The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
Sometimes an album’s title tells you nothing about what you’re going to hear.
Titles can mean something to the artist, but too opaque to help with better understanding a work. The phonetic alphabet has a certain synergy with Wilco’s radio shorthand name, but the words Yankee Hotel Foxtrot offer no real insight into the genre-blurring masterpiece. Albums can share their title with an inscrutably named track, like “Swing Lo Magellan” / Swing Lo Magellan by Dirty Projectors. Familiarity with both Dirty Projectors and 15th Portuguese explorers isn’t enough to divine a sense of sound from that. Even a self-titled album isn’t a safe bet. In theory, they should be emblematic of an artist’s output, but just like no man steps in the same river twice, aside from the Strokes, no one makes the same music twice.1 Is St. Vincent the album that most represents nearly two decades of music from Annie Clark?2 What about bands who go to the eponymous well multiple times? Which Weezer, Led Zeppelin, or Van Halen is the one that should serve as shorthand for the band’s output?3
Hornet Disaster does not lack a statement of purpose or suffer from ambiguity. The LP’s side-one, track-one song is called “Hornet Disaster,” and the album as a whole radiates the the sort of assaultive, welt-inducing energy that could conceivably come from a hornet disaster.4 The second full-length album by Swedish artist Sputnik using the Weatherday alias is a 16-song swarm of buzzing, stinging, often-angry emo-adjacent noise pop. It’s not a smooth listen, but for listeners who can connect with paint-peeling noise and sad boy whinging that occasionally bubbles over into omnidirectional wounded outbursts, there’s no finer substitute in 2025.
That noise, likely to be fabulous to some and a deal-breaker to others, is Hornet Disaster‘s calling card. It’s a patina of vibrating discordance that envelopes just about every second of the album, like a huddled mass of peeved insects. Even the chipper opening moments of “Hornet Disaster,” which recall a similar upbeat greeting on Jane’s Addiction’s “Stop,” sound like they’re being delivered through the haunted — or just defective — intercom from Disco Elysium. Whether a song, like “Meanie” is built on hard-charging guitar pyrotechnics; indulges in some folktronica, like “Green Tea Seaweed Sea,” or leans into lovelorn signifiers with acoustic guitar, like “Heartbeats,” there’s a good chance that at least one instrument sounds like it’s being played through several of Sleigh Bells‘ discarded, blown-out amps.
On the slower tracks, this adds an interesting friction. “Ripped Apart By Hands,” sounds like a straightforward folk-punk track, the sort of thing that’d be on an AJJ album.5 That’s a pretty cool basal sound, but it gains texture when space alien vocals beam in from some twinkling star to sing “Can’t recognize myself/ Not that I’ve tried to/ Bleed through every favorite place/ I guess/ I’d like to.” The song’s sound underscores that distance and disorientation. All that buzzing feedback and a penchant for colliding sounds also adds grandeur and bombast to the LP’s loan epic, “Nostalgia Drive Avatar” — especially its almost punishing last minute.
On the plentiful, bite-sized and faster-paced songs, the effect is more immediate. Sputnik has chops, and there’s about 60 years of evidence that suggests listening to blown-out guitar can be a joy. When that deliciously crunchy wailing careens with the chaotic energy of a Super Ball, as is often the case on Hornet Disaster, it can sweep you away in a sublime wave of feral energy. Put on “Tiara” to do housecleaning, and there’s a good chance you’ll demolish a loadbearing wall.
While Hornet Disaster is always interesting and more often than not enjoyable, it does have a couple weak points. The LP was winnowed down from a pool of 70 songs, and the cutting could’ve continued. There’s no outright clunkers on the album, but some of its 19 tracks are more equal than others. It’s easy to envision a tighter, more digestible version if the LP with no skippable tracks after some extremely light pruning.
The album’s other considerable drawback is Sputnik’s singing. Their voice isn’t bad, but it has a lamenting-but-flat quality reminiscent of Rivers Cuomo. That’s a voice that’s sold an improbably number of albums, but put to its best use on shorter LPs. Sometimes that relative blankness serves the material, sometimes it doesn’t. However, to the album’s immense benefit Sputnik, unlike Cuomo, seems comfortable letting their mask of stoic sanity slip in the form of a wounded wail or unhinged scream.6 The bigger the swing, the better it plays with the more-is-more production choices. The way the raw-throated Tasmanian devil shrieks at the end of “Hug” melt into frothing guitar din is wonderful. It’s rare that an album’s strengths and weaknesses can find common ground and complement each other, but Hornet Disaster is that kind of LP, and it turns any quibbles into minor blips drowned out by a wall of vespine vibes.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Kids In The Hall, Season Two, Episode Eighteen
– “Ah, men! You’re right! I must increase my self-loathing quotient. Man! Man! Man!”
