Dream | Heartbreaking Bravery

Casey Jordan Weissbuch – Dream (Stream)

Very few people working in punk-leaning music today have strung together a track record as strong as Casey Weissbuch. With a career that includes work with the likes of Mitski, Diarrhea Planet, Colleen Green, and Jaill (among a long list of equally impressive artists), as well as projects that operate as a clearer vehicle for his own distinct songwriting voice (Slanted, Gumbus, and Trapped all being fine examples) in addition to running Infinity Cat‘s consistently excellent cassette series. Now, he’s returned with a recording project that boasts his own name and, as a result, scans as Weissbuch’s most personal endeavor to date.

Before diving too much further into that project, it’s worth taking a beat to recognize some excellent songs to have emerged since the beginning of April. A small handful of those songs will be covered in this post while the remainder will be evenly distributed across the six fixed stream posts set to follow this one. Those songs came from the likes of Basement Revolver, Proto Idiot, Crusher, Margaret Glaspy, Hurry, Ben Lukas Boysen, Gland, Walleater, and Gorgeous Bully– all of which constitute an extremely tempting slew of titles. As incredible as those nine tracks wound up being (and, make no mistake, they’re all very serious contenders), Weissbuch’s “Dream” was the number that secured this post’s feature spot.

“Dream”, appropriately, boasts several of Weissbuch’s most recognizable songwriting traits. A straight rhythm that finds a shocking amount of power in its relative simplicity, a melodic sensibility that’s deeply indebted to the slacker punk movement of the early ’90s, and sharply intuitive atmospheric work that manages to make the smallest details feel like enormous moments. In some instances, Weissbuch’s approach results in brief flashes of material that are as reminiscent of Elliott Smith as they are of Sebadoh.

While Weissbuch has an admirable tendency to embrace his influences to their fullest extent possible, it’s worth noting that he’s also cultivated them into something that can stand on its own. Beyond that, songs like “Dream” are recognizably Weissbuch’s. Every time he’s been granted the spotlight, he’s laced his material with honesty, self-deprecation, and a sense of deceptive liveliness buried in narratives that have a tendency to lean towards the mundane. It’s a formula that’s paid massive dividends for his work as a songwriter in the past and “Dream” sees Weissbuch dangerously close to perfecting its formula.

As an introductory song to a new outlet for Weissbuch, it’s extraordinarily promising. In addition to the song’s thoughtful composition and meticulous attention to detail, when it’s scaled back to an area devoid of critical dissection, “Dream” is still an engaging song. While it certainly rewards investment, it’s nearly as effective as a piece of music that just washes over the listener. All told, it’s a track that thrives off its own modesty but, upon close inspection, betrays something approaching greatness.

Listen to “Dream” below and keep an eye on this site for more updates from the project.

Midnight Reruns – There’s An Animal Upstairs (Stream)

It’s been a long while since an individual song was featured on this site, a happenstance that’s left the floodgates open and the banks flooded. To that end, there’s a long list of those songs that will be included over the majority of the next few posts- all of those outpourings will, as always, will be accompanied by a featured song. This post’s headlined by a band that’s no stranger to this site but still relatively unknown to the listening world at large: Midnight Reruns.

The band’s sophomore full-length, following an extremely promising debut and a sophomore EP that expanded on that promise, was produced by Tommy Stinson and is due out in a few weeks on Dusty Medical (their first for the label). It’s a hard-charging burst of hook-heavy, punk-leaning rock n’ roll that sounds distinctly Midwest and the assault is led by the surging “There’s An Animal Upstairs”, which– nearly impossibly– also benefits from a genuine sense of breeziness.

Marked by the band’s characteristically formidable dual-guitar attack (something that’s earned them more than a few Thin Lizzy comparisons) and guitarist/vocalist Graham Hunt’s increasingly impressive lyrics, “There’s An Animal Upstairs” takes the already raised bar and kicks it up a few levels. Highlighting this ongoing evolution are the opening lines of a chorus section that floored me on first, second, and 40th listen: “I can feel my proteins burn/and I can feel my atoms/I can feel my stomach churn/and overflow with acid”- a section that hints at what the rest of the album has to offer.

Riding their usual crest of half-drunk Replacements heroics, the song also finds the Milwaukee quartet deepening their grasp on dynamics as well. Everything about “There’s An Animal Upstairs” clicks so well that it practically justifies the awed pre-release compliments its been picking up on its own power. There’s a certain sense of identity that accompanies the song, lending it a considerable amount of power and furthering its immediacy.

Every shift the song takes is maximized for its fullest impact, with each of those hairpin turns navigated with a precision that somehow compliments the songs giddy, shambolic aesthetic. It’s a song of conflicting components that continuously find surprising ways to reconcile and ensure that “There’s An Animal Upstairs” isn’t just great but genuinely memorable. An earworm with an incredible amount of substance, it’s also one of the best songs of the year and should prove more than a little helpful in ensuring Midnight Reruns their proper place on the map.

Listen to “There’s An Animal Upstairs” below, pre-order Force of Nurture from Dusty Medical here, and scan through a long list of some great recent songs beneath the embed.