Our weekly podcast includes in-depth analysis of the new albums we find extraordinary, exciting, and just plain terrible. This week, Reviews Editor Jeremy D. Larson hosts Senior Editor Anna Gaca and Contributing Editor Philip Sherburne, as they delve into some lesser-known records from 2022 that they love: the mesmerizing jazz of Jeff Parker’s Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, the ambient bliss of Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka’s Languoria, viscerally intense rapper $ilkMoney’s I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore, and more.
Listen to this week’s episode below, and follow The Pitchfork Review here. You can also check out an excerpt of the podcast’s transcript below.
Anna Gaca: I want to talk about an album that I encountered through my colleagues here at Pitchfork, they tell me about so much great music. The band is called Shake Chain and their album is called Snake Chain—a beguiling combination of names.
Philip Sherburne: An SEO fail. [laughter]
Jeremy D. Larson: Love it.
Gaca: Shake Chain are a four-piece from London. We all know about wordless choruses, your “la la la”s and “hey hey hey”s and so forth. And there are so many songs on this record where I think there are lyrics and I think they’re in English, but you’d be lucky to catch a word here and there. It sounds so cursed. The singer, Kate Mahony, is shrieking, she’s quivering, she’s on the verge of tears, she’s actively sobbing. It’s like: What’s your favorite, screaming and crying and throwing up? And the whole time the music is this raw, messy, explosive garage rock. It sounds really cheap, like they just let off 40 boxes of fireworks that fell off the back of a truck. I just love it. It’s so intense. It’s this vision of a world that is so ominous. There’s no way to react except by howling and sobbing. The overall atmosphere of it is really unlike anything else, maybe outside of metal.
Larson: It reminds me of Diamanda Galás fronting a new wave band. The vocals are definitely an acquired taste. But I highly recommend listening to this album super loud because I don’t think it will make sense any other way. This needs to hurt you a little bit, and that’s where the pleasure comes in. That’s my take on Shake Chain and their album Snake Chain—I feel like the naming of that is typo-core. [laughter]
Gaca: It is typo-core.
