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It is both fitting and kind of sweet that instead of a bio or blurb under the track listing for Strawberry Hotel on Bandcamp, Underworld have put just three words: “Please don’t shuffle…” Rick Smith and Karl Hyde have been at this for quite a while (if you go back to their pre-Underworld band, over four decades) but when you actually listen to the record their request doesn’t come off like just old-timers raging against the algorithmic, streaming dying of the light. There are definitely LPs that could be listened to any which way without too much of a negative effect, but Strawberry Hotel is such a sprawling, patchwork travelogue of a record that jumbling it all up does feel like a risky proposition. Hyde and Smith want the listener to have the Underworld experience with this one, and they’ve done their part. You can imagine them wincing at someone having a subpar time with the shuffle button.

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Photo by Roman Koblov

A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale. Eight pieces start with one note from a standard scale and unspool outwards. Each is split down the middle with either the Selke brothers or Hirano starting and the other finishing.

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Prism Shores shrouds indie rock vulnerability in shimmering washes of guitar noise. A flickering confession erupts into grand romantic gestures, as radiant jangle shimmers and dissolves into dissonance. This is the second full-length album for this Montreal-based foursome, following 2022’s Inside my Diving Bell, and they have considerably cleaned up their sound in the interim. Tight harmonies, clear lines of melodic arc and sharp interplay between the instruments bring their heartsore firestorm into focus.

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“Sludge” and “drone” are two musical monikers frequently attached to records put out by Texas three-piece behemoth USA/Mexico. There are trackable reasons for invoking the terms, but neither is adequate to the maximal slurry of sound the band unleashes. Sludge bands tend to be riff worshipers, but while there are distinct patterns in the two compositions (if that’s what we want to call the tracks — “songs” feels wrong…) included on Live in Paris, there aren’t riffs. Rather, the compositions articulate something anterior to the riff, an atavistic throwback to something more primeval. And drone? That might be a somewhat more accurate term for what USA/Mexico has released into the world. But there’s something intrinsically highfalutin about drone music — it inevitably comes with an artistic concept. Concept? These tracks don’t even have names. They are events. They happened. Someone recorded them. Beyond those bare existential facts, there isn’t a lot to say about “Side A” and “Side B,” because there isn’t a lot to think about them. You listen and you feel.

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A bridge can provide a path from one place to another, but it can also be a means of suspension. If you match title to sound-induced association, A Bridge Over The Lagoon acts more as the latter; at a minimum, it’s auditorily faithful to an environment in which nothing happens fast. It is the debut LP of Last Light, which comprises Ben Spiers and Dean Brown.

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Rose City Band albums typically arrive at the onset of summer, the first humid, budding, insect humming weeks of May for instance, where their indolent strumming and wistful melodies overlay the early days of summer with a sonic haze. This one comes in the dead of winter, still sunny, still breezy but with a frisson of chilliness somewhere in the mix.

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Tindersticks

We missed a few. We always do. December is always a month for catching up on other peoples’ favorites, checking out lists, listening to radio and discovering that, as rich and crowded as our collection of favorites was, we didn’t get to everything. In this annual feature, Dusted writers celebrate the ones that almost got away. Contributors include Bill Meyer, Patrick Masterson, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Ian Mathers and Bryon Hayes.

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The Fleshtones out of Queens, NYC, have been riffing on monsters since you were in diapers. Their break-out Hexbreaker from 1983, featured the vamping sing-along, “Screaming Skull,” and they’re often compared to the Cramps for their cartoonish horror fixation. The band first dallied with lycanthropy with the 2000 single “Face of the Screaming Werewolf,” and they’re back for more in this, their 20th album, an absolute hoot of a disc that shows no signs of age or frailty.

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We stand in awe of the poetic weirdness of David Lynch and mourn his loss.