Pressing Concerns: Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, Spinnen

Hey there, everyone! We’re back with a fun Monday Pressing Concerns, featuring new albums from Silo’s Choice, Kinski, Humilitarian, and Spinnen. Some really good stuff down below! Let’s get to it!

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Silo’s Choice – Liberals

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Obscure Pharaoh
Genre: Indie pop, sophisti-pop, jazz pop, soft rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 2005

It’s a great time to be a fan of the music of Jon Massey. The Cincinnati-originating, Chicago-based art rock/indie pop/soft rock/folk musician has been making music as Silo’s Choice since the beginning of the 2010s, but his various projects have found him on a hot streak as of late–his duo with Mike Fox, Coventry, released an excellent LP in 2023, and last year brought a superb album from his long-running Cincinnati band Upstairs and a choice Silo’s Choice record, too. Massey plans to release “several more” Silo’s Choice records this year, but he’s started 2025 off with a bang in the form of Liberals. Liberals is a pretty clear departure from the meandering, John Fahey-influenced acoustic guitars and upright bass explorations of 2024’s Languid Swords–Massey mentions The Left Banke, early Destroyer, and Belle & Sebastian as touchpoints for this one, and he’s kind of right. At its most animated, Liberals has the same kind of jazzy, whip-smart pop rock that I heard a good deal in the Coventry album, and even the slower numbers on this album display a renewal of vows with concise pop music. Massey is evasive about the “political” implications of the album’s admittedly provocative title, and if he’s trying to say that he’s merely up to his typical Silo’s Choice shenanigans here with that, then I’d agree. It’s there in bits and pieces, sometimes all at once in a rush and sometimes glimpsed through a reflection in the melted Chicago snow and salt.

There are so many good songs on Liberals. The piano-led baroque pop of “The Acceptance World” is a refined Massey classic, an opening statement fueled by coffee and lodging borrowed from acquaintances (“They ask if I don’t want the Ottoman instead / And I say ‘no’, that empire’s long gone”), and I don’t think there’s anybody else out there who could write a song like the whirlwind neoconservative bildungsroman of “2005” (“It’s 2005 / And we’ve only been in Iraq for a year in a half,” Massey situates us). If that’s too heady–well, “City of First Dates” doesn’t totally solve that problem, but it’s something new, Massey putting on his best game show host face and pulling together maximal pop rock and even a bit of disco moves as he sketches out a song that does indeed live up to its title (“Is this fun? Do you like me?” Massey asks us over and over and over again in the refrain). Liberals’ default mode of polished piano pop doesn’t come even close to getting stale, sailing us through the quiet “Please Please Please Do Not Refuse Me Service”, the fretting “Laughter Through Headphones”, and a cheerfully-skipping, war-torn piece of cotton candy called “Comfortable Kid” (“Back when we still got a shock even seeing a gun / Now we see them a lot”). The one true indulgence of Massey’s folk side is “Pick Me Up #2”, which might be the best moment on the entire thing. Massey turns everything over in his head in the Starbucks inside the Target on Halsted, waiting out inclement weather: “I’m never far from walking out between the cars / With a snowball in my hand, spinning, spinning,” he remarks over confidently but delicately-picked acoustic guitars in the refrain of this one. The music conveys the general sense of what Massey is on about here–as for the specifics, we’ll have to file that away to come back to. (Bandcamp link)

Kinski – Stumbledown Terrace

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Post-rock, 90s indie rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Experimental Hugs

Kinski are an experimental post-rock band from Seattle, forming at the tail end of the 1990s and spending this century steadily releasing albums on storied indie rock labels like Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars. Stumbledown Terrace is the group’s tenth album, their first in nearly seven years, and their first for Comedy Minus One, the New Jersey imprint that’s been something of a haven for longtime indie rock veterans in recent years (Silkworm, Eleventh Dream Day, Deep Tunnel Project). Stumbledown Terrace is also the first Kinski album since the departure of Matthew Reid Schwartz, the multi-instrumentalist who joined the band shortly after they formed in 1999, paring them down to a power trio (guitarist Chris Martin, bassist Lucy Atkinson, and drummer Barrett Wilke). Clearly this hasn’t slowed Kinski down, though–their latest LP, recorded by Tim Green at Louder Studios in Grass Valley, California, is a nice, electric jolt of a reminder of how cool guitar music is. On Stumbledown Terrace, Kinski walk the tightrope between instrumental, sprawling post-rock and punchy rock and roll like the best of their influences and peers like Sonic Youth, Trans Am, and Oneida (with whom they’re currently touring). It has a live feel to it, certainly–and this applies to the moments in between the most kinetic ones, too.