– “I’m always late, Shona. Adapt.”
– “Is that the desk of an idiot, Henderson?!”
– “Suffice to say the clog was this close to being a felony.”
– “I know it was a bad joke, but it was a plunger joke, and that’s what I was in the market for!”
– “To err is human. To spread for me, divine.”
– “I used to wear nylons on my legs to do temp work. Now I wear them on my face to stop sexism.”
– “Actually, once, I hit on a woman with only one leg.”
Kojak, “Bad Dude” – The titular bad dude is a PI/bounty hunter played with affable menace by football player, bodyguard, and actor Roosevelt Grier. Despite Joe Gores returning as scriptwriter, this one is not very good. It feels like it wants to be a blaxploitation story but no one is sure what do to with that. And we are trading in the sort of stereotypes that go with such a thing. The most interesting thing here is the station house banter between Crocker, Stavros, and Saperstein.
Frasier, “Come Lie with Me” – A confession: I skipped an episode, called “The Friend,” which is probably the most cringeworthy episode of a show that has more than a few painful scenes. So onto this one, where Frasier has trouble coping with first the knowledge that Daphne had sex in his apartment, and then with life with his dad but without Daphne as a buffer as she has decided to move out. The conclusion, with Frasier willfully accepting a story about how Daphne’s boyfriend can’t possibly have sex, is quite funny.
Severance, “Attila,” “Chikhai Bardo,” and “Sweet Vitriol”
To misquote Community, this season will be mentioned by name in my suicide note.
“Attila,” surprisingly, is actually a pretty good episode that feels rooted in the characters and their dilemmas. I especially like how Helly, sideswiped by the revelation that Mark mistakenly slept with Helena, comes back blazing and purposeful, intent on reclaiming the experience with the do-over they both want; this second sex scene appropriately feels both more awkward and more tender. (Britt Lower does a great job playing Helena as icy and polished and Helly as fiery and feral; you can even see a difference in the way she walks.) Gretchen developing feelings for innie Dylan, who engages with her totally in a way his outie counterpart no longer does, is also nice. The characters even reasonably share information with each other, allowing for more interaction and more story possibilities! It’s not exactly racing forward in terms of plot–though the accelerated reintegration at the end is a good step in that regard–but it feels like the show getting back to its SF roots in terms of thoroughly exploring the human implications of its core idea and doing so in character-illuminating ways that are interesting and involving.
Then “Chikhai Bardo” and “Sweet Vitriol” go back to being fancy, beautifully photographed and performed stalling, offering the signifiers of prestige but not much actual meaning. Look, everyone’s doing a great job–I’ve loved Dichen Lachman since Dollhouse, and I like seeing her get such a well-deserved showcase, but very little here feels like it matters, and a little of it would go a long way. Her first couple courtship scenes with Mark were cute and a nice way to draw us into caring about their relationship in its own right, but the miscarriage tragedy is a replay of what we’ve already heard about, and having it lead into the Lumon-controlled fertility treatments just give us deliberately vague half-answers, one of the show’s specialties at this point. It’s getting off on being withholding. Just tell me already! So help me, if even one more person has an elliptical conversation about Cold Harbor, I’m going to scream!
“Sweet Vitriol” is even worse on that front, but I was so annoyed with it that I don’t even want to talk about it. Cool revelation, gorgeous new setting, but it never feels to me like this one justifies its own existence.
Two big points of annoyance for this night’s set of episodes: 1) After “Trojan’s Horse” featured Milchick having to vow that he would “tighten the leash” on the innies, one of the things I was most excited about was to see what that would look like. Would he be able to get himself to do it? Milchick treats them all less like people and more like goldfish in need of plastic castle enrichment, but that’s still a step up from the rest of Lumon, and he seemed to genuinely have some of his identity invested in not being out-and-out cruel to people who can perceive his cruelty (as opposed to sending an uncomprehending Miss Casey back to the testing floor after Gemma’s triumphant escape, which was a rare example of something being both pointless and a good, devastating story beat, which he could do without hesitation). Then I watched three episodes with no significant Milchick-MDR interaction at all, so the development I was excited about sort of fizzled out. 2) The Reghabi plot is still extremely frustrating to me. She twice quashes intriguing potential story solutions hatched by main characters I was already invested in: let me at least see more of Mark trying the after-image plan, or Devon trying the (extremely clever) birthing cabin plan! Don’t just have a guest star swoop in to impatiently say those things won’t work! I’m hoping the latter will still come into play later, since it was set up a season ago and it would feel like such a waste to not use it, but the way it was handled here was certainly frustrating. (Devon calling Cobel for help, on the other hand, does not feel set up well at all: it feels like a way to get some main characters back together. This woman stalked your brother and inserted herself into your life under false pretenses, and you have good reason to believe she was also an abusive boss! Why would you conclude that it’s safe to go to her for help?)
