Making up for lost time here with five extra reviews this week. Four of these five records are really good … but which ones? You’ll have to find out below.

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Also I took sickness and free time to disgusting new heights with my movie watching this month. Go check it out on Letterboxd.

On we go…

SLUGFEAST s/t CD/CS/DL (Cherub Dream)

Late Q3 ’25 action from this plucky Sacramento trio, a simulated 30-year class reunion to both ‘90s indie pop (think Butterglory) and the scuzzy tonal shift dynamics of post-punk/shoegaze outfits like Hum, with a few detours into slowcore extracurriculars. It’s gonna sound familiar to anyone who’s been around (and if it doesn’t, welcome to the feeling), but the good thing about it is where it’s coming from – there’s already one review in this column that shows what similar bands from this era did to stifle and kill the impulses of their own hearts, so here’s the opposite of that, in letting all those emotions bubble up and help find ways to punch these songs into a higher gear. Other bands have taken this path – nobody’s out here calling this original – but the decision Slugfeast made here, either knowingly or otherwise, to divorce the notions of emotional music from anything “emo,” is the right call, even if that mechanism simply relies on the noise/fuzz element. Go back to the base, it starts at the base and it finishes there too. If a band can get away with writing songs that regularly roll past 4-5 minutes in length and still hold interest, that band is doing something worth hearing. Slugfeast is that band! Grateful to the tallest of Tall Texans for sending this my way.

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