Gossip Wolf has never bought into the theory that punk gets better when it has a bigoted, incompetent Republican administration to rail against. (And Americans certainly didn’t consider that when they flushed the current one!) But in case you feel like cherry-picking supporting evidence, Chicago hardcore band Wrong War provided some on Election Day in the form of their anvil-heavy debut LP, Fixed Against Forever. The veteran crew—former Ottawa and Current singer Matt Weeks, guitarist Patrick Keenan, bassist Dave Pawlowski, and drummer Dan Smith—retch up a projectile of feral, rumbling riffs that delivers a hearty “fuck you” to the Trump era. The video for “First Shot Misses” uses footage from Dan Dinello and Tom Corboy’s film Pink Triangles Rising that shows the LGBTQ+ community confronting a neo-Nazi rally intended to disrupt the 1982 Chicago Pride Parade; it was directed by Dinello’s son Bryan.
Gossip Wolf recently got hip to Jonn Wallen, who makes synth-based experimental music as Oui Ennui. In October, he and Chicago multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Angel Bat Dawid teamed up as Daoui to release the full-length collaboration Message From the Daoui. And last Friday, Oui Ennui dropped (Nos)+Algebra, a serene ambient solo EP made by digitally processing cassette recordings of synth loops and then subjecting them to cassette-tape delay. Standout track “1063 Prospect Blvd.” ends with what sounds like a symphony’s worth of strings playing from the bottom of a well.
The Reader last checked in on Jamal Moss, aka Hieroglyphic Being, shortly after he dropped The Pleiadian Agenda in July—at that point he’d put out a dozen progressive-house full-lengths since March, and since then he’s added ten more releases to the stack! This wolf recommends browsing his Bandcamp page starting with the latest, the crunchy 4 the Ones Who Know, and working backward.  v
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