You know, seeing weak plotting like what you’re describing here has become insanely funny to me after getting the hang of writing it myself. It’s not even that hard to push the story forward! It’s actually more difficult to keep trying to hold it back! And to no benefit!
Just watched the finale, and there’s actually a one-two punch of clever, surprising plotting that I loved that is, in its own way, massively irritating, because if you knew how to do this, show, why weren’t you doing it the whole time?! So maybe they also find it harder to stall the plot, and they’re mistaking “difficult” for “intrinsically worthy.”
Justified S6, “Fate’s Right Hand” – alright, let’s get this done. Finally taking Boyd down should be easy enough with walking liability Dewey Crowe around, right? Oh. Raylan’s little excursion into Mexico at the start of this episode looks fantastic, and as ever I am intrigued to see Garret Dillahunt turn up in anything. Keeping my fingers crossed that they find something for Ava to do other than sulk.
Think you’ll be happy with where Ava goes this season (also not a fan of her prison storyline which at one point turns on a guy being a creep rather than plot).
That’s good to hear! The prison stuff just felt a bit generic, and I isolating one key character from the rest of the cast is always going to be tricky to pull off.
SATURDAY
Primal
Season 2, Episode 1. “Sea of Despair”. First time.
Season 2 starts right at the end of Season 1, with Spear and Fang looking across the sea as Mira is taken back by slavers, and Spear resolves to build a raft to go and find her. They build it together, though it takes some coaxing for Fang to get on it, then set out to sea. This is a big change, taking them both out of their element, and less well-equipped than they probably imagined, with no shade, tools, sail, oars or food. They make do, but it really had me worried, and they come up with ingenious solutions, such as killing a giant turtle that they use for both food and shade. There’s also a nice, calm interlude where the action stops and we rejoyce with them in the majesty of the ocean. Of course, peace can never last too long here, so they have to fend off some flying dinos and even one scary fucking megalodon, while losing their ship in a thunderstorm. They survive that, but get separated by the storm (the message is clear: you may defeat nature’s beasts but she’ll always find some other way to get you), and Fang wakes up some time later in an island, with Spear no way to be found.
Season 2, Episode 2. “Shadow of Fate”. First time.
Spear is eventually found but not by Fang but by a band of Celtic warriors, who take him back to their village and nurse him back to health and offer him some food and sanctuary. At the same time, Fang comes across a red male T-rex and slowly they start to bond: they compete for prey, they share their meals, they explore the island, they even get drunk on wildberries. It’s the first time in the show that Spear and Fang not only are apart from each other, but also bond with others like them and get a glimpse of what their lives might have been if not for the tragedy that brought them together. It’s tender and moving and makes one question what exactly is fate for Spear and Fang before accident brings us into one major action scene and once again, tragedy strikes. Without going into spoilers, Spear and Fang’s union is tested and reaffirmed, but not without another heartbreaking loss. Incredible gut-punch of an episode.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS: I’m very, very certain that Fang got pregnant from Red in their short time together. A very poisoned chalice if it turns out to be true but perhaps a measure of relief. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
MONDAY
Primal
Season 2, Episode 3. “Dawn of Man”. First time.
We catch Spear and Fang still in a down mood, with Fang in particular still mourning her loss from the previous episode, and Spear unable to tell if its the rain falling on her face or if its tears. He tries to console her but it’s clear he’s going through his own funk as well: he finds some cave drawings and he sets off without Fang to explore a nearby abandoned human village. Later at night he tries praying to the moon like he saw Mira do, to no real avail. It’s clear his experiences have made him reflect about other ways he could have lived, beyond the mere killing and surviving he’s been doing with Fang. Nearly every episode this season has had that kind of sequence, a calm reflection between the action, perhaps a consequence of the story bringing in other characters and the possibility of a different future for our characters. But are characters are who they are and it can never last: soon they are attacked by bear-riding vikings, who they kill after a skirmish and chase (with Spear getting a sword, natch), eventually finding their camp, where Spear finds the captive Mira and they have a very loaded reunion. She convinces him to free the rest of her people but the episode ends with the sound of beasts and horns coming from the other side of heavy mist…
Season 2, Episode 4. “The Red Mist”. First time.
