Sherwyn – What
Sherwyn is inquisitive about the world and nostalgic about the old times. Just like many bands plunder through the 90s alt-rock back-pages, so does the artist here look back towards an era where rock-samples dominated mainstream hip-hop.
What’s spine and bones are made of a rock guitar part that sounds like someone reinterpreting AC/DC. Over it, Sherwyn rhymes about wishing to see the world in a different light. It’s a peace-fest song with some kick to it.
Sherwyn’s flow is confident and anthemic. And, clocking in at just under 2 minutes, this is a punk-rock style of getting the bare bones of a message out there to a public unwilling to spend more than a couple of minutes on anything unrelated to food, sex, or the elections.
The Ceiling Stares – Thank You For The Panic
The Ceiling Stares write a song about panic attacks, and it sounds just like routinely having them feels. It’s a tune that is suffocating, seems to move in circles, and occasionally seems to stop, but doesn’t.
Sure, there’s an artsy post-punk sensibility to this, but it is delivered with considerable confidence. Little about this seems studied, or as if it has required much labour. Much like punk-rock pioneers Suicide, part of the song’s mission seems to be to provoke and upset those who’ll happen to hear it.
The nightmarish, assembly-line repetitiveness used in the song only takes a breather for a beautiful sax solo to enter the frame while African-drums dance around it. If this, as the author claims, is a song about the inescapable news cycle, it does a great job of representing the fact in the tediousness of routinely expressing hollow messages lie some of the biggest evils of the modern world. Evidently, Chickentown!
