New Minnesota music round-up: Rattling folk from Pop Wagner
Plus dreamy folk pop from Glass Echoes and industrial sounds from Rx Cowboy
‘Rowdy Folk Songs,’ Pop Wagner
Released Feb. 17, 2024
As its title indicates, here we have a collection of nine raucous folk songs, recorded by the cowboy-hatted Pop Wagner, a longtime local folky and frequent “Prairie Home Companion” performer.
The arrangements are minimal — just Wagner and his various guitars, along with Adam Kiesling on bass and Mikkel Beckmen on washboard, tambourine and stomp box. But the mood has the full-throated vim of a live performance, which half of these tracks are.
As a guitarist, Wagner likes his tones deep and low; as a vocalist, he sings in a warm, conversational tenor, and the combination is striking. This is especially true on the first track, “Grizzly Bear,” a song of lost love in which the guitar provides heartbroken ragtime riffs while Wagner sounds cheerfully bitter.
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‘The Skirmishers,’ Glass Echoes
Released March 15, 2024
The two-person team of Chris Bartels and Ben Noble, recording as Glass Echoes, released an album called “Breathe” in 2022, showcasing a simultaneous love for dense electronic soundscapes — a thumping mass of arpeggiated synth notes and various boops and beeps — and soaring, unabashedly pretty melodies.
Their new album, “The Skirmishers,” leans into melody, with the songs alternating between old-timey chamber pop and breathy blasts of gossamer harmony. The title track provides an especially memorable example: a high, quavering Rufus Wainwright-like tenor keening over an arrangement that sounds like a 1980s soundtrack glitching out. “All along the sky is falling,” they sing, an apocalyptic image wrapped in almost-painful sweetness.
‘Cowboy Killer,’ Rx Cowboy
Phage Tapes, released March 15, 2024
Phage Tapes describes itself as a “small batch leftist label out of Minneapolis, with an interest in noise and industrial music,” but “interest” feels like they are underselling it.
They have already released at least 10 albums in 2024 with names like “Anger Protocol,” “Waste of Life” and “Act of Disaster,” all of which sound more or less like somebody fistfighting a garbage can. This is not a criticism, by the way — years ago, WMMR radio had the slogan “music should hurt,” and its thrilling to find new releases still committed to this aesthetic.
This album by Rx Cowboy is credited to nobody specific, although it was mastered by Collin Gorman Weilland, a longtime musician and engineer in the Twin Cities independent music scene.
The album itself is filled with aggressively unmelodic industrial noises, distant howls of agony, chaotic drum machines, lyrics shouted through what sounds like broken PA systems and sounds that can only be described as “robots experiencing panic attacks.” Bracing stuff.