WITLW: November 16, 2025
Problematic rock stars, discovering music thanks to autocorrect, and uncategorizable pop music out of Austin. Plus everything else I listened to last week!
What I Listened To Last Week:
And Always Forever: Night 2 @ The Echo/Echoplex 🎤
Red House Painters - Old Ramon
A month ago I predicted that Poor Image’s self-titled debut would get me into slowcore. Well I was right. I listened to three Red House Painters albums this week and Old Ramon was by far my favorite. The songwriting is very close to the unvarnished autobiographical style certified-bad-guy Mark Kozelek would develop, perfect and then get carried away with on his subsequent Sun Kil Moon project. but the instrumentation has a lot more heft than those records. This is still a proper rock band doing proper rock band things, churning out chunky riffs and bittersweet melodies that march along with the resolute air of a good funeral dirge. Every song reads as a screed of regret, the bitter tears of time dripping down pockmarked cheeks turned toward a fading sunset. Just the type of shit I’m on these days.
Dreary - Wilt
Shoutout to typos. I was looking up UK dream pop duo deary on the recommendation of a Bandcamp comment (still haven’t listened) but accidentally dropped an extra “r” in there somewhere and what do you know, this insanely heavy hardcore group out of Fontana, CA popped up instead. I suppose it was kismet given that they dropped their debut EP less than two months ago. I don’t normally go for this kind of stuff but the melodies on here are undeniable, and lead singer Natalie Orosco’s voice festers with a quiet intensity capable of punching through the band’s wall of sound onslaught. Plus she can really scream too. Gotta get this band out to LA!
Cicada - CICADA 2
More like ear 2. Cicada is Luko M and Violet Better, two young Brooklynites making music that falls roughly into the whole indie-folktronica wave that’s been sweeping through all the cool corners of the internet as of late. I checked out Luko’s latest solo record Clutch back in September and enjoyed what I heard, he’s got a great ear for samples, sweet and sticky spirals of sound that hold songs together with their centripetal force. I enjoyed this record too, at least the parts that didn’t sound so much like ear. To be fair, they’re a lot more guitar-centric than their wellspring, but it’s hard not to think of that other digi-twee duo with every half-mumbled refrain and sporadic vocal glitch. The strongest tracks are the ones that play things a little more head-on, like “Hoop’s” endless dulcimeric loop or “Post Office’s” jazzy trip-hop slink, stuff that isn’t so concerned with hiding its hand.
Felt Out - Are You With Me?
Felt Out is the project of husband-and-wife duo Sowmya Somanath and Walter Nichols, two Austin-based musicians who have been mining a sweeping brand of experimental pop music for close to a decade now. Previous releases have encompassed late 00s bloghaus, mid-10s vaporwave, peak-COVID hyperpop, and that’s just scratching the surface. They’ve labelled this latest album trip-hop but, the residual influence of all that previous genre work can be felt as well, along with the incorporation of more ambient elements such as drone and field recording. If what I’m describing sounds unwieldy it’s because it is, but only in the best of ways. Like a giant teddy bear you struggle to bring home from the fair, there’s just so much to love you can’t quite wrap your arms around it.
SOTW: Red House Painters - “Cruiser”
Is this the greatest song about LA ever written? Probably not, but that’s not a fun thing to blog, so I will say yes, this is the greatest song about LA ever written. Never mind that a good chunk of the lyrics are Kozelek waxing poetic about his “exotic” Japanese girlfriend (yikes) instead focus on the way he renders the city’s evenings (”Purple nights”), or it’s odd congruency with the Pacific (”pavement meets the sand”), or how it appears from the window of a plane (”glitters on the ground”), simple lines that will bring to mind a thousand images for anyone who’s spent time here. But pretty descriptions only go so far and “Cruiser” goes farther, capturing the city’s primal character as a beacon of perfection that simultaneously charms you with its ease and spurns you with its incessance. It’s a cosmic joke of a place, and you either get it or you don’t.