Essential Releases, October 25, 2024 (original) (raw)
ESSENTIAL RELEASES Essential Releases, October 25, 2024 By Bandcamp Daily Staff · October 25, 2024 
What the Bandcamp Daily editors are listening to right now.
District Five
District Five are a quartet from Zurich, Switzerland who’ve spent the past six years making high-fidelity, label-resistant guitar music with a level of technique and sophistication that betrays their upbringing in the Swiss jazz scene. Whereas 2018’s debut _Decoy _was the unmistakable product of that particular lineage, the follow-up, 2022’s Burnt Sugar, ganvanized those sensibilities into a grand game of genre tag touching upon psychedelic rock, dream pop, and even grunge. Their latest effort, Come Closer, occupies the Goldilocks Zone between either extreme, its tight, technical instrumentation tempered by the lush guitar and synth tones, roomy arrangements, and simple, unfussy vocal melodies. If you dig Hiatus Kaiyote, The Smile, or just intricately constructed rock in general, you better have District Five on your radar. And if you don’t, well…that’s why this column exists!
–Zoe Camp
DJ Lycox
Guetto Star, the first full-length DJ Lycox in seven years, opens like a goth record: a spine-chilling minor-key two-note keyboard line, a rolling Birthday Party-esque bassline, and a deep, distant voice ominously intoning a single syllable over and over. This is somewhat par for the course; his revved-up 2021 EP Lycoxera cast similar shadows—one track is even titled “Rapaz Sinistro,” or, “Sinister Boy”—and on Guetto Star, Lycox continues to set driving, insistent kuduro rhythms in chilly musical environs. (See also: His self-released 2023 EP Area 93.) On “To Bem Loko” (“Very Crazy”), a skeletal accordion line wheezes its way down the octava a half-step at a time as Lycox repeatedly pulls the drum track out from underneath it. “Mortal Kombat” is a head-spinning slice of deconstructed electronic music, with a spectral flute melody hovering near the top and the other elements—bass, piano, even drums—appearing and disappearing at random to unnerving effect. Even “Staring At the Moon,” the closest thing here to a straight-ahead dance track, sounds like a particularly bereft and mournful take on Mexican corrido. Lycox has perfected this blend of melodic darkness and pulsing rhythms, and the bewitching sound of Guetto Star arrives just in time to soundtrack Halloween dance parties.
–J. Edward Keyes
Hazy Sour Cherry
. 00:10 / 00:58
Tokyo’s premier indie pop party band (whom we last heard from at the end of 2022 when they graced us with, what else, a bouncing Christmas single) offer up a punky blast of guitar pop candy for your Halloween festivities on Hazy Horror Party. The EP is something of a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist (there are two musical skits in Japanese in addition to the English-language songs) and while spooky-kooky-ooky song titles (e.g. “Zombilly Rave (till someone call police!)” and “The Dracula Bop”) certainly bring to mind ye olde B-movie tropes, just like in those rubber monster films of yore, nothing here is going to actually scare you. Hazy Sour Cherry remain at their core a wholesome bunch making chiming, friendly indie pop that almost seems almost too basic for the skill of the players—music this freewheeling and unapologetically fun can be written off as amateurish, but I dare you to find a misplaced note.
– Mariana Timony
Naked Roommate
Blech band name/album title combo notwithstanding, Pass the Loofah from Naked Roommate is the kind of bouncy, eccentric, and electrified post-punk Oakland bands have gotten pretty good at churning over the past decade and a half or so, and a particularly excellent version of it. The record has that modish mix of songs you can really dance to with anti-capitalist politics we can all agree with, but it’s kind of glam, kind of funny—a relationship is desired to have someone to pay half the rent, the record opens with a swipe at Bored Apes (remember those?)—and the songs themselves boast such interesting constellations of perfectly placed bleeps and bloops and synthesized basslines, it takes several listens to even begin to appreciate the complexity that underpins the surface level fizz.
– Mariana Timony
Various Artists
Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop & Funk from the South China Sea (1974-88)
Shorn of context, it would be easy to mistake “Mangge Mangge,” the second track on Soundway’s stellar new compilation Ayo Ke Disco, as a product of New York’s Lower East Side scene in the late ‘70s, at the precise moment post-punk was starting to bleed into funk and hip-hop, and vice-versa. That strutting bassline, those eerie “Rapture”-y keys, the bleary horn chart that recalls a more straightforward James Chance. But while it was recorded at around the same time, the track—like everything here—originated on the other side of the world, in the midst of cultural upheaval. Consisting of music from Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, Ayo Ke Disco takes a dizzying jaunt through disco, funk, and multiple adjacent genres. As “Mangge Mangge” indicates, none of the tracks attempt to infuse these sounds with regional elements or musical modes; instead, they represent the involved artists’ best shot at replicating them, element for element. And all of it slays: The dreamy “Dahaga” takes a Curtis Mayfield-y funk backdrop and tops it with a shivery female vocal; “Disco” plays like a distant sequel to “Planet Rock” with its robot vocals and lockstep drum machine. The title track, with its staccato horn chart and wah-wah guitar, conjures images of leisure suited groovers twisting on a light-up dancefloor. I’ll confess there I times I can get fatigued with the deluge of reissues—I find myself occasionally wondering how much more can be added to the conversation. Ayo Ke Disco silences my question with a short, sharp: “You have no idea.”