. I should probably dislike Morning Phase then, since it’s been hyped as the second coming of Sea Change – but I don’t. I don’t adore it, but I do think that it’s a much stronger album than its predecessor precisely because it refuses to wallow in the mire of depression.
Beck has always been a folk singer at heart, as the Futurama episode intimates, although he’s always covered it up a bit with his penchant for grooves. Morning Phase strips those grooves away entirely and leaves us with expansive, static arrangements that seem drenched in, well, “Waking Light”. There is a tidal wave of string arrangements throughout the album, along with gently plucked guitars and Beck’s rather admirable voice. Here and there the drums pick up, and when they do (like on “Say Goodbye”) the effect is as galvanizing as a wall of gain-fuelled guitars or a breakbeat might once have been. The best moments though, oddly enough, are the moments where everything seems to stretch out into the infinite and hang like it will never end – the entirety of “Wave”, basically, or much of the sublime closing track “Waking Light”. The last half of the album, though, tends to muddle together into one loose conglomerate and it’s not until “Country Down” kicks it up a slight notch that you realize that you didn’t just listen to one ten-minute track.
If Sea Change was a sticky glob of bummed-out feelings wadded together into one album, then Morning Phase is basically the same thing but with a more peaceful, zen-like cast to the tone. If Sea Change was the sound of a man awake and staring at his clock in the darkest parts of the morning, then Morning Phase is the sound of a man waking up into bright sunlight, padding out into the kitchen, making a pot of coffee, and feeling pretty okay. It’s probably an apt metaphor for where Beck’s head is at these days, on a personal and professional level, and while it does not make for an exhilirating set of songs, per se, it does make for a strong artistic statement. As Mellow Gold hits its 20th anniversary (!) it speaks to Beck’s artistic bona fides that he can continue to make these sorts of solid, impactful statements after so many years.
This is the band that released Young Team, Come On Die Young, and Rock Action – they have already shown that they are legends of post-rock who will be brought up in any discussion concerning essential listens of the genre. Young Team is especially close to my heart as it served as my rough introduction to the power and majesty that rock music could achieve once it was unhinged from the pop continuum. Tracks like “Like Herod” or “Mogwai Fear Satan” were thrilling, hyperdynamic suites using the comfortable voices of traditional rock ‘n’ roll.
By contrast, the band’s eighth album, Rave Tapes, feels closer to the soundtracks they’ve been carving out for the last few years: less dynamically adventrous, more even-handed and, ultimately, boring. There’s no intensity here, nothing to pick up your nervous system and throw it across the room in a fit of brittle imperiousness. The only major difference here is that the band has begun to sprinkle synths here and there through their sound. You would think they would have learned from the Nineties they were born out of: adding electronic elements for their own sake just makes an album even more awkward. Kudos to them for trying to add something new, even in a half-hearted way, but they don’t seem to have figured out exactly how to make them work in the context of Mogwai.
It’s an album by pros, and that’s maybe the biggest strike against it. Rave Tapes is like listening to Mogwai run through scales, or multiplication tables. There’s nothing that stretches their boundaries, nothing that proves anything to anyone else because, again, they have nothing to prove anymore. To paraphrase Nolan-era Batman, you either die an innovator, or you live long enough to release Rod Stewart Sings The Great American Songbook. This is Mogwai’s jazz-standards moment.
There’s this band, you know? They play downtown alot, and maybe they’ll change your life. But you’ll only be into them for a little while before the scene will start getting dark, and druggy. Kids will get stabbed at townie parties, those guys with the same tattoos as Gideon will start hanging around, and that guy who always shows up in sweatpants starts packing hard powders for the people that are looking for it. This is pretty much the core tenet of Brooklyn’s The Hold Steady, a hard-drinking band of classic-rock afficionados who just recently passed the ten-year mark. Anchored around Minneapolis transplant and former Lifter Puller leader Craig Finn’s densely woven tales of teenage sinning and repentance, the band embraces the power and theatricality of working class youth. Kitchen work, hard drugs, nights at the bar that go on too long, Catholic confessions of love and lust: these are the milieu that the songs operate in. In the early days, their MySpace slogan was “For people who thought that New Wave was pretty lame, then and now”, which should of course be tempered by the fact of Lifter Puller’s existence. The band came about from an idea that Finn and Lifter Puller / Hold Steady guitarist Tad Kubler had while watching The Last Waltz – an idea of a lost art of rock ‘n’ roll that would be blended with the searing punk rock that Finn and Kubler grew up on, like fellow Minnesota natives Husker Du. Their work has classic touchstones (Zeppelin, the Stones, Seventies pop like Cheap Trick and ELO) and Kubler consistently proves himself to be one of the better guitarists of his generation (especially on jaw-dropping moments like Stay Positive‘s “Lord I’m Discouraged”) but they never stoop to slavish imitation of the past. Instead, the Hold Steady uses them as a reference point to anchor much more recent memories of debauchery. Ten years on they’ve become a band that deals in mythology: the massive nights, the doomed affairs, the booze and the hangover. The bands and the scene. Hold steady.
Almost Killed Me
Released March 16th, 2004 on Frenchkiss Records
The album kicks off by telling us the backstory: we went from the Crash and the Depression to the Second World War, and from there into a glittering atomic future that got ugly and druggy by the time the Seventies were closing out and then the Eighties almost killed us, let’s not remember them quite so fondly. The resulting guitar pyrotechnics following the implosion of the dot-com bubble scrub away any trace of hip irony or awkwardly angular New-Wave possibilities, and leave the remaining nine tracks to carve out a peculiar sort of Midwest mythology. On “The Swish” Finn sings that “it was a bloodsucking summer, I spent half the time trying to get paid for my saviour” and throughout the album you can never quite tell if he’s talking about Jesus or Charlemagne the drug dealer. It’s an album of drunken swagger, a loud recollection of all the parties you got way too drunk or far too high at. You get blackout drunk and wake up with a straightedge band in Ybor City, FL. The ending track (the first in a series of epic closers the band would do) remains the greatest “last- song-of-the-festival-show” song you’ll ever here: it rides in on a bassline that pairs well with the setting sun, and reminisces about the good times that were had while simultaneously admitting that at one point you almost died and found out that maybe it wasn’t worth all the good times after all.
– “Positive Jam”
If you want to figure out where you are, the first thing you have to understand is where you come from. “The Eighties almost killed me, let’s not remember them quite so fondly”
– “The Swish”
“It was a bloodsucking summer, I spent half the time trying to get paid for my saviour. Swishin’ through the city centre, I did a couple favours for these guys that looked like Tusken raiders”
– “Most People Are DJs”
Hold steady Ybor City, you’re up to your neck in the sweat and wet confetti. Take off your beret, everyone’s a critic and most people are DJs. It’s a song that excellently conveys how tiring – and pretty sweet – the constant party scene can be.
– “Certain Songs”
I guess you’re old enough to know. Kids out on the west coast are taking off their clothes, screwing in the surf, and going out to shows. The confident piano chords here (courtesy of keyboard wizard Franz Nicolay) conjure up an idea of Billy Joel, but a Billy Joel where the kitchen workers and the bartenders are doing cocaine out of sight of the patrons and every night is redeemed by those certain songs – you know the ones. The ones that have been scratched into your soul.
– “Killer Parties”
The first place you’ll hear the line “if they ask about Charlemagne, be polite and say something vague”, a topic that is revisited on the next album. The bassline rolls into this song like far off thunder and the feedback-guitar echoes like distant heat lightning. The entire album is summed up in one line here: “Ybor City is tres speedy but they throw such killer parties. Killer parties almost killed me.”