…which we learn here it’s returning bear-vikings. Soon enough Fang joins in (after one of the best gags this show has pulled off) and we get a super long fight between the duo and the warriors (with Mira briefly joining), and after the latter are defeated the village’s women and children are raised to fight. Spear reluctantly fights them but after he accidentally kills a kid he had been avoiding and Fang kills the kid’s mother, Rika, after she nearly pulls a spear through her skull the gloves come off and they massacre the entire village. It’s a scary sequence, with both taking mythical levels of damage and injuries but still killing and killing and killing, while a red mist covers everything. It leaves a shocking scene, which is soon found by the returning viking chief (Rika’s husband) and his son (brother to the kid Speak killed by accident). In a long, slow sequence, they discover the extent of the devastation, they cry and mourn, they bury their dead, they free their remaning slaves, and they give their family a funeral by boat pyre, all the while the viewer is left to reflect on the morality of it all. Are they any more or less innocent that Spear and Fang when their families were killed? Do all who live by the sword deserve to die by it? Is their legitimate grief and the magnitude of Spear and Fang’s atrocity enough to make us sympathize with the slavers and murderers?
Or is all of that besides the point? As the viking chief and son set fire to their village and gear up to chase and kill those responsible for their loss, the show seems to have one clear answer: It’s time for revenge.
The latest white lotus and righteous gemstones.
Lots of oedipal action this week. Frankly too much. Home Box Office? More like Here Be Oedipodes.
(Danny mcbride; “oedipus? yeah, I ate a puss! [lewd gesture with fingers extended in a V-shape and sticking out his tongue].)
Neither McBride nor White like subtlety.
For McBride, the oedipal jealousy of Jesse for Eli is a broader part of Jesse’s insecurities.
For white, the oedipal complex of Greg (and I won’t be surprised if that’s also what’s going on with Rick and Jim) mirrors the earlier discourse about seeing yourself reflected in the desire of the other.
Oklahoma! – Connected to my listening, largely to the 2019 revival. Ended up watching the 1999 production with Hugh Jackman, and this is a very specific, very American work of art in that there are layers of darkness here – lonely outsiders, people being treated as property while property and territory are bubbling away in the background of the dynamics, shotgun weddings, outright murders and sham trials – that are easy to miss if you just want to enjoy the songs, all of which are beautiful, catchy, emotive, and even poetic (“a dream starts a-dancin’ in my head”). There’s also a song that feels decades ahead of 1943 in that it gleefully celebrates being slutty, “I Cain’t Say No.” This is largely a classical production but also acknowledges that darker center, whereas the 2019 revival clearly goes full tilt into that, for better or worse. (I suspect parts of it work and parts do not, but the soundtrack, the score as interpreted by a country/bluegrass band, is sublime.)
The Great North, “It’s Compli-skated Adventure”
Credits gags: Fin Diesel, Shart Week
Invincible, eps 5-6
I’m about to get cut up on so I don’t really want to write any more about anything.
What did we listen to?
Mistrial Lou Reed
The most Eighties of his music so far; the drums having so much echo is a big sign of it for me, on top of the polish on everything. The sincerity of his writing and performance is always what does it for me. This also has a harder rock sound that I appreciate.
Pipes Of Peace, Paul McCartney
Also good.
Relics, Pink Floyd
This feels two steps further, one step back when it comes to the band slowly groping their way to Dark Side Of The Moon. More ambitious lyrics, less ambitious musical structures and no stab at cohesion.
Fiddler on the Roof, in Yiddish, from around 2018. Interesting to listen to this and see how much I understand despite a very limited knowledge of Yiddish. “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “If I Were a Rothschild.” But I can tell how few cast members speak any Yiddish, especially the one from Lubbock, TX playing Teyve.
Bailed on the Blank Check on The Last Crusade when they spent ten minutes talking about Kit Fisto. The one place I know Chris Gethard from is here, and I think I plan to keep it that way. (News of the day: the Coens are about to win March Madness, and while we all love the Coens and all, is there anything left to say about at least some of their movies?)
Funny enough, I really wanna hear what they have to say from a Jewish POV (as a Gentile).
1001 Albums, etc. – properly getting back into a rhythm with this now, so here are some very brief impressions.
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon: Heard this before, has never done THAT much for me. Kinda prefer Meddle and Wish You Were Here, if my memory is to be trusted.
