Chasing Fridays: b7lanket + Luko M, Cleaver Blue, Ivy Knight Q&A, more

I had a busy week! I saw five shows in seven days and only decided to write about one of them below. The others, for those interested, were: theyhungusfrompowerlines (screamo mosh), Verity Den (YLT-core), Dead Butteflies (melodic screamo cry-mosh), and Reek Minds/Yambag/Illiterates (ballistic side-to-side hc). When I wasn't at those gigs I was writing my book. And when I wasn't writing my book I was listening to obscure internet music, some of which I catalogued below. This week, I wrote about some laptop twee, some cloud-rock, and seeing motherfucking Weedeater live. Then, I interviewed cloud-rock-adjacent singer-songwriter Ivy Knight, who I'd describe as Merce Lemon via Mazzy Star for people who love Erika de Casier.

b7lanket, Luko M - Home team

There's something happening and I don't know what to call it. I don't know if it's a genre or a trend. I don't know if it's laptop twee or something different. I don't know if it's just some patterns I'm soldering together in my own mind that are based entirely on my own browsing experience. But I keep hearing electronic pop songs that are dinky and sweet and joyful and homemade, but not in a degraded, lo-fi way. In a quaint way. In an emotionally touching way. In a way that makes me choke up a little in the back of my throat because what I'm hearing produces at once a rush of amorphous nostalgia and also a grounding, soothing reassurance that the present isn't a lost cause. That there's still beauty to be discovered and warmth to be felt and kindness to be shared. That sincerity is a worthwhile pursuit.

A lot of this music is only available, or is at least primarily centralized, on Nina Protocol. There's that bleac EP, there's ideasforconversations, and there's b7lanket and Luko M's new collaborative EP Home team, which might be the most affecting of the bunch. b7lanket put out a skramzy laptop twee EP last year called frogtopia that I thought was very cute and silly, albeit so precious that the songs melted into sugary goop before they had a chance to calcify. The music on Home team is more enduring. To me, these are world-class pop songs. I wrote about this in relation to the new Bassvictim haul –which is considerably more abrasive than Home team, though similarly emotive – but I feel like my taste in pop is being rewired by this emerging class of indie-tronic tinkerers.

Following a half-decade ruled by hyperpop maximalism, the simplicity of b7lanket and Luko M's "Asleep awake" is such a refreshing glide against the grain of XCX-ian zaniness. Not that Home team is a retreat into retro conservatism. Between the glitchy accents, b7lanket's digitally cherubic chirps, Luko M's bent-up vocoder moans, and all the precise nips and tucks within the production, "Asleep awake" is absolutely a modern pop product. One that couldn't have existed in any prior decade, but one that also feels spiritually aligned with a slower, less aggravated cultural tempo. The same goes for opener "Birdhouse," a skittering duet where Gameboy beats and acoustic strums are speckled with kiddie-voiced burbles and Rube Goldberg-ian synth twiddles.

I think that shift toward, not minimalism, but miniature-ism, is what's so appealing about this cadre of artists. The algorithm necessitates that musicians perform stunts, dances, and memetic mischief to be heard. The din of self-magnification and grandiose salesmanship is so overbearing, and thankfully, none of the artists in this sphere are playing that game. No promo photos, no social media savviness, and in the case of Home team, no cooperation with the streaming giants (you can only listen on Nina and Soundcloud). The music itself is compact, the access is limited, and the personalities of the makers are moot. Yet the clever ideas in these songs, the strength of these hooks, the abundance of charm leaking from every verse, chorus, and bridge yields a tremendous amount of enjoyment. This is the substrata of pop where I'll be living for the foreseeable future. Come join me.

