03.22.2026
Good Morning,
This is Beach Sloth. Below are this week’s albums:
· Editor’s Note – Moving forward, anything that is abnormally loud and noisy beyond what a ‘reasonable person**’ would subject themselves to will be prefaced with a *Volume Warning*. Thank you.
Swell Maps – The John Peel Sessions
John Peel might be the closest thing to what I wanted to be, had the whole radio thing worked out, and if I were British. Sadly and fortunately, respectively, I am not. One of the nicest things about John Peel was how he was an extremely out-there DJ who regularly played utterly bizarre stuff. A true music weirdo’s music weirdo, he’d play Merzbow on his show, Autechre on his show, Swell Maps, whatever interested him. Nobody stopped him; they encouraged him. We need a person like this back again in society to save us from suggested artists and sad algorithms. I love researching music and diving deep into sheer esoteric stuff, so, in a way, I have modeled some of my listening habits on the filtering he used to find what he did. Every time I read an article about how tough it is to discover music without the algorithm, I shudder. Please don’t let this happen to you; you do not need machines telling you what to do.
Swell Maps might be one of my top-favorite all-time bands, possibly top twenty. I first discovered them through a Soft Pink Truth track Real Shocks from their 2004 album Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth by Baltimore-based musician Drew Daniel. Immediately, I liked the song. Upon main-lining Swell Maps and realizing what level of post-punk/krautrock/experimental ethos they were, I fell in love with the sound. Everything is perfect – dissonance, almost pure noise with a slight groove, sometimes industrial, oddly funky, married to an utterly baffling conviction to the best album and song titles I have ever seen. Naming an album …In “Jane From Occupied Europe” takes guts, and, just as important, intelligence. Humor is a steadfast sign of intelligence, so if you lack a sense of humor, you might be a complete idiot. There are writers who are nowhere near as well-spoken as Swell Maps, and some of them have devoted their entire lives to writing for some perplexing reason, despite being unbelievably bad at it. As I write this, I think about a recent defamation lawsuit that failed because people couldn’t take a joke. Will there be defamation lawsuits in the future from equally humorless folks? I have absolutely no doubt in my mind.
For this John Peel Session, Swell Maps mellowed a tad. The tempos are slightly higher than on their studio albums. I am familiar with the studio versions of these, and they tended to play things a little sloppily compared to the tracks on here. Here they play it tighter on songs such as Helicopter Spies, where, on the studio version, they left things sprawl, getting nearly psychedelic, as if the band forgot they let that guitar riff linger for a couple of seconds longer than they should have. I personally love the timing, as Swell Maps tended to run things out longer than you’d initially expect, which was part of the surprise. Few post-punk bands ever would let their tracks stretch out this long, though exceptions exist. I also appreciate the band sounding as if someone startled them awake, because every one of their songs has a bleariness, as if they’re simply trying to get through and understand something. This, to me, is perhaps what endears them to me so much. Unlike bands who try for intensity, I respect a band that embodies the “five extra minutes” of sleep as an individual who cherishes sleep as much as a person cosplaying as a sloth for the last decade and a half.
By far, and I need to emphasize this, Midget Submarine is on here. I love everything about Midget Submarine. Unlike the studio version, where they embrace feedback a tad more, here they keep it cleaner, faster, and a tad tighter. Maybe they got enough sleep the night before, who really knows? But when I say I love Midget Submarine with all my heart, I do. The lyrics – funny yet equally stupid and violent, which, as an American, I wholeheartedly support. Guitars, going for the angular form of attack, as if all guitars are pitched on this 60 degree angle that in geometry would be one corner of an equilateral triangle. Finally, there is the off-beat beat. I may be a sucker for an odd time signature, but this one is a lot of fun. When you combine it altogether, you get a song that, if I were on a deserted island, I wouldn’t even need to bring with me because I have permanently etched it into my very brain. If you have not heard it, I cannot recommend it enough, as it is a rare life-changing track that I can point to and fully endorse.
Unsure why this took decades to get released – these songs were recorded in the late ‘70s, during post-punk’s greatest era. I think it makes some sense to release them now, especially amid all the excellent resurgence of the sound. There are a lot of great, witty post-punk bands who have drawn inspiration from Swell Maps, and I am so happy that more are discovering this peculiar little group, even if it is maybe about fifty years too late. Better late than never.
Bill Orcutt – The Four Louies
How many Louies are too many Louies? According to former Harry Pussy lead guitarist Bill Orcutt, four. That’s how many. A sound of pure rebellion, Louie Louie, filtered into two of the most popular idioms of midcentury Americana, and, alongside Steve Reich’s Four Organs, it shows exactly how influential Louie Louie was to American culture. One may claim that Steve Reich ripped off the sheer power of Oregon’s the Kingmen. This would, unfortunately, be proven correct, as much as it pains me to give credit to the wretched, clouded hellscape that is the Pacific Northwest. Those who have been able to escape have escaped, and many thanks to those who have been able to create art in a place as sunless as that perpetual milky twilight. Make fun of Alaska all you want, they do get some sun at least for that non-bleak half of the year.
