In the era of Ganser’s Just Look At That Sky delightfully descended on the world in July of 2020, I do admit that I mostly did find myself looking skyward, though that looking was often colored by an ever-present anxiety. My city was coming apart and maybe your city was coming apart too. Maybe atop the buildings of your downtowns there were guns, and men in fatigues. Maybe in front of the libraries, there were tanks, maybe in front of the food banks, there were army patrols. And yet, maybe you found an album or some tunes that reflected the times, which means both everything and nothing at all now, as time fractures into small, elastic shapes, some jagged, some joyful. An album of a moment must require malleability – songs that hold several songs within them.
Ganser is back with a couple of tunes that will anchor spring through fall, a project called Nothing You Do Matters (Produced by Liars’ Angus Andrew) and the songs are full, biting, sweet and relentlessly tongue-in-cheek. What propels Ganser as a band, for me, is what shines here: their performance of joyful apathy so often has many other moving parts underneath that suggest that they are a band of deep caring, simply unsatisfied with the hands they’ve been dealt by the world. The dark humor seeped into the apathy is the central and most visual part of the magic trick, but it isn’t the trick itself. It is the disappearing bird or rabbit, that which returns safely to the open palm in order to distract an audience from everything else unfolding during its disappearance.
No Can Fly
No Can Fly is an American rock band formed in Boise ID in 2021. In November 2022 they released their first self-recorded EP called Spider Dreams and shortly after that released a single called Bird Radar. The trio consists of guitar player and word man Tim Gates, bass player Jacob Gates and drummer Lucas Ventura.
No Can Fly makes music that explores different time signatures, heavy sounds and grooves with sometimes less orthodox song structures. They take inspiration from different aspects of music be it 90s alternative, post hardcore, vintage prog-rock as well as lighter indie rock sounds. No can fly, as a band, likes to keep a creative open mind as they continue to evolve their sound and expand their catalog.
Trippy Hearts
Trippy Hearts started as a long distance idea for a band between Boise and Boston with old friends Stephen Samuelson, Jenn Sutkowski, and Brent Heiner in 2013. Jenn and Brent ended up moving to Boise eventually to make the idea more of a reality. With Jenn (of Somerville Ukulele Club) on a Rhodes electric piano and vocals, Steve (of Dark Swallows) playing baritone guitar, bass, and drums, and Brent on guitar, the trio wrote and recorded Lacewing, at Rabbitbrush Audio in Boise with Z.V. House, mastered by Mell Dettmer at Studio Soli in Seattle, and released in 2021. Their friend Hyrum Haeberle (also of Dark Swallows) joined on bass for two years until they (amicably) parted.
Trippy Hearts make dynamic, moody/melodic, witchy/wavy music on the hopeful edge of the existential ache. Loud/soft indie. The songs are heartfelt with feelings of yearning for home, wherever that is, and ambivalence toward modern life. But there are bright edges, too, because music is cathartic.
There is also the occasional tripped-out crystal flute. Haunting!