Stevie Wonder – Innervisions: Don’t think I’d heard this in full before but most of the songs were familiar. Mostly admire Stevie rather than ever loving his stuff but the best stuff here is pretty undeniable.
ZZ Top – Tres Hombres: Mostly good fun but when they slow the tempo they lose me completely. I only really know the Eliminator-era stuff but I guess I’d heard “La Grange” which is a really weird single.
Paul McCartney and Wings – Band on the Run: Thoroughly enjoyed this, McCartney in full crowd-pleasing mode and I am not complaining. I knew the first couple of tracks and recognised one or two others but was surprised how enjoyable the whole album was, maybe my favourite post-Beatles album?
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – Next: Yep, agreed with the album title. Next, please.
Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies: Really enjoyed the previous Alice Cooper album on the list but this one didn’t do much for me.
Iggy and the Stooges – Raw Power: Had this down as my favourite Stooges but it’s a bit front-loaded. Still, good stuff.
The Isley Brothers – 3+3: Aside from the draggy James Taylor cover, thought this was great. Catchy songs performed and produced beautifully.
New York Dolls – New York Dolls: Hell yeah, great stuff.
Blank Check – mopping up the Spielbergs in a weird order, enjoyed the Last Crusade episode a lot and Empire of the Sun had some good stuff too.
Screen Drafts, best of 2024 – so much I hadn’t seen on this draft, partly because it was a weird transitional year for me and I didn’t spend too much time in the cinema, partly because they made some really weird choices. Kinda delighted that both of the year’s prominent cat movies got on the list although A Quiet Place: Day One making it to #2 (!) was deservedly controversial.
Okay, one thing that’s always bugged me about La Grange — I used to love it for the instrumental, but then I heard the Rolling Stones’ cover of Shake Your Hips. Is this the exact same riff and percussion or am I losing my mind more rapidly than previously indicated?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfS19zxOBPc
(Original for comparison)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QOnpiGpFP4
Both just employing a standard blues riff I guess. It is extremely similar though!
Like vomas said, I think it’s a pretty standard blues/boogie riff (I’m guessing John Lee Hooker probably hit it at some point). My favorite version, from Mr. Airplane Man:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAaHApSKIg
Choosing Band on the Run over Imagine? How Do You Sleep? (jk, the title track is still ass)
There’s some really good stuff on Imagine, I generally find the solo albums to be extremely patchy so I’m probably just surprised by the consistency of Band on the Run.
I’m with you on this – Imagine and How Do You Sleep? have high highs, but also long stretches where it sounds like he’s out of ideas. Band On The Run rarely gets as profound but it works very consistently. You put Imagine and Band On The Run together and it makes you miss their partnership; Lennon’s ambition and McCartney’s polish.
Besides, I’d put Plastic Ono Band and Mind Games as Lennon’s better albums.
I think I’ve had four or five phones with Billion Dollar Babies on it. I just keep transferring it to the next phone I buy. It’s still pretty relevant with ultra-rich, sexual perversion and weirdness being ideal qualities in candidates today.
Nice, you’re really getting your billion dollars worth.
Oklahoma! 2019 Cast Recording – Maybe surprisingly, these songs are largely perfectly transposed to a country/bluegrass setting*, with “People Will Say We’re In Love” feeling like a lost George Jones/Tammy Wynette duet, and the lady playing Annie deserved her Tony for her cool, dirty sounding delivery of “sittin’ on a velvetine satine.” “Lonely Room” no matter the interpretation is proto-Sondheim, a brooding, psychological piece with dissonant strings and a broken character’s voice instead of a rousing number.
*The Dream Ballet brings out the electric and I think the contrast mostly works though you can feel where the arrangement is struggling with the movements.
“Put on ‘Tiara’ to do housecleaning, and there’s a good chance you’ll demolish a loadbearing wall.”
My landlord will be disturbed to know that this is what really sold me on this album.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 4th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Straight Story
Apr. 7th: J. “Rodders” Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 8th: Bridgett Taylor: …One More Time
Apr. 11th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Balloon Farm
Apr. 18th: Cameron Ward/Cori Domschot: The Mummy
Apr. 18th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Hand Behind the Mouse
Apr. 22nd: Sam Scott: Broken Things
Apr. 24th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Sixth Sense
And the open call for May starts now! Our year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 26th: Tristan J. Nankervis: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
“for listeners who can connect with paint-peeling noise” : D
“and sad boy whinging” : /
Still intrigued but now wary.