Matthew Culnane

Rockingham County is in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and Dogwood Tales have packed it into this album: a song named after Ralph Sampson, the town’s most famous basketball player; McDonald’s Coke and high school football in “McMemories”; a friend in tears over a plate of fried chicken in “Angel Dreams”. “Mt. Jackson” goes from Kyle Grim’s uncle in a hospital bed to the bills that follow. It’s an album of big feelings in small places.

MJ Lenderman, who has songs called “Dan Marino” and “Toontown”, is the obvious comparison, though Grim and Ben Ryan play their own “Ralph Sampson” and “Princess Peach” with a straight face instead of Lenderman’s wry smile.

They’ve played together since high school, when both were in pop-punk bands in neighbouring towns, and the opener, “Soundcheck Infinity”, looks back to practice sessions loud enough to draw parental complaints. Perhaps that’s where the touches of Midwest emo come from. Otherwise the debt is to Neil Young. For every pedal steel line there’s a distorted lead or a wash of shoegaze, and the songs mostly move at their own unhurried pace. The standout for me is “Shield”, the longest thing here at five minutes, which starts slowly before vanishing into a wall of fuzz.

Bondo have good taste. The first song, ‘On The Cross’, starts out like Mogwai’s ‘R U Still In 2 It’, and the second, ‘Listen Back’, like Slowdive’s ‘Dagger’. The third, ‘Strummer’, could be an outtake from Slint’s Spiderland. In each case the resemblance is fleeting and the song ends up somewhere else, so Bondo are hardly short of ideas. The references just tell you what’s in their record collections.

So you’ll have a sense of the sound already: post-rock, slowcore, shoegaze. You can hear Tortoise, Codeine and Duster in there too. Some songs meander along glacially, while others, like ‘Brian Screams’, are propelled by guitars and loud vocals. All the name-dropping is only there to anchor you. This record is a great modern example of the sound, and the songs are expansive and easy to get lost in.

I said in September’s recap that I’d give this another couple of spins, and I’m glad I did: it opens up the more you play it. At the time I called it ‘slowcore-ish’, which is true as far as it goes.

This is perhaps Death Cab for Cutie’s best record in a decade. It’s haunted by Ben Gibbard’s divorce, and the title is his image for compartmentalising grief: a tower to lock the marriage away in while the band toured old albums for their twentieth anniversaries. The tower is also a cage. On ‘Full of Stars’ she accuses him of walling her in, and by ‘I Built You a Tower (a)’ he’s trying to keep her inside it, and failing.

Gibbard has said he wouldn’t make Kintsugi, his first divorce record, again. This time he set out to leave the bitterness behind, and no single party carries the blame here. It opens with an apology and closes with a kind of acceptance: he’s getting used to life without her, and still thinks about little else. His sighing, plaintive voice suits these lyrics.

The band sound punchier than they have for a while. Bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr are on fine form and sit well in the mix. The whole thing was recorded in only three weeks, the five of them in one room, but nothing sounds rushed. You get the sense Gibbard walked into the studio knowing exactly what to do with these songs. ‘Stone Over Water’, a song about convincing everyone you’re fine, combines its introspective lyrics with a very catchy chorus: “I’m trying to hold it together / Trying to take the first step”. You almost believe him.

I only knew a few Aldous Harding songs before Train On The Island, and the first listen was fairly hard going. None of the melodies stood out, and I had no idea what she was singing about, so it wasn’t much fun. It rewards repeat listens, though. A few months on, it’s become a favourite. I’m no closer to understanding the lyrics, but the songs have slowly unravelled and lodged themselves in my head. A good example, appropriately enough, is ‘Worms’. The way in was the arrangement: Hammond organ and Joe Harvey-Whyte’s pedal steel over slow piano.

The production is delicate. Piano dominates, but plenty else comes and goes, from the synth textures on the opener, ‘I Ate The Most’, to details you only catch after several listens. Harding’s own voice is a shapeshifter: her register changes from song to song as needed. It all adds up to dreamlike art pop that tends at times towards folk and psych.

The lyrics are another matter. They’re very abstract, and to get anywhere with them you have to zoom right in. Even then you’re inferring from tone and imagery rather than sentence structure or literal meaning. Collect enough pieces of the puzzle and perhaps the whole picture will eventually reveal itself. I’m still collecting.

In the summer I wasn’t sure Florida Water Blues matched blame the clown, Twisted Teens’ first album of the year. Two months on, the earlier record is still a little more immediate, but this one might have more staying power.

The dominant feeling is overload. Take a typical song and almost every component is pushing into the red. Caspian Hollywell plays most of the instruments, but you notice his deep, gnarly vocals and scratchy riffs first. Behind them are a drum machine and RJ Santos’s pedal steel. The net result is equal parts garage punk and country. Within that template, it’s about as close as they could come to a comedown record. The beating sun of blame the clown is setting (the closer is, helpfully, called ‘Sun Go Down’).

The melodies are strong throughout, which is all the more impressive given how much they release: a third album, The Holy Cross Tigers, is due from Sub Pop on 6 November. Lyrically, it’s great, and the wry lines come faster than you can catch them. The title track opens with “had about a hundred beers of solitude”. Simon Price has reworked a Dolly Parton quip for the Ramones: ‘it takes a lot of brains to sound this dumb’. I’d extend the compliment to Hollywell and Santos.