Separation Sunday
Released May 3rd, 2005 on Frenchkiss Records
A concept album, of sorts, the band’s best album follows four main characters: The Narrator, Charlemagne the dealer, Holly / Halleluiah the scenester/addict/party girl (and – spoiler – a hoodrat), and Gideon, a tattooed skinhead. They kick around the party cities of the United States and use the backstreets of Minneapolis as a home base of sorts. Holly admits at the very beginning of the album that “there’s going to come a time when I’m going to have to go with whoever’s going to get me the highest”, leaving the door open for drugs or religion. It is an album that is primarily concerned with the loss of innocence and the idea of repentance; Holly gets druggy, gets born again at a revival camp on the Mississippi River, gets druggy again, wakes up in a confession booth, and asks the priest if she can tell his congregation how a resurrection really feels. Charlemagne does a brisk business but ends up getting high too often on his own supply: “He asked what happened to Charlemagne. She just smiled all polite-like and said something vague. She said Charlemagne got caught up in some complicated things. She wiped at her nose and she winked.” There is a rough yearning implicit in the hard-scrabble tales of adolescent fuckery contained on Separation Sunday, a nostalgia for a bad time that didn’t seem so bad when you were in the midst of it. Holly finds religion in the end but you know it isn’t going to stick around long enough to make a difference, and this is fundamentally where Finn differs from Bruce Springsteen, another songwriter obsessed with youth and the possibility of salvation. Finn makes it clear that salvation, even when found, is never a permanent thing. Salvation is found in drugs, in friends, in music, and in God, and none of them will last forever.
– “Hornets! Hornets!”
“She said always remember never to trust me. She said that the first night that she met me. She said there’s gonna come a time when she’s gonna have to go with whoever’s gonna get me the highest” – this lone voice is how the album starts, and it sets the scene for every bloody moment that is to come.
– “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”
The band’s “breakthrough single”, so to speak, is a deceptively straight-ahead palm-muted power chord song that hits like a switchblade in the ribs up in Penetration Park. “I hate all the things that she sticks into her skin, like ballpoint pens and steel guitar strings. She says it hurts but it’s worth it.”
– “Stevie Nix”
An exuberant riff-riot of late nights, and about how sometimes the ER seems like an after-bar. It’s also a treasure trove of some of Finn’s best lines. “When we hit the Twin Cities, I didn’t know that much about it. I knew Mary Tyler Moore, and I knew Profane Existence.” “You remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young: you got passion and you think that you’re sexy, and all the punks think that you’re dumb.” Plus midway through is another one of those gorgeous, thrilling Franz Nicolay piano sections that seem to sum up all of the yearning emotions that run through Craig Finn’s songs. Lord, to be 17 forever.
– “Multitude of Casualties”
“She drove it like she stole it. She stole it fast, and with a multitude of casualties.” Also, “at least in dying you don’t have to deal with New Wave for a second time.”
– “Don’t Let Me Explode”
Here’s where it all falls apart: Holly and the Narrator come back from their trip through America, wasted and exhausted. Charlemagne is gone, a victim of the habits he was peddling. “We didn’t go to Dallas because Jackie Onassis said it wasn’t safe for Catholics yet. Think about Kennedy, and then think about his security, and then think about what they might try to pull on you and me.”
– “How A Resurrection Really Feels”
Separation Sunday‘s Big Closing Moment is a swooning, staggering number where Holly wakes up in a confession booth after a bloody, druggy, ugly party. She’s wearing broken heels and a crown of broken glass. Is Holly a stand-in for Jesus? At the very least, she’s the titular hoodrat from earlier in the album. The coda is gorgeous, a mixture of guitar, horns, and that piano, and it carries the album off into its own uncertain future.
Boys And Girls In America
Released October 3rd, 2006 on Vagrant Records
Peaked at #124 US
It’s not a concept album like Separation Sunday, but it may as well be. Holly says that “words alone could never save us” on “First Night” and it’s practically the theme; the album kicks off with doomed poet John Berryman diving into the river after realizing this very thing. It also starts off by admitting that Sal Paradise was probably right: boys and girls in America have such a sad time together. Throughout the rest of the album the band outlines exactly what they mean by this appropriation of Kerouac: the hookups, the drinking and drugs, the parties, the manipulations, the loneliness. The gang from Separation Sunday appear again in places, mostly on “Same Kooks” and “First Night”, but the stage is given mostly to others. “Stuck Between Stations” gives us Kerouac and Berryman; “Chips Ahoy” features a psychic girl with a few problems of her own; “Party Pit” and “You Can Make Them Like You” posit the loneliness that lies at the heart of the party scene. “Chillout Tent” is perhaps the most ambitious of all of these remarkably ambitious numbers; we’re told of a rock festival in western MA and of two people who have bad trips on drugs and hook up in the chillout tent afterwards, amongst the OD’d and the medics. The album is immediately more massive-sounding than either of its predecessors; the guitars surge, the pianos soar, and every song sounds like the soundtrack to an epic night out that resulted in some uncomfortable tragedy. If Separation Sunday felt like Craig Finn’s novel about a little scene and its central characters, Boys And Girls In America feels like his Great American Novel about ALL of the little scenes and the wild characters contained within them. That the album ends on “Southtown Girls”, a song about finding salvation in loyalty instead of flash, is indicative of the idea that the only way out is to settle down; the party pit may be lonely in the end, but you don’t have to be lonely forever.
– “Stuck Between Stations”
The piano that runs through this song really drives its power home. “She was a really cool kisser and she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian. She was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t really wasn’t that great of a girlfriend.”
– “Hot Soft Light”
It started off recreational, and it ended in a hospital. Finn claims to never be at the incident, on the advice of his attorney. “The band played Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, you said it was stormy and adorable.”
– “First Night”
An aching ballad about looking back and realizing that you can never get that high again. Features the return of Charlemagne, Gideon, and a hospitalized, newly religious Holly. Features the greatest lead-up and coda the band will likely every record.
– “You Can Make Him Like You”
A song about using people to get along in life. “You don’t have to deal with the dealers, let your boyfriend deal with the dealers. It only gets inconvenient when you want to get high alone.” It’s always on the boys, and you can make them like you.
– “Citrus”
A rare acoustic track. “Hey citrus, hey liquor, I love it when you touch each other.” “I’ve had kisses that made Judas seem sincere.”
– “Chillout Tent”
A soaring number about finding love in the medic’s tent at a big festival. “It’s sexy…but kinda creepy,” Finn sings, probably while winking.
– “Southtown Girls”
The Epic Closer, a song about settling for loyalty and comfort. Features some soaring guitar work that carries the album off into the horizon and a vibe that approaches southern rock in its genial embrace of the interplay between guitars and padded keyboards.
Stay Positive
Released July 15th on Vagrant Records
Peaked at #30 US, #15 UK
Stay Positive found the band stepping even further into an embrace of an imagined limelight, building songs that sound gigantic and taking risks with added instrumentation – the harpsichord on “One For The Cutters”, the (gasp!) New-Waveish synth on “Navy Sheets”, the banjo that legendary indie rocker J. Mascis is plucking on “Both Crosses”. The band claimed, then and now, that the album is about “ageing gracefully” although the songs themselves don’t quite bear this out. The album is about ageing, certainly, but it never seems very graceful. The opening track, a slash-and-burn Husker Du-referencing number, is about waking up no longer young in a dead-end town and trying to make something of it before it’s too late. “Joke About Jamaica” is about a bar girl who wakes up one day to find that the “bands are getting louder” and she’s getting older and no one wants to take her home anymore. “Lord I’m Discouraged” revolves around a woman the narrator loves that has fallen into deep addiction with no real hope of ever getting out (it also features Tad Kubler’s best guitar work and indeed the best guitar solo of the entire 2000s.) Elsewhere there is a sort of a theme running through the songs – not to the extent of something like Separation Sunday, but close. “One For The Cutters” sketches the story of a college girl who gets bored of her freshman boyfriends and starts partying with townies instead. She has a better time with them right up until the point where one of the townie kids stabs another townie kid. Several other songs make reference to the incident, either overtly or using the metaphor of a crucifixion. Stay Positive is more subtle in some ways than earlier Hold Steady albums; there is more loving interplay between instruments, and Finn’s lyrics get to stretch out a bit and revel in the detail more than previously. Franz Nicolay claimed it as his favourite Hold Steady album and left in 2010, stating that he’d achieved everything he wanted to achieve with the band.
