By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring Loose Fit’s art pop angled post-punk EP BITTERSWEET EXCESS and SUSS’s career best ambient country album COUNTING SUNSETS!
Loose Fit – BITTERSWEET EXCESS
Genre: Post-Punk
Favorite Tracks: “Bittersweet Excess,” “Cracked Whip”
Throughout the Australian DIY music scene are heaps of bands who indulge in angular post-punk excursions. I’m talking about the kind where subdued basslines, jagged riffs, and shouty yelps are doused in a dubby sheen—a psychedelic concoction. It is a delight for those drawn to tight, weird rock music. Sydney quartet Loose Fit, who are purveyors of this sound in the local scene, making a long-awaited return following their 2022 debut, SOCIAL GRACES.
Their latest, BITTERSWEET EXCESS, despite its brief 15-minute length, finds the band treading new ground as they’ve smoothed out their dance-punk to arrive at a dreamier, hazier sound. The dub complexion is clearer than ever, Loose Fit sounding closer to their Melbourne hypnotic post-punk contemporaries EXEK, with whom they’ve shared stages.
The new songs are a quick dose of mutant, escalating chords. The menacing titular opener is their new ethereal territory in action—saxophones emerge like ghosts as vocalist Anna Langdon’s taunting voice confronts today’s ever-present dilemma of humanity having more than it needs. “Cracked Whip” explores lust’s tendency to distort reality, the cowbell-driven groove making this serious interrogation hard to forget. The propulsive “Diminishing Returns” and “Feel Ya Shiver” chronicle more modern unease with whirring, skyward guitars, satisfyingly rounding out the EP.
Loose Fit fearlessly face existential predicaments while playing overwhelmingly infectious melodies. Effortlessly succeeding at post-punk’s most memorable qualities — the introspection and moodiness—Loose Fit honors the genre’s spirit. Listen to the EP on Bandcamp. [Dom Lepore]
SUSS – COUNTING SUNSETS
Genre: Ambient Country
Favorite Tracks: “Sunset I,” “Sunset IV”
I’ve long tried to tell people that Arizona has the best sunsets. Not, like, really great sunsets. The best sunsets.
That statement is, often, met with some skepticism—and rightfully so, I’m nothing if not (mostly, hesitantly) a champion of my home state. But I’ve seen sunsets of all kinds, in New England, in the south, in Los Angeles where I live, even in Europe and Mexico and Canada. They’re… fine! Sometimes spectacular. But they don’t quite hit the same. And there is, as I’ve learned recently, some scientific proof to back up my broadly subjective statement, and it has to do with Rayleigh scattering, or essentially how the color of the sunset itself is determined by both the size of the molecules or particles as well as the actual wavelength of light. Because Arizona is dry and because it’s a literal desert, dust particles are plentiful in the sky and thus create a more vivid, more colorful sunset than in, say, Vermont.
The brilliance, the texture, the gradient of the sun setting is captured on SUSS”s latest album, aptly titled COUNTING SUNSETS. The New York trio’s nearly decade long exploration of ambient country music has led to its most succinct work yet, a ten-song meditation on the waxing and waning of these particles and wavelengths hitting the horizon. As each sunset goes by, the band’s meditation on the colors and atmospheres shift—the darkening calm of night approaching becoming itself a fitting framing for music that is decaying and fading around us and within us as we listen; in their own words, it becomes “a quiet preoccupation with memory and the slow erosion of time.”
SUSS are a band that have only gotten better with age; 2024’s BIRDS & BEASTS, in particular its two 10 minute closing tracks “Beasts” and “Migration,” found a new layer to the lonely, calming, listlessness they’ve quietly perfected over the years. But COUNTING SUNSETS is yet another new layer, capturing the oranges and reds and purples with such dazzling effect. The shifts from “Sunset I” to “Sunset II” are melodically pronounced by tonally minimal, a DISINTEGRATION LOOPS style glacial shift in decomposition that is nothing short of stunning. Both warming and heartbreaking at the same time, it’s the most emotionally complex thing the band have ever attempted, the imagery repeating song after song to remarkable effect. To me, this is the sound of an Arizona sunset. Allow yourself to be alone with your own thoughts while it plays over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
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