Hello and welcome to the Rinse. Before we get into the regular comings and goings of this newsletter, I want to start with a tribute.

On Monday, May 4, my wife, Alison, and I said goodbye to our cat, Frank Catstanza. He fought valiantly against IBD, but it eventually won the war. To call Frank a great cat is a understatement. He was a constant presence in our house. He followed us around, corralling us into rooms and supervising any project that we were working on. Was his supervision any good? Of course it wasn’t—he was a nosy cat. In addition to the following, he showed Alison and I tons of love on a day-in-day-out basis, finding new and innovative ways to sit with us. But, he wasn’t just friendly to us. Frank was the ultimate greeter, showing hospitality to and curiosity in anyone who came into the house. To meet Frank was to love Frank. Everyone, from cat people to people who disliked cats, fell for our big ginger cat with his soft fur, loud purr, and his aggressive friendliness. While our house now misses his presence, he will live on in our hearts forever.

Ok, now with the sad part out of the way, let’s get into our regular affairs. As one might suspect, I’ve been slightly distracted. That said, I always have an obsession.

10,000 Maniacs is probably best known for the version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Because The Night.” However, one of their earliest singles is this one from their 1989 album Blind Man’s Zoo. This album is good. Do you need to run out and listen to it? No, unless you’ve decided that wearing a blazer, oxford shirt, and high-waisted stonewashed jeans while reading poetry is an important part of your lifestyle.

One of the strongest songs on this album is “Trouble Me,” a pop song led by the vocals of a young Natalie Merchant. It charted; it was a reasonably popular song and got them on late night television, when that still meant a lot. These points are all really secondary to my primary concern with this song. They, as a band, signed off on the following video:

I actually don’t want to be super negative because it’s nice to see older women being joyful together. But, this takes place in Chautauqua in 1989 according to the video’s caption. Does it feel like 1989? Does Merchant’s wardrobe suggest 1989? Furthermore, 10,000 Maniacs is a college rock band. Their primary audience is people in their late teens and early 20s. Does this extremely sincere video speak to them? Can it? I don’t think it’s actually a bad video, but I do find it perplexing.

I’ve spent the better part of the last 15 or so years being really into Times New Viking. I can imagine that a number of you have no idea of who they are. That’s reasonable as they never got huge, not really making the underground to mainstream indie crossover. Times New Viking is (they’ve recently started playing together again) a trio from Columbus, Ohio. They were at the forefront of a subgenre called “shitgaze.” If you listen to their music, their classification in this genre makes total sense. I’ll link to a video in a second, but I’ll describe the fidelity of their music to you first.

Take a basic microphone, something like a Shure SM-58, and plug it into a Tascam four-track cassette recorder. Then take that microphone and put it in the center of a basement. Have all of the members of your band play the songs as loudly as they can while shouting into microphones. Can you hear the hissing, muddled sound in your head, with each instrument bleeding into the other and the vocals lost in a sea of noise? If you can, you’ve effectively simulated the sound of Times New Viking for their first two albums, Dig Yourself and Present The Paisley Reich, which were released on noted underground label Siltbreeze. They moved over to Matador and then Merge for their final three albums. Those albums got an improvement of sound quality, but it wasn’t massive. While this might make it seem like they just used noise to cover up shit songwriting, that wasn’t true. The band wrote very good songs that were inspired by the lyricism of Robert Pollard, the frontman of the extremely prolific Guided by Voices.

This band is always on my mind because their song “Skull Versus Wizard” contains one of my personal favorite lyrics: “I make the same mistake everyday/ I wake up and go outside.” They came up again because I thought of “Another Day” from their album Rip It Off. A short, melancholy song that hit really hard this week. This song always worked for me, and I was just happy to get it back in the rotation.

When I think about epic house tracks, I think of a few things such as Hardrive’s “Deep Inside,” Daft Punk’s “Rollin’ and Scratchin’,” and Mr. Fingers’s “Can You Feel It?”. Another one on that list is Etienne De Crecy’s “Prix Choc.” On his Super Discount compilation, which features other luminaries of French techno as Air and Alex Gopher, this song is a clear standout. Is it the most complex song? Absolutely not, but it wants to get you to move on the dance floor and it does that exceedingly well. I remember first experiencing this song on an exchange trip to France, and I then lost track of it for about a decade even though its beat was stuck in my head. I eventually remembered the song, and it hasn’t left since. If you find yourself needing to move for like 9 minutes or so, I can’t recommend this track enough. And if you watch the video, you get to watch dudes do judo for three minutes as the song plays.