– “Constructive Summer”
The band always has stellar opening tracks but this might just be the best. “Let’s raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer, I think he might have been our only decent teacher”
– “Sequestered In Memphis”
Angry and scared, the narrator recounts to the police everything he knows about a girl he met at a bar. Rocks and swings like a vintage E-Street Band number
– “One For The Cutters”
A heavy story about druggy times – like most Hold Steady songs, but this time with more overt murder and cover-up.
– “Lord, I’m Discouraged”
Like “First Night” it’s a ballad, but it’s much heavier and hopeless, except of course for the pyrotechnics that result mid-way through when Kubler conjures up the ghost of Slash’s career.
– “Stay Positive”
A retrospective and a fan thank-you, of sorts. “The kids at the shows, they’ll have kids of their own, and the sing along songs will be their scriptures”.
– “Joke About Jamaica”
A song about growing older and no longer fitting into the scene you once did. “They used to laugh when she said ‘dyer maker’, all the boys knew it was a joke about Jamaica”.
– “Slapped Actress”
Man, we make our own movies.
Heaven Is Whenever
Released May 4th, 2010 on Vagrant Records
Peaked at #26 US, #48 UK
Heaven Is Whenever is a complicated sort of record. On one hand it’s very easy to hear the absence of departed keyboard wizard Franz Nicolay; there is very little piano on this album, and the atmospheric flourishes that he brought to tracks like “Stuck Between Stations” or “Stevie Nix” are sorely missing. On the other hand, Kubler steps in to fill the void admirably, largely by virtue of knowing when not to fill in the void. A lesser band would have attempted to fill the holes with noise, cramming riffs into every nook and cranny in the songs. Kubler shows restraint instead, choosing to forge ahead with a more straight-forward guitar-rock cribbed directly from the Boss and Thin Lizzy. Most of the songs are built around bouncy riff figures that breathe rather than oppress; a track like “Rock Problems” seems exuberant despite its troubled protagonists and his tasteful ghost-notes in the background of “We Can Get Together” add a sort of the atmosphere that Nicolay would typically have brought. Lyrically the album still deals with late-period American observations of wasted youth although there is a sweetness present, a hope that the doomed characters of previous albums never really had. Interviews for the upcoming album (Teeth Dreams, out March 25th) indicate that the album was rushed (which they were trying to avoid this time around) in order to provide an excuse to go back on tour; this likely explains the similar sheen surrounding several of the tracks and the simpler, more straightforward nature of Finn’s lyrics.
– “The Sweet Part Of The City”
The album’s lead-track strikes a deceptively laid-back Stones-esque country-rock vibe.
– “Soft In The Center”
You can’t get every girl – you’ll get the one you love the best. You’ll love the one you get the best.
– “Rock Problems”
A bouncy little number about first world problems of the young and drunk.
– “We Can Get Together”
A sweat-drenched ballad with a lot of musical touchstone. “Utopia is a band, they sang “Love Is The Answer”, and I think they’re probably right”
– “A Slight Discomfort”
Featuring some epic drumming and crashing guitar-and-keyboard to bring the whole thing home.
Teeth Dreams
Released March 25th, 2014 on Washington Square Records
Peaked at #28 US, #50 UK
When I did this guide originally, Teeth Dreams was a couple of months out from release. It was 2014, four years since Heaven Is Whenever, the longest gap between albums in the band’s career. They had been accused of rushing that album as an excuse to get back onto tour; for Teeth Dreams they went the opposite route, drawing it out and making sure they were getting the songs right. As most any critical fan can tell you, they didn’t. It’s an uneven album that tries to replicate their past successes without tinkering all too much with the basic framework. To be fair, it was their second album without their chief experimenter Franz Nicolay; his texture fills are sorely missed between the trad-rock guitar riffs that fill up the album instead. In many ways it’s the height of the Hold Steady as an arena-rock band: the arrangements are stripped back to provide as much room as possible for the guitar dramatics. The problem with that is that a lot of the album sounds like it’s been done before, and better. “The Ambassador”, for example, sounded more urgent when it was “First Night”, or “Lord I’m Discouraged.” “Spinners” has a great vibe but you can’t help but think “Chips Ahoy” covered the same sonic territory with a more interesting lyric. There are great, classic Hold Steady moments, to be sure: the opening song “I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You” created expectations that were perhaps too high, pre-release, and “On With The Business” has an all-time classic Hold Steady refrain. The biggest issue is that it’s a merely good album, and the second such in a row. In their review for 2021’s Open Door Policy, Paste Magazine refers to Heaven Is Whenever and Teeth Dreams as a “two-album stale patch a decade ago” and that’s an unfortunately accurate assessment of the two albums. “Stale” sums up a lot of it, and the long gap between albums didn’t help much in that regard. By 2014 it seemed like Franz Nicolay was right; when he quit the band he said that he’d accomplished everything he’d wanted to with them, and in retrospect it seemed like he knew how to leave a scene before it got druggy and ugly.
“I Hope This Whole Thing Didn’t Frighten You”
A great addition to the overall story the band had been spinning for more than a decade. The narrator brings his unnamed romantic partner back to the Twin Cities and runs into some people from his past – Cityscape Skins he used to go to those all-ages hardcore matinee shows with that are now getting back together and doing some sinister and disturbing things (it’s never outright said, but there’s probably more than a fair whiff of the racist movement involved as well). His lover, clearly unused to the sketchier side of life, gets scared by their demeanor and their talk and wonders how their partner could have ever been an associate of theirs.
“The Ambassador”
I know what I said, some of it was true. This is the big ballad of the album and while I stand by the fact that it was done better on better Hold Steady records it’s still a banger of a track in the context of the record. Plus it obliquely talks about the Cityscape Skins and Gideon, a fixture from previous albums, during his time at a Michelin shop in Bay City, Michigan.
“On With The Business”
“Blood on the carpet, mud on the mattress / Waking up with that American sadness.”
Thrashing Through The Passion
Released August 16th, 2019 on Frenchkiss Records
Peaked at #22 US
Back on Frenchkiss after 14 years, and back with Franz Nicolay after 11, the Hold Steady circa 2019 seemed to show sparks of creative life again. The two year lead-up to the album’s release saw many of the songs – all of the best ones – released as a series of singles paired A/B. They showed a band once again firing on all cylinders, discovering that they have aged and running with it as a new muse. The album itself features seven of those songs, out of ten total. The three non-single tracks on the album – “Epaulets”, “Traditional Village”, and “Blackout Sam” – are all fine, but the fact that “A Snake In The Shower”, the B-side to the clear best track on the album (“Entitlement Crew”), was not included borders on criminality. Still, these were the most consistently great set of songs the band had written since Stay Positive; both of the albums of their ‘stale period’ had some standouts but on Thrashing Through The Passion they finally wrote an album where it was mostly standouts again. “Blackout Sam” threatens to drag a little but Finn manages to keep it afloat through sheer force of melodic will. The album proved to be their highest-charting effort yet, proving that the lost decade the band went on through the 2010s, with diminishing musical returns and Finn’s solo run, wasn’t a detriment to building their legend. Part of it is the keyboard gloss that Nicolay adds (especially in the coda of “Entitlement Crew”), but part of it is that they sound like they’re having fun again, cutting loose in that old way they had before the characters got old, and scarred, and ran up against the brick wall of their own dead-end lives. The Hold Steady of Teeth Dreams couldn’t have written “T-Shirt Tux”, but the band from Separation Sunday definitely could have.
