By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, including a charity compilation of Streetlight Manifesto covers thrown together by Lonely Ghost Records and Neu Blume’s year-best cosmic folk album LET IT WIN!
Various Artists – 16 SONGS OF REVOLUTION: A STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO COVER COMPILATION
Genre: Ska, Pop, Rock
Favorite Tracks: N/A
Look, you got me. I’m a white dude in his mid-30s who played alto saxophone in his High School marching band. Of course I love Streetlight Manifesto. The large majority of us do! And just so you know my bona fides are legit, I passed out from dehydration and exhaustion at the set break between them and Reel Big Fish at the Marquee on January 5th, 2009—the circle pit for Streetlight being too intense for a gangly 16-year-old like myself—and my two favorite tracks are “We Will Fall Together” off of 2007’s SOMEWHERE IN THE BETWEEN and “A Moment of Silence” from 2003’s EVERYTHING GOES NUMB…
So now that you know I’m legit, here’s the thing: It’s not really like I listen to a lot of Streetlight Manifesto these days. Periodically I’ll see them on a concert list and go, “Well that’d be fun,” and then I obviously don’t do it. I haven’t been actively listening to the band since, well, not too long after I was slumped over in the lobby of the Marquee as my buddy brought me a cup of lukewarm water to wake me up. But listening to the wonderful charity compilation 16 SONGS OF REVOLUTION really brings me back. As you could expect from the immaculate DIY ears at Lonely Ghost Records, it’s a pretty eclectic mix of singer-songwriter takes, chiptuned and 8-bitted digital interpretations, and some faithfully blown-out, horn-forward covers, but boy is the whole compilation a nostalgic rush. The blurry, washed-out punk rock of “On & on & On” from Nelly Was Nervous awoke something inside me, a rush of memories surrounding the KEASBEY NIGHTS cut that I hadn’t thought about since the late 2000s while riding buses to band competitions. And that’s, in a nutshell, what all 16 songs do.
There are two highlights here I want to shout out. The first is Do It With Malice’s “If and When We Rise Again,” featuring Bex Rose and Eric Molina. The intro moves deftly from a Flea-esque bass stomp into a slurry ‘80s sax solo and then explodes into a maximalist-but-faithful Streetlight Manifesto cover, one that kitchen-sinks quirks from across the band’s sound into one track. The second is the Oldphone and Superdestroyer collab on “We Are The Few,” a dizzyingly modern take that distills one of the highlights of the band’s discography into a 73-second wonky hyperpop extravaganza.
All proceeds will be donated to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in perpetuity—Lonely Ghost Records + Streetlight Manifesto + Charity Compilation isn’t a hard math equation. You can grab a copy over on Bandcamp!
Neu Blume – LET IT WIN
Genre: Folk, Cosmic Americana, Alt-Country
Favorite Tracks: “Let It Win,” “Car To Go,” “Wood Pile”
About once or twice a year I will scour the internet to see if there is anything out there about Nanami Ozone, one of the great “what ifs” in Phoenix indie rock history whose national ascent was thwarted by a global pandemic and the collapse of the original iteration of Tiny Engines. And once or twice a year, I find nothing—a static Instagram page whose last post was from June of 2020 and periodic blog and social media posts about the band’s excellent two albums, NO and DESIRE.
So I need to give a quick shout out to Pro Teens’ Matt Tanner, who keeps me honest once or twice a year in my DMs with the best and brightest indie music coming out of Arizona. A few months ago he sent me Neu Blume’s LET IT WIN, a Detroit folk project rising from the ashes of Nanami Ozone by Mo Neuharth and Colson Miller. The group’s debut is one of the year’s best, a high wire act of twangy, cosmic folk music, hooky, rock-forward songwriting, and atmospheric American primitivism. The blissed-out shoegaze that defined Nanami Ozone by the end of their tenure is naturally gone, but Neuharth and Miller’s remarkable vocal interplay remains—their bio describes these songs as an extension of DESIRE, and certainly comparing and contrasting LET IT WIN to NO you can see two paths form, one with the latter’s louder, fiercer noise pop and one with the former’s lighter, bendy kaleidoscopic rock. But make no mistake, Neu Blume is its own defined thing, a project that feels remarkably current in a crowded landscape of slacked-out, twingy folk rock and countrygaze contemporaries. These songs, even at three or four minutes long, find ways to jam out—the bendy guitars in tracks like “Power” or “Wood Pile” stretch 30 seconds into feeling like a warm hour, the tough playing to close out “Be Still” delivering an intensely joyful and infinite sounding tone. The album’s highlights are its boundless downtempo numbers, namely its title track and “Car To Go.” You can hear these songs as extensions of DESIRE’s twisted waltzes and forlorn ballads—”Wet Mouth,” “Sonny Bono,” the now-aptly named “Michigan Man.”
On first listen, I was just thrilled that some piece of Nanami Ozone remained. Now, I hear LET IT WIN as its own towering triumph, one of the best collections of folk rock you’ll hear this year—and that’s saying something in 2025. Give it a listen over on Bandcamp!
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