Chasing Fridays: Greg Mendez, Big Nick, Fallen God, and more

Another week, another edition of Chasing Fridays. My left arm is aching right now and my mind's a little groggy because I got the double flu/COVID booster shots yesterday, but luckily I've got a hearty edition of my weekly column to share with all of you. This week, I felt inspired to go deep-ish on a few singles, a couple EP's, and one full-length album – all of which I liked quite a bit. From singer-songwriter to shoegaze to hardcore to rap and back again, I had thoughts to share and you can read 'em all below. Now hop to it.

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Greg Mendez - "First Time"

I was wrong about Greg Mendez. Last year, I wrote a brief review of the Philly songwriter's acclaimed self-titled album in which I deemed the severe minimalism of its sound a flaw. I thought his lyrics were vividly gutting, and I thought the bones of the acoustic-based songs (which I compared, rather obviously, to Elliott Smith and early Alex G) were promising. I just didn't think the record's inside-voice quietude served the drama in the songs. But I was wrong. I saw Mendez perform twice earlier this year and I had an extreme revelation about his music both times. Seeing him on the stage slumped over his chair, with his eyes cast downward and his shoulders slouched, like he was simultaneously afraid of making eye contact with the audience and also completely apathetic to our existence, floored me.

Suddenly, the piercing honesty and heartful regret in his music made sense to me. "Maria," a song I struggled to enjoy last year while so many fellow music heads crowned it one of the year's best, suddenly registered when I saw him play it without an ounce of pretense. The story was just falling out of him like coins slipping out of a pocket hole. His hands strummed the guitar strings with a solemn casualness. It's one of the most devastating songs I've ever heard. Or seen. Or felt. Watching him play it was like sensory overload in a weird way. Clearly, Mendez's humble appeal is more obvious to others than it was to me, because this week he signed to Dead Oceans (Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Japanese Breakfast) and announced a new EP that he's previewing with the song "First Time."

This one's not slipping by me. "First Time" is built around a spartan piano melody and Mendez's soft voice carrying a Beatles-esque tune. It's the kind of quiet song that's best heard at a loud volume, and with your normal breath count slashed in half so you don't accidentally sniffle over one the vocal cracks and pops he leaves in the mix to convey intimacy and homebound solitude. Every time he sings, "I know it's not the first time," I can imagine him warbling it into the mic onstage while plunking a laptop-sized keyboard. I can see "First Time" as much as I hear it. My perspective on an artist is rarely altered so profoundly, but something inside me changed when I stood just a few feet from Mendez while he talked about his life through song. I get it now. I hope you do, too.

Fallen God - Dismembered Thoughts and Memories

Dismembered Thoughts and Memories is Fallen God's first-ever release, but I've seen crazy-ass live footage of the band intermittently pop up on my feed throughout the last year. That's because Fallen God are the new project of South Florida musician Jeff Georges, who used to front Bloodbather and is a popular Twitter user with his finger on the pulse of hardcore. He's always championing the vibrant SFL scene he's heavily involved in, which has spawned many of my favorite hardcore releases of 2024 (Contention, Xcelerate, Domain, Resentment, Collateral, Jezter, etc.) The latest addition to that pile is Fallen God's debut EP, which is a superb selection of bone-snapping metallic hardcore in the lineage of Kickback and All Out War.

This is a style of hardcore that's been especially hot over the last few years, and I'll never get sick of hearing a band do it as well as Fallen God do on Dismembered.... The key is character, and Fallen God have it. Georges shrieks the word "ultimate" in "Ultimate Power" the same way Suburban Scum's ex-frontman howled it in "Ultimate Annihilation" — and it sounds badass as hell. When Georges screams, "welcome to my shattered world," in "Shattered World," he hangs on to each syllable in a way that makes even his pained screams sound catchy. Sure, the breakdowns are savage, but everyone's breakdowns are savage these days. Fallen God want you to grab the mic and kick your friend in the face, and these songs will facilitate that exact sequence of events.

Big Nick - Dope Music

You might not know the name Big Nick, but if you care about Philly indie-rock of the bedroom-pop and shoegaze persuasion, then you should. Big Nick is the project of Philly musician Josh Lesser, a former member of They Are Gutting a Body of Water and someone who's credited with providing "musical assistance" on Blue Smiley's seminal 2016 swan song, return. I stumbled into his first and, until now, only Big Nick album, Blue, on Bandcamp back in 2018, when he was one of many overlooked bedroom-gaze artists working within the post-Alex G milieu. I saw him open for TAGABOW in a Philly basement in 2019, where he played to 20 half-interested college kids and a couple heads. I figured the project was long deceased at this point, but this week Big Nick returned with Dope Music, a set of grim, vulnerable, and darkly funny songs that affirm Lesser as a fixture of the once-local sound that's now permeating worldwide.

Released via JWAR and produced/engineered/mixed by TAGABOW mastermind/JWAR head honcho Doug Dulgarian, Dope Music has all the markings of this particular artistic clique, who inject caustic internet humor into the historically severe, straight-faced genres of indie-rock and shoegaze. Juxtaposing the album's Datpiff-era mixtape artwork and crude vocal samples are very real lyrics about drug addiction and the grimy lifestyle that comes with it. On the aptly-titled "crack song," Lesser flips the words "I smoke rocks and see god" into a shabby trip-hop anthem with a schoolyard playfulness. In "shower song," the pathetic confession, "you're the only person that I shower for," is sung with so much candid yearning — and bolstered by such a headrush of distorted guitars — that it somehow sounds like a romantic note passed in class.