“Entitlement Crew”
“Now here’s a church, here’s the steeple / I like the party favors but I hate the party people.” Seriously, the end of this song is such a rush of 2006-era nostalgia that it’s surprising that this isn’t a B-side from the “Stuck Between Stations” single.
“A Snake In The Shower”
I don’t care if this song isn’t actually on the album, it should have been.
“A boy and a girl were draining their beers / He said “Stalin was a weatherman to start his career / And Johnny Cash was in the service when the news came through the wire / And it’s weird how you feel when bad people die” / She said “Yeah, I guess, whatever / All your fun little facts are never going to keep us together””
“Confusion In The Marketplace”
Hold Steady finales are always an event, some greater (“Southtown Girls”), some lesser (“Oaks”). “Confusion In The Marketplace” falls in the former. “Scoping out some dynamite and seeing if it detonates / People take advantage of confusion in the marketplace / You can turn the circles, yeah, and I can pull the parking brake / Princess on the payphone with an angle on some Western states.”
Open Door Policy
Released February 19th, 2021 on Positive Jam/Thirty Tigers
The band’s eighth album, Open Door Policy, was recorded in the last half of 2019 but a lot of the themes – the insidious creep of technology, the struggle with mental health, the trap of consumerism, and the potential of escape through fandom and the scene – just hit different now, in Year 2 of the Plague. In a way it’s quite difficult to listen to a Hold Steady record in lockdown; the band writes songs about the sacred and profane things that happen when we get together and when we can’t get together it gets difficult to remember what that feeling is like. “She said I’m glad to see you’re still in a bar band, baby / I said it’s great to see you’re still in the bars,” is a line Finn wrote scant years after 9/11 and it sometimes seems like the whole ethos of the band has been just that: glad to be surviving, glad to still be playing in a band, glad there are people who want to see them play. Open Door Policy finds them slowing down a little without sacrificing any of the cutting, working-class lyricism that underlined their older, more punk-inflected material. A track like “Heavy Covenant” would have, ten years ago, been a more fist-in-the-air type of song; in 2021 it’s more of a stomp, one that still has the core of youth embedded in it but simultaneously aware that dancing all night while soaking up liquor is a younger person’s game. Same goes for “Spices”, which would have been a “Chips Ahoy” type rocker in a past life but is now a moody, tense thriller of a track that bursts into life just as Finn shouts his protagonist’s drink order (“Vanilla vodka and a Diet Dr. Pepper”, itself a complicated tension between youth and the vagaries of age). A song like “Family Farm” drags out the ghosts of the past but now the past is a novelty in a band that has decided, finally, to evolve their sound out of the doldrums of the early 2010s. They’ve figured out how to use their six-piece lineup to their advantage, with the horns taking on a more important role at times and Nicolay bringing out some rather interesting synth pulses to complement his galloping piano runs. “Unpleasant Breakfast” shows off their willingness to experiment with their sound, adding some electronic influences into the mix; “The Feelers” and the closer “Hanover Camera” delve further into their roots, with the latter riding a breezy golden era Fleetwood Mac-type bassline into the sunset. The net effect of Open Door Policy is that the band is capable of aging gracefully; this is not something that was a sure thing, back in those heady scene days of Boys And Girls In America.
“Unpleasant Breakfast”
It is an admission of middle age when you can write a line like “That girl in last year’s picture / Is now haunting her own hallways / I no longer see the romance in these ghosts.”
“Heavy Covenant”
The way that Franz Nicolay’s keyboard layers play off of that pounding bass drum makes this song just as much of a life-affirming headbanger as those old Frenchkiss days, but with a bigger dollop of the wisdom that hard-won age brings.
“Lanyards”
The protagonist of “Lanyards” got lost in all those hot soft lights, trying to find his dreams in California; he talks about people trying to get all kinds of wristbands and then a girl he knows gets a bloody one.
“We were raised on Tennyson and venison and the Grateful Dead”
Stephen Malkmus’ latest outing with
his Jicks melds two disparate eras
together: the slacker-punk ideals of
the 1990s that his old band Pavement
helped to create, and the rambling
stoner-rock of the 1970s, namely the
Grateful Dead. Indeed, the Dead are
name-checked in “Lariat” and their
spirit becomes obvious by the time you
get down to “Cinnamon and Lesbians”.
There’s a free-wheeling vibe to the
album that is charming and tempered
well by the squalling guitar that is
laced throughout. Taken alongside
last year’s Deerhunter outing (another
album comfortingly anchored in
Seventies stoner rock) one wonders if
the Dead are finally due for their
indie embrace. The original hippies
are beginning the Long Great Dropoff
and if any band was ripe for a
reclaimation of legacy it would be one
obsessed with its own indulgence.
That’s not to say that Wig Out at
Jagbags is that sea-change album, but
it does point in a certain direction.
Malkmus, though, can’t help but be
rooted in slacker-indie rock. He’s put
out more albums with the Jicks than he
had with Pavement, and his new band
takes on new ideas and directions that
his old band’s oddly conservative
experimentalism would never have
allowed for, but the ghost of Crooked
Rain, Crooked Rain still lingers. It
finds it’s own cool groove, though,
and ends up being much more fun for
it.
In 2010, Matador Records threw a 21st birthday party for itself in Las Vegas, and it was topped off by a reunion of the classic GBV lineup (the 1992-1996 incarnation, when the real magic occurred). This was followed by recording sessions and, on New Years Day 2012, a new GBV album. Like the albums they’d originally done, they recorded on home equipment in garages, living rooms, and basements, and it seems to have given them the impetus to just relax. While it’s not quite on the level of, say, *Propeller* or *Bee Thousand*, it’s much better than anything made from 1997 onward. It showed that the band wasn’t quite done yet, although that would of course prove to be something of an understatement.
Six months after *Let’s Go Eat The Factory* the band returned with another sprawling album that sounded like a *slightly* less inspired version of the original lineup’s glory days. Gone were the professional, solid, unexceptional albums of the early 2000s; the band brought back the quick bursts of British Invasion rock ‘n’ roll, the quirky lo-fi recording quality, and the weird song-sketch collages that interspersed their best work. The off-kilter moments are still there, of course, but the good moments are brilliant, and numerous.
Then came the *third* reunion album in 12 months, and it became obvious that the band was literally incapable of not writing songs. *The Bears For Lunch* is arguably the best of the three 2012 albums, although it’s not by much. The style is the same, though; classic early Who and Kinks type songs filtered through a stormy night when radio signals bounce all over the ionosphere and snatches of great old pop songs can be heard fitfully and from far off. The hit percentage is, as the others, not as high as it was in the mid-1990s, but it’s close.
The band’s fourth album in the space of a year finds the third era of Guided By Voices beginning to run out of steam a bit. When they’re on, they’re **on** (especially on Tobin Sprout’s songs), but when they’re off they seem muddled and distant, like a lover who’s beginning to tire of you. Time will tell if the relationship will begin to sour, but if it does, this will mark the point where you can look back, broken and alone in a rented efficiency with hotdogs thawing in the sink, and say that it all began here. The hit-to-miss ratio, always pretty high on even mediocre GBV releases, slips a bit here; it is proof, perhaps, that even a band as fiendishly prolific as Guided By Voices can eventually wind itself down.
