The end of another month marks the time for a reflection on the month prior and the records that came out during it. Here's a few albums I enjoyed from February!
Sleeper's Bell - Clover
Fire Talk / Angel Tapes
February 7, 2025
The vocals of Sleeper's Bell's Blaine Teppema instantly captivated me upon listening to the singles from what would shape up to be the duo's debut album, Clover. The Chicago-based band's debut album is full of tender, folk songs with light, acoustic instrumentation. The stories weaved on Clover are anecdotal, conversational, and honest. With repeated motifs of clovers and the idea of blue, Teppema walks us through stories of falling asleep in cars waiting for AAA, to screaming at highway signs. There's always a sense of sweetness that lays underneath the surface of each track. This open and sweet nature doesn't undermine the wit that exists in these songs too. In "Bored," she sings, "Why do i wanna break a quiet institution? I was quiet, too, until I met you. I am so afraid of time’s careless passing and I’m bored," and in "Room," she poetically and wisely equates love to " a kind of carefulness and I'm fallin’ over and droppin’ shit." These songs while emotionally tender and straightforward are crafted with such a breeze to their production, that the weight of their contents may not fully sink in until the end of their runtime, which makes me come back to them all the more often.
Favorite Tracks: Clover, Room, Road Song, Bored, Over
Meagre Martin - Up To Snuff
Mansions and Millions
February 14, 2025
Meagre Martin's 2023 debut full-length album, Gut Punch, was an instantly classic album for me, filled with Sarah Martin's vocals, which feel at times like a yodel and at times remind me a bit of youbet. Her vocals compliment and hover above the band's anthemic instrumentals. Meagre Martin perfectly meshes slacker indie rock reminiscent of the early 2000s with the reverb of the most modern interpretations of shoegaze. Two years later, the Berlin trio have returned with Up To Snuff, an EP that while sonically in line with their debut, turns up the volume, the stakes, and the passion. Songs like "In The Room," begin with guitar riffs that glide in tandem with Martin's vocals, but create a driving rhythm that lifts the listener up to the song's loud and crashing energy, complete with buzzy guitar feedback. The song's lyrics simply describe the way in which we dissect and compartmentalize ourselves for others. Maybe the screams and hollers by the end of the song are more of a cathartic release of pent up anger, but they sound so beautiful. "Malcom" similarly explores the suffocation of being social and physically stuck, with the refrain referencing the American sitcom, "Just like Malcom in the middle gotta figure it out." If this is the track the band is on for their next full-length project, I can't wait to hear it.
Favorite Tracks: Malcom, Frankie, In The Room (all of them it's only 5 songs!)
Youth Lagoon - Rarely Do I Dream
Fat Possum Records
February 21, 2025
Ever since Trevor Powers returned from his eight-year hiatus, his music has been at its best. 2023's Heaven Is a Junkyard showcased a new side to the Youth Lagoon project. It's a more moodier one, more raw, a little more atmospheric and focused on experimentation rather than his low-fi roots. Rarely Do I Dream continues this trend, adding onto this more matured sound, but in a more autobiographical tone. Throughout the course of this album, we hear spliced, organic home video footage recordings from Powers' childhood, from birthday parties, to road trips, to small innocuous moments. They blend in perfectly with the songs he's built around them, the sampled audio pieces enhance the narratives that Power expresses. It's not quite nostalgia, but it feels almost like it. It's incredibly palpable on songs like "Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)" which details and reflects on childhood memories that you can't re-access once you've grown up, before you've had the realization that "life's a baseball bat to the jaw." Powers muses the line quietly, since maybe our subject, his past self, hasn't had that realization quite yet.
Cornelia Murr - Run to the Center
22TWENTY
February 28, 2025
Much of Cornelia Murr's latest album, her first in six years, was written and created in the prairie of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the town of prophetic Willa Cather located two hours from my hometown. In Red Cloud, Murr spent her time restoring a home and utilizing the space and the quiet of the prairie to create some of her most dream-like music yet. Run to the Center is an album that feels like its always existed due to its sweetness, spacious and clear production, and sparse, yet classic instrumentation. On the title track, she writes a love letter to the house she restored, singing, "Working on this old house as if it's my body, If I take care of it it'll take care of me. Stripping leaves off the centuries, maps of other worlds obscured destinies." You can almost hear sandhill cranes throughout the track too. The addressed subject throughout the album's runtime is always an indirect ode to "you." Perhaps these songs are all addressed to this house, the peace and stillness, and the life Murr carved out for herself in the midst of the prairie.
Favorite Tracks: Meantime, Run to the Center, In the Wings, Bless Yr Little Heart
Pink Must - Pink Must
15 love
February 28, 2025
Pink Must is the duo of composer and multi-instrumentalist, More Eaze and Lynn Avery of Iceblink. Truly this combination of forces makes complete sense, as More Eaze has created ethereal fusions of experimental electronic and rock music with musicians like claire rousay and Lomelda, and Avery's music combines ambient sounds with more classical arrangements. The duo's cross-country remote beginnings became a real life collaborative project in 2023, and these songs feel alive in the way that only music created in a shared space can. Songs like the opening track, "Morphe Sun" open with autotuned vocals that surround the song's bouncy, organic instrumentation. "Away" soars with its strings section that harmonizes with the robotic vocals. Some tracks follow a more pop structure, while songs like "Himbo," drone with hypnotic synths and pieces of audio that almost resemble the start up sounds to an old video game. The glitches and raw textures of these nine songs are an impressive debut, and I'd like to see how weird a follow up could be.
Favorite Tracks: Disappointed, Away, Karaoke of the Bends, Blessings
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