Cleaver Blue - invessel

Cleaver Blue is the recording project of songwriter-producer Jake Snowden, a young artist from Sheffield, UK who's now signed to Horse Vision's Inadvertent Index imprint. Last year, he contributed one of the best songs to his label's prodigious Satellite compilation, which I view as the definitive cloud-rock instruction manual. Since then, Cleaver Blue has been dribbling out increasingly better singles that have all been building toward invessel, an EP of lavish indie ballads with tweaked production that sounds very of this moment. Opener "Like My Brother Said (Yours)" is one of my favorite tunes of the year, a cinematic yearner that wrings treacly levels of longing out of epic midi strings garnished with Cleaver Blue's aching auto-tuned pleas.

A lot cloud-rock radiates an aloof coolness that cuts against the overexposed vulnerability-core of indie-rock's previous epoch. Sound trumps subject in this milieu, and the cryptic intangibility of Chanel Beads and untitled (halo) is fundamental to their standoffish appeal. Cleaver Blue's take on cloud-rock is a lot more precious and overtly sentimental, and that's what makes him unique. "Where Did You Come From?" swells with early twenty-something angst that spills out of Cleaver Blue's digitized chirps and seems to drip, sweat-like, from each moistened guitar strum. "Be Me" has the empty basketball court openness of Blond(e), the sense of solitude in a typically communal space that's so quixotically affecting. It also sounds like Alex G's "Cross the Sea," or basically any Horse Vision song. But I think Cleaver Blue is inching toward something truly distinct.

Weedeater live @ Thunderbird Cafe

The 2020s have been strange and kind to sludge and doom-metal. Acid Bath reunited because TikTok zoomers gave them the Duster treatment. Crowbar are currently in a Spotify "Viral Rock" playlist due to a similar burst of interest among kids who were asking their parents for Deftones merch for Christmas last year. The rapidity of Chat Pile's success is perplexing. It's never been a better time to be a band of disheveled middle-age dudes making achingly slow pain metal, but I'm glad that Weedeater still reside a few miles off the beaten trail. The North Carolina stalwarts make my favorite kind of stoner-sludge: weathered, caustic, maladjusted for polite society. Seeing them play to a few hundred head bobbers in Pittsburgh last Sunday was a reminder that true freak shit still prevails.

Weedeater bassist-croaker Dave "Dixie" Collins was an unrepentant maniac onstage. Glugging from a half-empty bottle of whiskey and checking his mic with unintelligible trucker commands. Spinning his cap around on his head with his eyes bulging and crossed, his jaw limber and fidgeting. Grinning into the crowd while flicking a string of white saliva from one side of his mouth to the other like a snake's tongue. Passing a cigarette between his bandmates mid-set in a venue where smoking is absolutely prohibited.

Weedeater's name is a bit of a misnomer. These aren't bong-blazing burnouts wailing about mystical hinterlands. These are hillbilly tweakers howling about cheap cocaine and not-so-cheap cocaine. "God luck and good speed" goes their best song, a line Collins screamed while dragging a finger under his nostril and bearing his yellowed teeth. No games. No gimmicks. Just real American outlaw metal. Go(o)dspeed.

Chasing Down

Ivy Knight
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Ivy Knight

Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.

Ivy Knight is a singer-songwriter from New York City who's been swirling around the current tide-pool of internet-damaged indie-rockers. She's featured on albums by Deer park, Taraneh, Evanora Unlimited, and cleo walks through glass, and she's about to tour North America with London cloud-rocker Mark William Lewis. Ivy Knight's forthcoming album, Iron Mountain, arrives next month via the trendy U.K. imprint Scenic Route, and given that it was produced by cloud-rock kingpin Deer park, I figured the record would be cut from a similar cloth. It's not, really. Knight delivers a slate of naturalistic folk-rock with a psychedelic tinge. Her songs are smokey and warm like the scent of a distant bonfire, thought drizzled with the Mazzy Star-esque glaze that's all the rage right now among the tapped-in cognoscenti (Fine, Quiet Light, sweet93).

For this week's Chasing Down Q&A, I asked Knight about how her songwriting has changed since her 2022 debut, her chemistry with Deer park, the NYC scene she moves through, her fixation on Southwestern imagery, and more. Read the full interview below.