And just like that the pendulum swings back and the band seems on fire once again. After taking a (relative) break through 2013 the band released *Motivational Jumpsuit* and proved their continued vitality. If the four albums of 2012-2013 sound like they could be cherry-picked to produced one really stellar album, *Motivational Jumpsuit* sounds like that album. 20 tracks in 40 minutes seems as breezy and concise as it did in the days of *Bee Thousand*, and while the quality is, again, not quite up to the standards of those hoary old days, it’s closer than it’s been at any point during the post-reunion period. The rockers are chunky, with fat, bottom-scraping guitars playing off of drums that actually sound well produced despite the lo-fi recording. The ballads are the best part of the album, especially on the joyous singalong of “Some Things Are Big (And Some Things Are Small)” or “Jupiter Spin”, on which the band reprises its love of appropriating Beatles melodies and takes a new look at “Tomorrow Never Knows.”. It’s a solid album that points the way forward for another busy year of prolific songwriting, and remains as yet another indication of the inhuman creativity of Pollard and Co.
Following the demise of the Tobin Sprout era, Pollard hooked up with Cleveland rockers Cobra Verde and recruited them to be his new version of Guided By Voices. The album is perhaps the most consistently focused album of the post-Scat era; it’s a direct continuation of *Under The Bushes Under The Stars*, with even higher production values. The songs seem more like the songs of a regular band, only written by a guy that can’t seem to take two steps without writing a pair of knockout pop songs. The professionalism can be off-putting to fans of the wild, anything-goes era, but those used to mainstream rock will find a lot to love on this one.
The band’s major label debut (on TVT Records), produced by Ric Ocasek (of The Cars), and honestly not all that remarkable. Often pointed to as a weak link in the band’s discography, the pressure of being signed to a major label after having spent so many years poor and recording through basement walls seems to have pushed Pollard into writing a really bland group of songs. There are really only a couple of standouts and the rest can be discarded at will. Interestingly, both standouts were used in pop culture: the stellar, misleading lead-off track “Teenage FBI” was used in *Buffy The Vampire Slayer* and super-ballad “Hold On Hope” was used memorably in an episode of *Scrubs*. At the same time, their live show, a ramshackle affair involving a **LOT** of drinking, kicked into epic mode, with sets often going over the three-hour mark. Anyone who grew up on modern rock radio will find *something* to like about the album, but in my humble opinion it pales in comparison to what came before or (to a lesser extent) what would come after.
A bit of a return to form after the relative snooze-fest of *Do The Collapse*, *Isolation Drills* contains some of the best tracks of the post-*Under The Bushes Under The Stars* era, and puts back the muscle and heft that Ric Ocasek’s glossy production sacrificed. There’s a lot of love for the Seventies here; while Pollard’s songwriting will always remain anchored in the British Invasion, there’s a sense on *Isolation Drills* that the band set out to make the best Cheap Trick album ever recorded. In this, they succeed: the songs sound ready for the arena at first blush, and the fact that radio didn’t immediately pick up on the universal accessibility of the album just goes to show the problems with terrestrial radio right from the beginning of the internet age.
Back to Matador they went, and even though they went from a major to an indie they managed to do better, chart-wise, than anything that came before (relax, it was only #160). It’s a bit tighter than *Isolation Drills*, and the reduction in recording budget actually seems to bring a bit of the old wild Pollard out to play in places. The magical moments seem a bit forced at times, but it’s a good album – not essential like *Bee Thousand*, or as lifeless as *Do The Collapse*, but it lands somewhere in the middle of their discography.
*Earthquake Glue* was an album that showed a band on a real upswing. Their previous two albums had shown a willingness to be consistently good, if not great; they were albums you could listen to all the way through a couple of times, and then skip to the good parts thereafter. *Earthquake Glue* recaptures a bit of that old magic, though, from the 4-track garage recording days; there is a light, mellow groove that permeates the album like a particularly good bag of weed. It’s still not as consistent as anything from the lo-fi era, but it can be considered as being perhaps the most solidly satisfying of the second part of the band’s career.
This was supposed to be the last album – they announced in April of 2004 that it would be, and for a while it was. It sounds like an attempt at crafting something a bit more wide-screen than anything they’d done before, like an album composed of the last songs of the night at their panoramic live shows. In this it really only half-succeeds; many of the songs, even though they fall into the usual two-and-a-half minute mould, seem as though they are wearing out their welcome by the end. It seems a bit tired, more than anything else, and Pollard was more than happy to spend the next several years following his muse through a series of typically ramshackle solo projects and albums with his sometime band Boston Spaceships. For all intents and purposes, Guided By Voices was put to bed for good.
The instant USA Today bestseller by Chuck Tingle about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.
“Brilliantly bloody, wildly fun, and extremely scary, Bury Your Gays brings a sledgehammer down on tired tropes and makes a masterpiece of their guts.”―Rachel Harrison, national bestselling author of Black Sheep
Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell.
But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, “for the algorithm,” in the upcoming season finale.
Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. And what’s worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles.
Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future―before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.
One of the Best Horror Books of 2024 by Esquire!
One of the Best Books of Summer 2024 by Paste, HuffPost, Esquire, and Publishers Weekly!
Forgotten Sisters
Forgotten Sisters
Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer)
A city’s haunted history and fairy-tale horrors converge for two women in an addictive novel of psychological suspense by a multiple Bram Stoker Award–nominated author.
Sisters Anna and Jennie live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River. They’re tethered to a disquieting past, and with nowhere else to go, nothing can part them from their family home. Not the maddening creaks and disembodied voices that rattle the old walls. Not the inexplicable drownings in the area, or the increasing number of bodies that float by Anna’s window.
To stave off loneliness, Anna has a podcast, spinning ghostly tales of Chicago’s tragic history. But when Anna captures the attention of an ardent male listener, she awakens to the possibilities of a world outside.
As their relationship grows, so do Jennie’s fears. More and more people are going missing in the river. And then two detectives come calling.
They’re looking for a link between the mysteries of the river and what’s housed on the bank. Even Anna and Jennie don’t understand how dreadful it is―and still can be―when the truth about their unsettled lives begins to surface.
The instant USA Today bestseller from CJ Leede, author of Maeve Fly―a scorching and sweeping new novel about the end of the world as we know it.
One of Esquire and Vulture’s Best Horror Books of 2024 • A GoodReads and Publishers Weekly Editors’ Pick • An Indie Next Pick!
“A blistering, feverish ride through a uniquely American apocalypse.”―Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author
A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust.
Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin…
“I’ve loved Maggie Thrash’s work for years, and Rainbow Black is going to set so many new hearts aflame—murder, intrigue, queer love, dark humor AND satanic panic? Welcome to the Maggie Thrash Fan Club, world!”—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
For readers of Donna Tartt and Ottessa Moshfegh comes a brilliant, deliriously entertaining novel from the acclaimed author of Honor Girl. Rainbow Black is part murder mystery, part gay international fugitive love story—set against the ’90s Satanic Panic and spanning 20 years in the life of a young woman pulled into its undertow.
Lacey Bond is a 13-year-old girl in New Hampshire growing up in the tranquility of her hippie parents’ rural daycare center.
Then the Satanic Panic hits. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey ’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations as part of a mass hysteria sweeping the nation. When a horrific murder brings Lacey to the breaking point, she makes a ruthless choice that will haunt her for decades.
As an adult, Lacey mimes a normal life as the law clerk of an illustrious judge. She has a beautiful girlfriend, a measure of security, and the world has mostly forgotten about her. But after a tiny misstep spirals into an uncontrolled legal disaster, the hysteria threatens to begin all over again.
Rainbow Black is an addictive, searing, high-octane triumph, an imaginative tour de force about one woman’s tireless desire to be free.
Twenty four years ago, Olive and Stacia went into the woods. Only Olive returned, with no memory of what happened. Now, Olive’s father has vanished, leaving behind research which indicates that he has found out what lives in the woods.
It wakes up every twelve years, taking only children. It has been doing so for at least two hundred years. And it is waking again.