Stumbledown Terrace is made up of seven songs of varying lengths, volumes, and adherence to “rock” music structure–Kinski’s task is to make all of these puzzle pieces fit, and they do so in the most automatic manner possible. The first impression we get of Stumbledown Terrace is “Do You Like Long Hair”, a steadily-unfurling eight-minute instrumental centerpiece that sets a wildly high bar, and “Gang of 3”, while also being an instrumental, prefers to prowl about rather than try to leap even higher. It’s more than fifteen minutes into the LP before the vocals show up–whoever’s singing in the title track is barely holding their own against the dark torrent of noisy indie rock, a relatively small but still very welcome wrinkle to the album. “Stumbledown Terrace” is, of course, followed by “Experimental Hugs”, which is (ironically) the most conventional track on the album by far, a catchy two-minute hook-y rock and roller that kind of sounds like the Foo Fighters (but, you know, better). And, of course, we have another eight-minute epic coming up in the second half of Stumbledown Terrace with “Slovenian Fighting Jacket”–but, rather than work its way up to the crescendo like “Do You Like Long Hair” does, it meanders for six minutes before blasting off out of nowhere in the final two. The four-minute acoustic-led “Her Absence Feels Like a Presence” is the closing comedown–perhaps it would have been impressive to keep up the fiery rockers all the way to the finish line, but who do Kinski have to impress? (Bandcamp link)

Humilitarian – Intra

Release date: February 21^st
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Emo-y indie rock
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: 3206

Last year, I heard an album called Please Stay Off the Statue by a Philadelphia band called Comprador; it’s a really adventurous and omnivorous rock record, bits of glam and prog-pop and power pop and grunge thrown in a very well-executed blender. Charlie D’Ardenne, Comprador’s bandleader, has apparently taken to playing guitar in a different band, Humilitarian–they’re a quintet, with D’Ardenne joining original members Kira Cappello (vocals/lyrics), Brendan Clarke (guitar), Eli Glovas-Kurtz (drums), and Tucker Pendleton (bass) when their previous second guitarist, Noah Ward, moved to Texas. Although Humilitarian has been around since 2019, D’Ardenne’s on-record debut for them is also the band’s first full-length album–Intra has been in the works for a while now. Although Humiltarian are pretty different from Comprador, one key similarity is that Intra matches D’Ardenne’s project in terms of sheer ambitious energy. They’re somewhat hard to categorize–I think “emo-y indie rock” is more or less acceptable, “Big Rock Music” more confusing but also more accurate. Every song on Intra sounds warehouse-vast; Cappello’s voice is the biggest and most dangerous weapon, while the guitars perform a just-as-essential function by zigzagging around to fill the cavernous space around their frontperson.

Intra is a sprawling record–its nine tracks come in at over forty-five minutes in total, meaning that Humilitarian really take their time moving through them. Not every song is quite as obvious about it at as opening track “Your Arms Again”, which spends a minute on a boulder-rolling guitar introduction before ramping up into the explosive alt-rocker that’s a bit more in line with what we can expect from the rest of Intra. With Cappello at the helm, Humiltarian do their best to sculpt a new, dynamic-indie-rock type of torch song–they do kind of end up living up to their band name in this department, if more in a “humbling” than “embarrassing” way. The work that Clarke and D’Ardenne do is impressive to me, too–they take their Midwest-emo-inspired shimmery leads and more classic rock hero moments and make U2-like heart-wringing “anthemic rock” music out of them, although the band change things up when the moment calls for it, too. Around the mid-section of Intra, “I’m Not Dreaming”, “Steal”, and “3206” start mixing in a bit more post-punk/art punk stopping and starting and syncopation–in particular, the relatively brief, harmonic-heavy “3206” is maybe the most exciting two minutes on the album. Intra feels very labored-over, like the work of a bunch of talented musicians taking their time to fully sketch out the various paths these songs take. There are a lot of ideas in Intra, but the pieces blend together as part of the hard-hitting whole of Humilitarian.  (Bandcamp link)