Tacoma Radar, No One Waved Goodbye

As one might suspect from the beginning of this newsletter, I was feeling particularly sad at the beginning of the week. What music is better for being sad than slowcore, maybe one of the saddest genres of music around. Tacoma Radar are a Scottish slowcore band that released this album back in 2004 to crickets. The Numero Group, the label whose goal is to rescue excellent albums from obscurity, have rereleased this album, and they have done us all a great service.

Unlike many slowcore albums, which revel in empty space and torpor, the nine songs on No One Waved Goodbye play with a variety of dynamics and create an excellent backing for the gentle vocals and melancholy lyrics of Jennifer Cosgrove. If you are a fan of either Galaxie 500 or the American Analog Set, you will find a lot to enjoy here.

The Reds, Pinks, and Purples, Acknowledge Kindness

This newsletter has been a long-time supporter of San Franciscan Glenn Donaldson’s indie pop project The Reds, Pinks, and Purples. He is prolific and his standard of quality is extremely high. There is no such thing as a bad Reds, Pinks, and Purples albums. You certainly can prefer one over the other, but none of them are bad.

On the band’s previous album, 2024’s Unwishing Well, Donaldson slowed down the tempos a bit and made everything a bit more atmospheric. That transition continues on this album. Some of the songs are heavy on acoustics while others have the feeling of The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees in the 80s. While every one of the band’s albums have had a darkness to them, they are a bit more on the surface of this album, accompanied by plenty of beautiful instrumentation. In short, it is another strong outing from Donaldson even if the vibe is more goth and less college rock.

Nondi_, Nondi…

Nondi_ is an electronic artist hailing from Pennsylvania and signed to Planet Mu, a clearinghouse for those who are interested in pushing the boundaries of both electronic music and club music. On Nondi…, Nondi_ takes those boundaries and absolutely incinerates them. Any variety of home electronic and club styles can be heard on this album, and she plays them off of each other with great skill and finesse. The album feels in harmony, not just like an exercise or a flex. She has clearly thought about how all of it should fit together and flow, making this a joyful 45-minute listening experience. If you are interested in reaching the outer limits of what can be possible in electronic music, I think you should listen to this album.

Asphyxiation, “What Is This Thing Called ‘Disco’?”

Hailing from Melbourne, this quartet made a one-off album in 1981 that fused art school aesthetics with post-punk and disco. When one thinks about the fusion of post-punk and disco, something like ESG or Liquid Liquid might come to mind, and that’s reasonable. Unlike those bands, Asphyxiation leaned more into the post-punk side of the balance, adding copious of amounts of synthesizer and saxophone to their sound.

While they tend to be more on the abstract side, there are still grooves present on tracks like “Aural Risk” and “Blurred Movement.” I haven’t really heard something like this before, but I found it compelling and hypnotic in equal parts. The overall album is both a time capsule of what art school students were making musically in the early 1980s and an excellent album that still holds up today.

Cola, Cost of Living Adjustment

A possibly self-titled album from this trio of Canadian rock minimalists. This new release, their third album, continues playing with their guitar-bass-drums setup by letting go of some of the enforced simplicity of their previous recordings. They play songs with a couple more chords and flourishes, and the music on the whole is brighter and peppier while maintaining a hypnotic minimal beauty. Some bands will change everything in the effort to make a step forward. That is not necessary at all, and this album is a clear example of that.

Loraine James, Detached from the Rest of You

Loraine James, as I have asserted in this newsletter, is one of the best electronic producers working right now. Her music, rooted in both abstract and club electronic styles, is singular in its ability to synthesize these sounds into something truly distinct. In addition, her music’s ability to excavate her personal life as well as the world around her is astonishing. On this album, she enlists the help of such luminaries as Tirzah, Alan Sparhawk of Low, and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, among others, to create a powerhouse of an album. She calls this album her pop star album, and while I disagree with that heartily, it is a phenomenal piece of experimental electronic music by a producer who only continues to grow.

Kacey Musgraves, Middle of Nowhere

After a bit of a misfire with Deeper Well, I was wondering what Kacey Musgraves was going to do next. She showed us with this album. She got back to Texas, wrote songs that celebrated her home state’s rich history, and created music that represented it well. With all the disco balls and sequins, it can be easy to forget that Musgraves is very good at bread-and-butter country songwriting, telling everyday stories full of fine detail. This comes out both in her solo songs as well as her collaborations with Billy Strings, Willie Nelson, and Miranda Lambert, among others. It’s good to have this Kacey back with us. I hope that she can stick around for a while.

That’s all from me this week. If you enjoy what you’ve read, please tell a friend about this and get them to subscribe. Please take care of yourselves and each other. Pet a dog or cat if they are cool with it. And keep hope alive for the Knicks in these playoffs. I know that the Spurs and Thunder are out there along with the Pistons, but if we can do nothing else in this world, we can dream.