Forced to return to her hometown, Olive finds her memories returning.
What she remembers from the days leading up to Stacia’s disappearance is magical, almost impossible to believe, but she knows that she must return to the woods–to face what lurks there, to save her father, and to find out what happened to Stacia.
“Beautiful, poetic, and gutting. Hollow Girls is a captivating novel that will lure you deep into the woods where magic and darkness entwine. There is so much heart to this story of friendship and blood where oaths and secrets continue to unravel until the very last page. Bring an offering to the Fae, and come along on this memorable journey.”
–Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland.
Winnie Campbell is sixteen and a burgeoning serial killer. Her father blames her for her mother’s death, dotes on her little sister, and executes increasingly cruel punishments meant to humiliate Winnie. As the punishments morph into torture, she begins fantasizing about regaining some semblance of power, eventually working through her rage by killing small animals.
When her violent games escalate and she accidentally kills an infant while babysitting, Winnie gets a taste of a power she doesn’t want to let go of. Her obsession with killing grows, and so does her fascination for Leigh, a girl that reminds her of her younger self.
Winnie wants to kill. She wants to die. She wants to be someone other than herself. And killing Leigh, a symbolic suicide, could be the key to her metamorphosis.
“A shocking and utterly harrowing examination of the creation of a murderer. Although Crushing Snails excels in many areas, this novel is perhaps most skillful at effectively illustrating the very human compulsion for violence and depravity. Murray’s excellent novel showcases the very human possibility of carnage—the horrifying prospect of brutality—when curiosity is sated and when we finally surrender to our most feral desires.”—Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“Masterfully executed and chilling to the core, Crushing Snails is a terrifying look into the darkest depths of the human mind and the ways in which monsters are formed. With the intensity level set to high, Murray draws you into complicity as you witness one girl’s spiral into obsession and depravity, culminating in a horrifying conclusion you’ll never forget.”—Kelsea Yu, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of Bound Feet
“A nightmare of power and control, or perhaps even something more wayward. Crushing Snails is provocative and demanding, spiraling and unapologetic. Emma Murray is an exciting emerging voice in horror challenging what is normal and what is safe.”—Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Crime Scene
“Sick, twisted, and compulsively readable—Emma E. Murray’s Crushing Snails is a coming-of-age story that goes to dark and darker places, leaving me constantly hanging between two modes of thought: one-more-chapter and holy-fucking-shit.”—Carson Winter, author of The Psychographist
A woman checks herself into an insane asylum to solve the mystery of her sister’s murder, only to lose her memory and maybe her mind.
From the subversive voice behind The Phlebotomist comes a story that combines the uncanny atmosphere of Don’t Worry Darling with the narrative twists of The Last House on Needless Street
What would guilt make you do?
Hadleigh Keene died on the road leading away from Hollyhock Asylum. The reasons are unknown. Her sister Morgan blames herself. A year later with the case still unsolved, Morgan creates a false identity, that of a troubled housewife named Charlotte Turner, and goes inside.
Morgan quickly discovers that Hollyhock is… not right. She is shaken by the hospital’s peculiar routines and is soon beset by strange episodes. All the while, the persona of Charlotte takes on a life of its own, becoming stronger with each passing day. As her identity begins unraveling, Morgan finds herself tracing Hadleigh’s footsteps and peering into the places they lead.
The terrifying reality of The Redemption of Morgan Bright unfolds over the course of chapters told from the points of view of both Charlotte and Morgan, police interviews, and text messages.
Once there were four Lasco siblings banded together against a world that failed to protect them. But on a hellish night that marked the end of their childhood, eldest brother Shawn died violently after being dragged behind closed doors. Though the official finding was accidental death, Nathan Lasco knows better, and has never forgiven their mother, Stella.
Now two decades later, Stella promises to finally reveal the truth of what happened on The Day of the Door. Accompanied by a paranormal investigative team, the Lasco family comes together one final time, but no one is prepared for the revelations waiting for them on the third floor.
The final installment in the most lauded trilogy in the history of horror novels picks up four years after Don’t Fear the Reaper as Jade returns to Proofrock, Idaho, to build a life after the years of sacrifice—only to find the Lake Witch is waiting for her in New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones’s finale.
It’s been four years in prison since Jade Daniels last saw her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, the day she took the fall, protecting her friend Letha and her family from incrimination. Since then, her reputation, and the town, have changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there’s one aspect of Proofrock no one wants to confront…until Jade comes back to town. The curse of the Lake Witch is waiting, and now is the time for the final stand.
New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones has crafted an epic horror trilogy of generational trauma from the Indigenous to the townies rooted in the mountains of Idaho. It is a story of the American west written in blood.
“Simply put—and I do not say this lightly—Incidents Around the House is the most purely effective horror novel I have ever read.”—Neil McRobert, Esquire (Best Horror Books of 2024, So Far)
A chilling horror novel about a haunting, told from the perspective of a young girl whose troubled family is targeted by an entity she calls “Other Mommy,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box
“This book isthe monster that lives inside your closet.”—Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House
To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”
When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the question over and over, Bela understands that unless she says yes, her family will soon pay.
Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe, but other incidents show cracks in her parents’ marriage. The safety Bela relies on is about to unravel.
But Other Mommy needs an answer.
Incidents Around the House is a chilling, wholly unique tale of true horror about a family as haunted as their home.
A chilling twist on the “cursed film” genre from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World.
In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.
The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.
The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.
But at what cost?
Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful feat of storytelling genius that builds inexorably to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.
A visceral and heartbreaking work of gothic horror about small town mysteries, local folklore and the things we leave behind when we’re gone, from the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Queen of Teeth.
What really happened to Cabrina Brite?
Ivory’s life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries?
Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina’s death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina’s closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina’s death.
Because Cape Morning isn’t a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes A Sorceress Comes to Call―a dark reimagining of the Brothers Grimm’s “The Goose Girl,” rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic.
*The hardcover edition features a foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.*
Cordelia knows her mother is . . . unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms―there are no secrets in this house―and her mother doesn’t allow Cordelia to have a single friend. Unless you count Falada, her mother’s beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him.
But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t evil sorcerers.
When her mother unexpectedly moves them into the manor home of a wealthy older Squire and his kind but keen-eyed sister, Hester, Cordelia knows this welcoming pair are to be her mother’s next victims. But Cordelia feels at home for the very first time among these people, and as her mother’s plans darken, she must decide how to face the woman who raised her to save the people who have become like family.
Embark on a darkly humorous journey of reality TV meets the macabre. On the set of The Groom, a group of women must compete for the heart of Midwestern bachelor Tristan by spending a week in a haunted house. Divorcee Linda, resigned to her role as the show’s underdog, finds her resolve cracking when she begins to fall for fellow castmate Charity. Meanwhile, Sabrina, groomed by her witchy mother to deliver their family from poverty by marrying a rich man, sees winning the competition as her predestined path.
But after a shocking demise, the game takes a sinister turn. As the remaining contestants grapple with their desires for love and survival, they uncover dark secrets within and without the house’s walls. Trapped in a twisted new competition, they must confront their own demons or face elimination.
Sixty-three-year-old Los Angeles stoner, Hank Wallace, is just trying to get by and get high when he takes a gig distributing ads for a local company. But the job quickly turns into more than it seems. Hank begins hearing voices and experiencing strange visions while passing out the ads. Before he knows it, he’s fallen prey to his employer, a demon from another world.
Possessed by the demon, Hank absorbs nightmares from others living in his corner of LA. He becomes a conduit that feeds anxiety and dread to the demon. The nightmares pour in, but they aren’t enough. The demon requires more sustenance than the nightmares provide.
And the demon is in luck. Hank learns that his estranged sister, Carla, his only living relative, is terminally ill with cancer. He has steered clear of close relationships with family for decades, but he cannot avoid it any longer. The demon insists. Carla and her family’s grief is a siren’s call.
