Five Pound Pocket Universe –
Brain Bubble Party

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

Jazzgrind is one of my all-time favourite musical genres. It’s often very wild, barely tamed, so it goes into whichever direction it wants to go, and changes decision every thirty seconds or so. Swiss trio Five Pound Pocket Universe excels at this, and their debut album Brain Bubble Party is the proof of it.

Not only do they interweave metal, jazz, and grindcore in many aspects of their compositions, they seem to have a certain musical fetish for Japanese music, which also appears out of the blue on some occasions, sprinkled here and there throughout the … Read more

Bangladeafy – Ribboncutter

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

New York-based mathcore duo Bangladeafy made waves as early as 2011 with their debut release, This Is Your Brain on Bugs, and kept surprising and impressing with each successive release. This month, the drums-and-bass band releases Ribboncutter, a twenty-two-minute EP showcasing the culmination of their years of experience and experimentation.

Adding to their more natural-sounding beginnings, bassist John Ehlers now shamelessly uses a multitude of pedals to enhance the sounds that can only come from his bass guitar. Besides the to-be-expected overdrive and distortion, there are certainly a few other ones: reverb, echo, delay, … Read more

Big Heart Machine – Big Heart Machine

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

I’ve been waiting on this release for as long as it has been announced (or very nearly so), but, when it was finally released, it was impossible for me to listen to it attentively and, thus, prepare a short review before the month’s end. It is doubtless that I can say that Big Heart Machine would’ve made it in August’s monthly recommendations, but you’ll have to be content with this belated, overdue one.

Big Heart Machine is the eighteen-piece big band under the baton of Miho Hazama and the production of Darcy James Argue, another … Read more

Green Tree Novelty Tea – The Lion’s Suite

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

Green Tree Novelty Tea starts off strong with their debut EP, The Lion’s Suite: a twenty-minute collection of stellar progressive rock with vibrant math rock influences. Just make sure to raise the volume before listening to the album, because it’s mixed quite low.

The band includes the bassist of blog favourite Axon-Neuron, and this is the sole reason for my stumbling upon this album, for it is not promoted or shared a lot. This makes it even more of a pleasant surprise, then, to find therein some of the best progressive rock of recent … Read more