Spinnen – Warmes Licht

Release date: March 7^th
Record label: Alien Transistor
Genre: Post-punk, art punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Träume

Taking their name from the German word for spider, Spinnen are a Munich-based bass and drums duo made up of a couple of veterans of the “muggy, experimental” side of their home city’s music scene in Sophie Neudecker and Veronica “Katta” Burnuthian. After playing in a bunch of bands separately over the years (Soft Violet, Friends of Gas, Bombo, The Living Object), Warmes Licht (“warm light”) is their first record together, brought to us by The Notwist’s label Alien Transistor. The twenty-six minute LP manages to be both “experimental” and “rock”–we get noisy, clanging art-punk bass/drum ragers right next to soft, almost ambient organs and synth pieces, as well as moments that don’t fit neatly onto either end of that spectrum. I’m not sure who’s singing (I’m guessing both, but I can’t tell them apart), but the vocals are key in keeping Warmes Licht fun and (yes) light amidst the chaos. I can hear the riot grrrl influence on the duo in the vocals, which are shouted and chanted with just as much enthusiasm as Spinnen have for making a racket. Burnuthian’s bass provides a lot of the melodic heft, too–although she never neglects low-end duty, either.

Warmes Licht’s opening track, “Träume”, works way better as an awesome opening pop statement than it has any right to–between the reaching-for-the-sky bass chords and the just-as-enthusiastic vocals, Spinnen pull off the perfect mix of skronky post-punk and power pop. “Wirken” comes right after “Träume”, and it rocks too–but instead of trying to repeat themselves, Spinnen go a different route on this instrumental and follow an exciting groove where it leads them for two minutes. If there were any rails at any point on Warmes Licht, Spinnen start to go off of them around the five-minute percussion-led “Moment”, which stacks organ and intermittent bass riffs over top of Burnuthian’s kit before descending into an icy, haunting synth-shaded finale–and then this derailing enters “straight-up confusing” territory with a three-minute meandering carnival organ-type piece called “Warm”. Those looking for clarity in Warmes Licht’s second half (first of all, have you tried looking anywhere else?) won’t get it–“Geister” is the cheerleader-punk-noise-pop tack a la “Träume”, except even more abrasive this time, and the two-minute “Ermüdend” would be Spinnen’s entry into the angry post-punk sweepstakes if they cared to add some more instruments to it. “Mäuse” ends the album with a big old trash pile of noise rock–setting everything on fire is one way to make a bunch of warm light, I suppose. (Bandcamp link)

Also notable:

• Transistors – Everything Will Never Happen Again
• The Medium – Sports! EP
• Vundabar – Surgery and Pleasure
• Edith Frost – In Space
• Daily Worker – Field Holler
• Juicin – Zig Zag EP
• Playland – Playland 3
• The Thirsty Giants – Thirst A.D. EP
• Cream Soda – Make Up Your Mind EP
• Newtie – Dusk Dances
• Circu5 – Clockwork Tulpa
• Will Stewart – Moon Winx
• Miya Folick – Erotica Veronica
• Jim Knable & The Randy Bandits – Pale Fire
• Sonic Transistor – Floodgaze
• Pumuky – No sueltes lo efímero 
• Man Lee – Hefty Wimpy
• The Murder Capital – Blindness
• Darci Phoenix – Sable
• Roller Derby – When the Night Comes
• Clara Mann – Rift
• Various – We Love It Here. A Benefit Compilation for Lamplight AVL
• Canyons and Locusts – The Goal Gigolo
• Occurrence – Real Friend
• Ichiko Aoba – Luminescent Creatures