Hank drives to Sacramento bearing an invisible gift. The demon can erase their grief, but at what cost? Unless Hank can get his head together and snap out of it, the demon will consume every last one of them.
From New York Times bestselling horror writer Stephen Graham Jones comes a classic slasher story with a twist—perfect for fans of Adam Cesareand Grady Hendrix.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton—and a place where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, and shared sense of unfairness of being on the outside through the slasher horror Jones loves, but from the perspective of the killer, Tolly, writing his own autobiography. Find yourself rooting for a killer in this summer teen movie of a novel gone full blood-curdling tragic.
In this “stunningly visceral” (New York Times Book Review) novel, a group of young men seek vengeance after one of their mothers is murdered in a Puerto Rican slum; STAND BY ME with a haunted, obsidian-dark heart.
One of B&N’s Best Horror Books of the Year
For childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo, death has always been close. Hurricanes. Car accidents. Gang violence. Suicide. Estamos rodeados de fantasmas was Gabe’s grandmother’s refrain. We are surrounded by ghosts. But this time is different. Bimbo’s mom has been shot dead. We’re gonna kill the guys who killed her Bimbo swears. And they all agree.
Feral with grief, Bimbo has become unrecognizable, taking no prisoners in his search for names. Soon, they learn Maria was gunned down by guys working for the drug kingpin of Puerto Rico. No one has ever gone up against him and survived. As the boys strategize, a storm gathers far from the coast. Hurricanes are known to carry evil spirits in their currents and bring them ashore, spirits which impose their own order.
Blurring the boundaries between myth, mysticism, and the grim realities of our world, House of Bone and Rain is a harrowing coming of age story; a doomed tale of devotion, the afterlife of violence, and what rolls in on the tide.
From Gretchen Felker-Martin, the acclaimed author of Manhunt, comes a vicious new novel about a group of teens who must stay true to themselves while in a conversion camp from hell.
“A soaring, boundless ode to queer survival. It’s flat-out mesmerizing.”―Paul Tremblay, author of The Pallbearers Club
Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin.
In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived―but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person.
Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it’s too late.
The fate of the world depends on it.
“Tense and frighteningly visceral, Cuckoo is a masterwork of body horror thrumming with high octane viciousness.” ―Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
A woman builds her lover from carefully scavenged pieces and parts. A young girl is groomed for madness by one who loves her most. A neurodivergent boy organizes his life, and loss, by the ticking of a clock. And love can be the most splendid and destructive force in the entire world.
Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales is a collection of seventeen stories that are both bleak and beautiful, devastating and sweet. Enter the crematorium to experience grief, starlit nights, and gorgeous tragedy that make our souls burn from the inside out.
One of Paste Magazine’s “Most Anticipated Horror Books of 2024”
It’s about to get very dark.
Bram Stoker Award-winning author Laird Barron returns to the dark and dreadful with his fifth horror collection, which weaves sixteen weird tales into a mosaic of the bloody and the macabre.
It is in the darkest moments, during the loss of hope, that the language of crows is most clearly heard. The words are as menacing as piercing beaks, the events as perilous as a sea of black feathers. The corvid tongue spreads diabolical thoughts and devious visions.
Legend has it that crows prophesize offenses of the worst kind, their harsh tones are harbingers of horror. Collectively, crows are a murder, and they call out orders about their own name. The Language of Crows and other stories contains dark fairy tales, historical horror, and psychological horror in voices of the violent and the violated. It is a collection of witches’ spells, monsters’ murmurs, and voices within one’s head.
A brand-new collection of four intense, claustrophobic and terrifying horror tales from the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke.
THIS SKIN WAS ONCE MINE
When her father dies under mysterious circumstances, Jillian Finch finds herself grieving the man she idolized while struggling to feel comfortable in the childhood home she was sent away from nearly twenty years ago. Then Jillian discovers a dark secret that will threaten to undo everything she has ever known about her father.
SEEDLING
A young man’s father calls him early in the morning to say that his mother has passed away. He arrives home to find his mother’s body still in the house. Struggling to process what has happened he notices a small black wound appear on his wrist. Then he discovers his father is cursed with the same affliction.
ALL THE PARTS OF YOU THAT WON’T EASILY BURN
Enoch Leadbetter goes to buy a knife for his husband to use at a forthcoming dinner party. He encounters a strange shopkeeper who draws him into an intoxicating new obsession and sets him on a path towards mutilation and destruction…
PRICKLE
Two old men revive a cruel game with devastating consequences…
From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER.
“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,” and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.
“Two Talented Bastids” explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,” a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man” asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.
King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.
A young queer man finds love at a magical clothing shop-and the courage to stand up to the homophobic cops. A witch who makes custom nightmares wonders why all her victims are connected to the Black Panthers-and who she’s really working for. A soon-to-be father encounters a mysterious hitchhiker who tries pulling him back to the days of his violent past. A brand-new vampire, freshly hired at the blood bank, delights in her heightened sexual desire and superhuman strength.
Cynthia Gómez’s debut collection is a magic-soaked love letter to Oakland, brimming with feminist rage. Its twelve stories center ordinary people-Latine, queer, working class-as they wield supernatural powers against oppression, loneliness, and dread.
Christi Nogle has established herself as a modern Ray Bradbury, this collection adds fantasy, slipstream, and fabulism to her canon.
One Eye Opened in That Other Place collects Christi Nogle’s best weird and fantastical stories. The collection focuses on liminal spaces and the borders between places and states of mind. Though you might not find a traditional portal fantasy here, you will travel across thresholds and arrive at other places and times that are by turns disquieting, terrifying, and wonderful. Get up close with the local flora and fauna, peruse the weird art exhibits and special shows, and consider taking a dip in the mossy, snail-filled tank of water. Make sure to bring your special glasses
This new collection will appeal to readers of Jeff VanderMeer, Charles Wilkinson, Steve Rasnic Tem, M. Rickert, Lynda E. Rucker and Stephen King’s novel Lisey’s Story.
The Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author returns with a new collection of literary horror and weird fiction that glitters with startling prose and tortured souls.
Invaginies is an invasion, it is a perception that is bodily and transcendent creating holes, paths, or pockets of alternate truth-and not always voluntary–enlightenment.
Every line sings and strikes like grotesque poetry of the possessed. With 17 disturbing tales exploring plagues, possessions, gender & corruption, set in apocalyptic eras not much unlike our own, Joe Koch brings the terrors of a postmodern world into vivid focus.
Haunting and beautiful, Koch takes their place among the great names of the weird like Brian Evenson, exploring the queer perspective in horror as Billy Martin and Clive Barker, and contemporary rising voice, Eric LaRocca.
Literary prose meets the grotesque in this collection of stories to galvanize lovers of horror and weird fiction. With a growing cult audience, this collection is sure to shoot to the top of readers’ tbr piles.
At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.
Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.
With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”
A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!
Zip up your human suit and set sail, imbibing every perspective you can
in order to perfect the persona.
Push to the outer edges. Document your travels, and forget to return.
There will be a test.
Learn what it means to be human.
Forget what it means to be human.
Learn what it means to be human.
Forget what it means to be human.
Do not panic.
BRAVE NEW WEIRD: The Best New Weird Horror, Volume Two encompasses the finest Weird speculative fiction published in (roughly) 2023. Edited by Alex Woodroe.
