Welcome back to Top8. Apparently two weeks have passed, but I cannot account for the passage of time. By the time you are reading this, I will already be underway with the fall semester, which longtime readers will know, means that I am near death and about to balance myself on the razor's edge for the next few months. Music is there for me in these times, and I know it is for you in your hard or weird times too.
Over the past week, I got to watch the Perseids and celebrate a dear friend's birthday. I also listened to "Masterpiece" by Big Thief at least 60 times while something other than sober. Interesting days. I also caught the Jeff Buckley documentary at the Floralee. It's a flawed but overall excellent film and a must watch for Buckley fans. And of course that means that I have been listening to a lot of his music recently too.
Send your on repeat tracks to wtsq.org/contact.
Ligature - Stained
First, a mea culpa, I should have included Ligature's new track, "Stained" in the last Top8. I just plain forgot to. I usually add the songs for Top8 to a playlist in progress before ultimately going back through them and picking the final version. With this song, I forgot to add it, so I forgot to include it.
Ligature is a band out of Huntington and our own Big had Em from the band on Bugswrrrld back at the end of July. I was really impressed with this track and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss out on sharing it with you. "Stained" is the kinda Deftones inspired shoegaze with 90s nu metal elements that the kids love these days. Turns out that you and I can listen to it too, and you should. First of all because it fucks. Secondly because we were around for this music the first time around. It's awesome to see it come back around again.
Also interesting that, when I wrote that paragraph, I assumed that THE KIDS were not reading Top8. Which is true, I guess. Hell, I don't think anyone reads this at all. If you're reading this now, what is wrong with you anyway? I am just here because of my decade-long hyperfixation on the radio station and my inability to say no to projects.
I've really gotten off track here. The point is: "Stained" is loud and crunchy and soft and dreamy and it does all those things just the way it needs to. The vocals soar, the screamy bits rage, the band thrashes gloriously. There's an anthemic quality here that begs to be heard in a room with your pals and a White Claw. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, I hope to hear a lot more from this band.
Forth Wanderers - To Know Me/To Love Me
I love it when a guitar amp sounds like it is straight up broken. There is some excellent distorted brokenness on "To Know Me/To Love Me". The band is Forth Wanderers and they are out of New Jersey or something along those lines. They more or less broke up a while back after getting started initially about a decade ago. Recently, they thought they'd give playing together another go, and so here's this album. There's a pleasingly lumbering thing happening on this track. A sludgy, growly guitar foundation upon which is built a big alt rock mass of femme vocals and music that is both familiar and a little adventurous. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but it feels like a track you make with people you've been playing with for a while.
Teen Suicide - Fade 2 Blue
Every band cares how they sound, obviously. That's the whole deal with music. But Teen Suicide really, really care. Every single track has a careful, almost delicate aesthetic executed as anything from a seemingly random sound collage, to a painstakingly careful lofi dirge, to songs like this. "Fade 2 Blue" is half of a single which is the first new music from the band since 2022. Something I love about Teen Suicide is how they manage immerse themselves so fully into an intentional home-recordings sound while never sounding overly precious about it. "Fade 2 Blue" has a little bit of a Weezer vibe creeping in around the edges, but not so much that you'd ever mistake one for the other. Teen Suicide seem pretty happy living in the bedroom or the garage recording brilliant songs like this, full of fuzzed out guitars or vocals that sound like they were salvaged from an old voicemail tape, or lost, disembodied voices haunting an analog tape machine. I really like this band.
Racing Mount Pleasant - Your New Place
When Lou sent me this, I said, "this is like if BC,NR were still good." And I am standing by that. Black Country, New Road went to hell so fast that I have basically already forgotten that they were still together. That said it's not really fair to start this off talking about BC,NR when the band in question is Racing Mount Pleasant.
"Your New Place" is an unironically ironic, theatrical track with some saxophone, strings, and a bit of alt rock grist and dramatic close, sad vocals. Besides Black Country, New Road, this is also something that fans of middle-era Beach Boys, Magnetic Fields, The Polyphonic Spree, or (more modernly) Mei Semones might like. There's something about the Sturm und Drang of the whole that that really resonates with me.
Wombo - S.T. Titled
You all probably already know about Wombo. The Louisville three piece, post-punk geniuses have been favorites here at WTSQ since I first played them on Attention Please. Or maybe it was Mya who played them first. Or maybe it was Brad. Regardless, we love Wombo. The new album is called "Danger in Fives" and its truly fucking excellent. I am featuring "S.T. Titled" here but I could easily have picked other songs from the album. This is the kind of post-punk with energetic, angular bass lines and ripping guitars. Think of bands like Wire or The Slits or more recently of Gustaf or Squid. There's an underlying anxiety in "S.T. Titled" which I think suits me. put this on and dance nervously.
Prohibition Prohibition - Riga
If ever there was a track I would have played on Attn Pls, this is it. Over 11 minutes of slow burning, post-punk rage, and minor key sadness. It's like they made this for me specifically. "Riga" is a proper epic of a track. It stretches out its ideas without ever feeling long. Just before you know it, it's 8 min later, and the song is not even close to being done. This is a journey.
Teethe - Iron Wine
"Iron Wine" is a quiet-loud-quiet track with some teeth. Which is a sentence I wrote without thinking about the fact that the band is called "Teethe". I love this track because it takes its time getting where it's going, but it makes quite a racket getting there. The vocals are quiet and shoegazey, but the crunch is positively violent.
Just Mustard - We Were Just Here
I have been into Just Mustard for a while now. They are part of a significant resurgence of Irish bands over the last several years. Like many of their peers, there is often a brooding darkness in their music. That's the case with "We Were Just Here." It feels like something that should be listened to at night. Katie Bell's vocals are reverbed to hell, and the band comes in with a buzzing synthy sound supported by this throbbing giant bass line. This is the first song off the new album, and I am looking forward to more.
And this week's extra innings. I am featuring three of my favorite Jeff Buckley tracks.
Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye
If you've ever had a break up with someone you don't hate, this is a song for you. This is off of the extraordinary debut "Grace". The whole album is soaked in the sadness of a breakup Buckley experienced shortly into his music career, the story of which is told in the documentary I mentioned earlier.
Jeff Buckley - Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan cover) (Live at Sin-e)
One of the things that made Jeff so brilliant was the enormous range of influences he had. "Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae" is from the Live at Sin-e album which is my absolute favorite of his, and one of my favorite albums by anyone. This is one I'd take to a desert island. I love that the audience thinks he's just taking the piss when he starts singing, but very quickly realizes he is GOING FOR IT. This is obviously not the first time he's sung this. It's a brilliant translation of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwali music into a white kid with a telecaster singing in a cafe in NYC. Jeff had this kind of range. He could nail an Edith Piaf song or utterly transform a Leonard Cohen song. And all this made his originals that much richer. P.S. – there is a really lovely story about Jeff meeting Nusrat in the documentary.
Jeff Buckley - Grace (Live at Sin-e)
LIke I said, Sin-e is my favorite. My favorite version of every song he did is the one on this album. Don't get me wrong, "Grace" is an amazing album, but the Sin-e performances are just perfect crystalized moments. You feel NYC at this point in time. You feel the intimate closeness of the performance. And the utterly perfect quality of the performances. Jeff was an extraordinary guitarist and probably the best vocalist in the rock idiom since Freddie Mercury, if not of all time.
And a playlist with everything.
Thank you all for reading and listening.
-emily