Both compositions have tended to show government inefficiencies and the upper classes’ lack of taste. The FBI investigated the lyrics of “ Louie Louie for over two years at the urging of Indiana Governor Matthew Walsh to conclude that the lyrics were indecipherable at any speed. Real great use of taxpayer dollars. Conversely, this money spent by the federal government would have been of great help to those working in the Studebaker Automobile Plant, where their last car rolled off the South Bend assembly line on December 20th, 1963. Does this mean that the US Federal Government cared more about some silly incomprehensible nonsense novelty song than the average American auto manufacturing job? Yes, and they will continue to care nothing for the plight of the working class. Richard Berry, the singer of Louie Louie, remained desperately impoverished until shortly before his death, when he finally secured the rights to the song and became rich. Again, the money spent by the FBI could have been used for any practical purpose, and instead it was sacrificed at the altar of American Puritanical Impulses. Fortunately, decades later, Bill Orcutt played in the band Harry Pussy to try to make up for centuries’ worth of repression. Did it succeed? Kind of, because even now, the public has been unable to confront the antagonistic cacophony that was Harry Pussy, they are too afraid to even utter their name in polite society. Impolite society loves the ever-fucking shit out of Harry Pussy.
Steve Reich proved the upper class in New York City had no class. People hated Four Organs, whereas now they love it. It only took the realization that music should be, and could be, experimented upon for boring Upper West Side folks to get behind the weirdness. Even now, as this indeterminately aged sloth reflects upon their life, they remember how they introduced the wealthy Upper West Side people to the good old-fashioned noise of Dat Politics, forever getting them out of their blissfully boring folk musings played in stagnant overpriced coffeehouses. Yes, no matter where Beach Sloth travels to, they bring merriment and the escape from reality that the normies crave. Remember, if you would like to contribute to the Beach Sloth weird fund, become a paying subscriber today!
Bill Orcutt, in short, made these two tracks sing. Each extended beyond the ten-minute mark, with no singing, just the silly vocals replicated by the organs, allows the two pieces to have pure glee. For the first section, the cut has much more in common with the bliss of Louie Louie. On the flip side, Steve Reich strikes back, with the organs taking center stage. It is this conflict, this at the knife’s edge, of uncertainty despite being trance-inducing, that makes the two pieces so breathlessly silly yet highly original. Just an overall good time, and a way to indoctrinate garage rock fans into Steve Reich and classical minimalist fans into garage rock.
Photokem - A Mat in the Garden
After a half-decade of ambling about the greater Brooklyn region, Photokem finally releases its debut album. I could critique them for taking so long, but I am a sloth, so getting angry at them for taking their time feels hypocritical. Besides, the way they execute the sound is highly distinctive. Orchestral pop, post-rock, the artiest art rock that ever arted, yes, these cover it partly. Yet they are such an outlier thanks to their unique combination of skills. No matter what, nobody will ever accuse Photokem of chasing trends – post-rock has been on the decline since the early aughts (a statement I did not revel in writing down) and orchestral pop again had more of an early aughts quality. Even in that decade, though, those genres typically never, if ever, met. So the way they synthesize all of this, with a vocalist included, is out-there and distinctive.
Lyrics are poetic things. Vocals serve an equally memorable goal. The combination of all these elements is something quite splendid. Everyone in the band appears to push the others towards this cinematic flurry of delicate sounds. Piano, strings, within a post-rock/art rock ethos, perhaps the only close comparison I could even think to mention would be Louisville’s Rachel’s. Like Rachel’s, they appear very out of step with the zeitgeist (a compliment, because the world deserves more beautiful sounds like these) and almost appear to have been transmitted from some parallel dimension, where such music is common. On the orchestral pop side, they incorporate elements of TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, and early Fleet Foxes; it’s really a slew of reference points that rarely coexist.
Yet they do. It helps with the sense of enormity, as they have many collaborators providing backing vocals. This gives the tracks a communal experience, which reflects nicely on the tight-knit community of Brooklyn at large. Indeed, in terms of places I have lived, places like Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Denver all have that distinctive, tied-together quality that is something I genuinely love. So, hearing that temperament brought along by strings, vocalists, and post-rock guitars is doubly refreshing. In fact, come to think of it, post-rock was an extremely communal experience. Jokes about how groups like Tortoise and Godspeed You! Black Emperor was abundant, as if artists could work together and no man was an island. Obviously, that has changed, so hearing a group harken back to that sense of unified purpose is downright inspiring.
Most of the recordings occurred at the group’s various apartments. Again, you can kind of tell by the fidelity, which is warm without being overly coy. The piano aspects were recorded in a proper studio, so this mixture of fidelities allows a certain dialogue between the different approaches. It is thoughtful work, and it is a bit of a pity that they had to self-release it on Bandcamp. Yet, you can hear the passion, and it translates nicely into some unusual approaches. The main thing I will forewarn is that the abstraction is a bit out of left field, so wait until two tracks in before passing judgment. As some books do, there’s that introductory chapter that is necessary to introduce the reader (in this case, the listener) to things. Remember that Banana Breakfast that introduced Gravity’s Rainbow? Yes, it is much like that, despite seemingly appearing so random. The effort is rewarded, and it is some very specific stuff. This is the music created without any commercial concerns whatsoever, freewheeling and lively.
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Throne
Throne | Beach Sloth | My Wishlist
**Your idea of a reasonable person, music-wise, I’m sure, differs from mine. **Still, if you’re already here, you’re already unreasonable by sheer virtue of your attendance, and I thank you for that. **
Last.fm
This wonderful Swell Maps appreciation is appreciated.