The album highlight is "shoot dope til I die," which has the pitched-up vocals and ramshackle acoustic strums of the Alex G period between Trick and DSU. That specific era of Alex G, before the alt-country ballads and Aphex Twin-sy fuckery of his last few records, are the source material for so many artists in the JWAR sphere of influence, and Big Nick makes a strong case that there's still plenty of good ideas to be mined from that strain of internet-native lo-fi pop. If you fuck with Feeble Little Horse, Computerwife, Hooky, Stove, Weatherday, or any of Big Nick's aforementioned Philly peers, then Dope Music is within your wheelhouse.

Glixen - "Sick Silent"

I like how Glixen have been giving MBV-style shoegaze a muscular makeover that sounds of a piece with the present landscape but also reverent toward the genre's primitive years. "Sick Silent" is the Arizona group's darkest, heaviest single yet, and it accomplishes everything Glixen have ever excelled at while also pushing their sound in a slightly new direction. My favorite thing about Glixen is that their music never sounds sterile. The guitars on this track are so loud that the edges char and tatter like parchment paper, but the disintegration never neuters their walloping force. Every instrument in the mix sounds utterly crushing, but there's still enough clarity in the vocals to keep the melody upfront at all times. The mark of a great shoegaze song is when you can't pick out the seams in the composition. Rather than four or five individual components stitched together, you just hear one imposing torrent of noise that's so kinetic that it almost appears still. "Sick Silent" achieves that effect. Most Glixen songs do. I think all of their acclaim thus far is well-earned.

Inner Peace - Floorbreaker

Rap and hardcore aren't easy genres to combine, and the bands that are best known for doing it effectively (E-Town Concrete, Fury of Five, Gridiron) aren't beating the cornball allegations. Inner Peace are different. The Indiana band are fronted by an rapper named Drayco who could be spitting over any beat and still sound awesome. In this band, he delivers wordy sermons over chunky, thrashy hardcore songs, resulting in a free-flowing iteration of rapcore that's unlike any band I've ever heard. Their 2023 demo was so engrossing because of how Drayco's voice stepped in and outside the jagged guitar grooves like he was playing verbal hopscotch. He wasn't punching in easy rhyme schemes, he was ranting all over the tracks with total indifference to the rhythms below, often starting out at a harried whisper and revving up to a gravelly yelp.

It was one of the coolest hardcore demos I've heard in a long time, and it earned Inner Peace a little bit of buzz in the Midwest – but I think they could be bigger, and the songs on their new EP Floorbreaker demonstrate why. On this release, the songs themselves are a little more coherent and melodic than on the demo, providing a stable foundation for the kinetic Drayco to gleefully spray over. Opener "Act Like You Know" would probably be a great hardcore song no matter who had the mic, but Drayco turns it into a masterpiece, ad-libbing and sprint-rapping over the two-step verses and huffing mightily over the bouncy mosh parts. The next three songs maintain that pace without overdoing it, offering just enough shreddy solos and Bad Brainsy riffs so that my ear isn't full discombobulated by Drayco's dizzying ravings.

Playboi Carti - "All Red"

A couple weeks back, I wrote that the new album from Playboi Carti disciple Destroy Lonely was good enough to hold me over until the rage maestro himself released his long-awaited new album. Well, now it's going to have to keep pulling its weight. Last week, Carti formally announced his fourth opus, I Am Music, and then dropped its latest teaser track, "All Red." Like many other Carti fans I saw reacting on my timeline, I wish it was better. Whereas previous Carti loosies like "2024" and "Evil Jordan" offered a mutated strain of what Carti devised on 2020's Whole Lotta Red, "I Am Music" is a step backwards in time — something the zeitgeist-driving rapper has never done.

Like many others, my first thought was that it sounded like a Future track from the late 2010s, or even like 21 Savage if he worked with F1lthy instead of Metro Boomin. The mantra-like hook about an upside down cross tattoo has diminishing returns after the first chorus, and the song's sole verse only contains a couple scant fragments where Carti's voice sounds sufficiently quirky. I wanted him to follow the path he carved earlier this year with his beautifully mush-mouthed verse on Camilla Cabello's "I Luv It." Even the whispery, brittle delivery he showcased on "Evil Jordan" is a creative juxtaposition to the satanic spasms of Whole Lotta Red. "All Red" sounds woefully normal for one of popular music's most unpredictable weirdos.

Slowwves - "SWS"

Shoutout to friend of blog Owen Morawitz (of The Pitch of Discontent) for turning me onto Slowwves, a Thai shoegaze trio who've released their first four songs in 2024. While I expected this new one, based on the art and the spelling of the band's name, to sound like trite grunge-gaze, I was pleasantly surprised that "SWS" is doing something a little different. The interplay between the masc/femme vocalists is gorgeous, the guitar leads offer more than just atmosphere, and even at six minutes, the song feels like it's actually leading somewhere the whole way through. During its grand finale, I like how the reverby guitar leads dip and dive beneath the lapping distortion like seabirds. Plus, the hook is hummable as hell. Yep, this is good.