WILTLW: Aug. 24, 2025

Ness Lalonde - Buzzkill

Saw them perform at the Uniting Entity show a couple weeks back and raced to check out the record. This is slippery stuff to get hold of, frequencies collide and slide past one another like stones at the bottom of a riverbed made slick with time. Fingers running across guitar strings, faint whisps of microphone static, the residual impact of a piano keystroke, this is the environment in which Ness and their electro-acoustic folk songs take root, unspooling like picnic blanket confessionals made on hot and muggy summer nights. It reminds me of mk.gee’s studio pyrotechnics but with the heft and muscle stripped back to reveal something softer and more silken.

AR15 - eulogy

It’s as heavy as you think. Colorado’s AR15 fires a screaming bullet right between the eyes of our depraved American psyche, a country actively killing itself from the inside out. I’ll be honest with you, I could’t understand much of what was being said here, but the power and pain of this music are undeniable. Take the penultimate track “black hand,” which begins with two guitars engaged in a duet of soft and yearning lament before unleashing into a ballisitic torrent of hi-hats and bass pops, pounding your ears into submission until slowly decelerating to leave space for the clearest lyric on the project: “Sick of water/Sick of food/Sick of sleep/Sick of sound.” Sick of it all.

Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones

I try not to throw the album of the year moniker around much, we’ll see how it all comes out in the wash in January (the only sane time to pick one.) But still, The Passionate Ones makes a strong case. Marcus Brown is my favorite writer until proven otherwise, who else could make a song like “Idiot In The Park,” two minutes of self-deprecating humor about looking to spirituality to confirm your feelings followed by an ascendant synth solo that sounds like it was programmed on a keyboard for kids. Where Erotic Probiotic 2 felt like a warm hug The Passionate Ones is like an arrow to the heart, piercing you with sharp and exacting clarity, leaving the blood to bloom within.