Table of contents:
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas – Lullaby for the Unseen
Thomas Ha – In That Crumbling Home
Hussani Abdulrahim – The Library Virus
Patrick Malka – Show Me
Eirik Gumeny – A Balanced Breakfast
David Simmons – Food is Poison
Premee Mohamed – Quietus
Perfect Kiss Strickoll – punctum (o baked alaska for you i am a former american)
LC von Hessen – Transmasc of the Red Death
Simone le Roux – The Man Outside
KS Walker – River Bargain Baby
M.M. Olivas – The Prince of Oakland
Amitha Jagannath Knight – My Mother, The Exoskeleton
Rachael K. Jones – The Sound of Children Screaming
Judith Shadford – Endless Yearning
Daniel DeRock – Guest Opinion: We must take action regarding the [REDACTED] High School janitor
Geneve Flynn – A Box of Hair and Nail
Anemone Moss – Everything You Dump Here Ends Up in the Ocean
Karlo Yeager Rodríguez – Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground
If books have no power, why are they trying so hard to keep them from people?
4,240 unique book titles were targeted for censorship or banning in 2023 alone.
Shadows in the Stacks was published to raise funds for the Books Unbanned Initiative through the Library Foundation SD. All proceeds from sales go to the Library Foundation SD.
This collection of terrifying tales was edited by Vincent V. Cava, James Sabata, and Jared Sage, with a foreword by Laurel Hightower, and features all-new stories from…
Kevin David AndersonZachary AshfordS.A. BradleyBridget D. BraveKel ByronVincent V. CavaClay McLeod ChapmanRebecca CuthbertAlexis DuBonJamie FlanaganDouglas FordEvelyn FreelingAi JiangLucy LeitnerJonathan MaberryJ.A.W. McCarthyTim McGregorJohn PalisanoJames SabataWilliam SterlingAlvaro Zinos-Amaro
Each limb tells a story. Every organ shares a secret.
A woman saves the leg of her dead child. A man leaps from soul to soul, trying to find a pure heart. Uteri wander, skin peels back, and human bodies liquify all over this world.
Slice into the anatomy of this collection to discover all the unseen horrors the human body can deliver.
Brand new stories from Alex Wolfgang, Ai Jiang, Mary Rajotte, Julie Sevens, Christopher O’Halloran, Sasha Brown, Bridget D. Brave, Taylor Ketterer, Demi-Louise Blackburn, Lindsey Ragsdale, Emma E. Murray, Johnathon Heart, P.L. McMillan, Rachel Searcey, Bryan Young, Kai Delmas, and David Worn, with a foreword from Paula D. Ashe.
Bury Your Gays: An Anthology Of Tragic Queer Horror
Bury Your Gays: An Anthology Of Tragic Queer Horror
Ghoulish Books
A manifestation of ecstasy, heartache, horror and suffering rendered in feverish lyrical prose. Inside are sixteen new stories by some of the genre’s most visionary queer writers. Young lovers find themselves deliriously lost in an expanding garden labyrinth. The porter of a sentient hotel is haunted within a liminal time loop. A soldier and his abusive commanding officer escape a war in the trenches but discover themselves in an even greater nightmare. Parasites chase each other across time-space in hungry desperation to never be apart. A graduate student with violent tendencies falls into step with a seemingly walking corpse. Featuring stories from Cassandra Khaw, Joe Koch, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Robbie Banfitch, August Clarke, Son M., Jonathan Louis Duckworth, M.V. Pine, Ed Kurtz, LC Von Hessen, Matteo L. Cerilli, November Rush, Meredith Rose, Charlene Adhiambo, Violet, and Thomas Kearnes.
It’s the question asked of any story about a haunting: why didn’t you just leave? But if accounts of people who have stayed in haunted houses are any indication … it’s never that simple.
In this book, you’ll find twenty-two all-new stories about the reasons people don’t leave scary situations-parents who stay in haunted houses to protect their children, convicts who literally can’t leave their prison, retail workers who need a paycheck even if it’s from a haunted workplace, trauma survivors suffering from agoraphobia, and more.
Featuring Shauntae Ball, I.S. Belle, Die Booth, Max Booth III, Christa Carmen, Raquel Castro, Alberto Chimal, Gabe Converse, Lyndsey Croal, Victoria Dalpe, Alexis DuBon, Corey Farrenkopf, Cassandra Khaw, Joe Koch, E.M. Linden, Steve Loiaconi, R. Diego Martinez, J.A.W. McCarthy, Suzan Palumbo, Tonia Ransom, Rhiannon Rasmussen, and Eden Royce. With illustrations by Luke Spooner, Yves Tourigny, and Yornelys Zambrano.
We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures
We Mostly Come Out At Night: 15 Queer Tales of Monsters, Angels & Other Creatures
Running Press Kids
An empowering cross-genre YA anthology that explores what it means to be a monster, exclusively highlighting trans and queer authors who offer new tales and perspectives on classic monster stories and tropes.
Be not afraid! These monsters, creatures, and beasties are not what they appear. We Mostly Come Out at Night is a YA anthology that reclaims the monstrous for the LGBTQA+ community while exploring how there is freedom and power in embracing the things that make you stand out. Each story centers on both original and familiar monsters and creatures—including Mothman, Carabosse, a girl with thirteen shadows, a living house, werebeasts, gorgons, sirens, angels, and many others—and their stories of love, self-acceptance, resilience, and empowerment. This collection is a bold, transformative celebration of queerness and the creatures that (mostly) go bump in the night.
Contributors include editor Rob Costello, Kalynn Bayron, David Bowles, Shae Carys, Rob Costello, H.E. Edgmon, Michael Thomas Ford, Val Howlett, Brittany Johnson, Naomi Kanakia, Claire Kann, Jonathan Lenore Kastin, Sarah Maxfield, Sam J. Miller, Alexandra Villasante, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.
The Black Girl Survives In This One: Horror Stories
The Black Girl Survives In This One: Horror Stories
Flatiron Books
Be warned, dear reader: The Black girls survive in this one.
Celebrating a new generation of bestselling and acclaimed Black writers, The Black Girl Survives in This One makes space for Black girls in horror. Fifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.
The bestselling and acclaimed authors include Erin E. Adams, Monica Brashears, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Daka Hermon, Justina Ireland, L.L. McKinney, Brittney Morris, Maika & Maritza Moulite, Eden Royce, and Vincent Tirado. The foreword is by Tananarive Due.
Howls From The Scene Of The Crime: A Crime Horror Anthology
Howls From The Scene Of The Crime: A Crime Horror Anthology
Howl Society Press
A death row cell that recounts the dark stories of its inmates. An informant who consumes shards of crystallized skulls to see the past. A world where to speak of the dead is a violation of an unjust society’s rules. Heists, drugs, cults, detectives, murder, monsters, revenge.
Commit yourself to Howls from the Scene of the Crime, an anthology of crime horror laced with blood, secrets, and occult compulsions from some of the best established and emerging horror authors writing today. Featuring a foreword by Bram Stoker Award(R) winning crime horror author, Cynthia Pelayo.
Beyond The Bounds Of Infinity: An Anthology of Diverse Horror
Raw Dog Screaming Press
Welcome to a world of horror viewed through a kaleidoscope lens. Embark on a journey to untangle the writhing tendrils of human terror in a dimension where the possible and impossible blend-an unstable realm where comfort can be found in the coldest pits, and dark gods feast upon the sweetest suffering-where infernal sounds birth silent letters that drift along midnight shores and the unexplained lurks beneath crumbling urban structures. Step over the edge of what you think you know, and find yourself…Beyond the Bounds of Infinity!
Featuring stories by L. Marie Wood, S.A. Cosby, Jessica McHugh, and Mary SanGiovanni-alongside newer voices like Cassius Kilroy, Jessica L. Sparrow, and Vicky Velvet-Beyond the Bounds of Infinity offers a collection of weird fiction and cosmic horror stories that are diverse down to the cellular level. From Taíno folk horror to the horror of identity in a world that just doesn’t understand, from cozy to apocalyptic, and everything in between, let these authors show you what fear really is, and what it means to them.
