We are giving away a pair of tickets to Squid @ Revolution Hall on February 23. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed February 19.
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From our sponsors:
February 23, 2024
7PM Doors, 8PM Show | $22 | 21+
More info: etix.com
Revolution Hall
1300 SE Stark St., Portland, OR
Teeming with melodic epiphanies and layered sounds, Squid’s second album O Monolith is a musical evocation of environment, domesticity and self-made folklore. Like its predecessor, 2021’s critically acclaimed, UK number 4 album Bright Green Field, it is dense and tricksy – but also more warm and characterful, with a meandering, questioning nature. This is unmistakably music made by friends, but it’s not exclusionary – they’re inviting you in to listen with them.
O Monolith will be released 9th June on Warp Records, it was produced by Dan Carey, mixed by John McEntire of Tortoise and recorded at Real World Studios. There’s a running theme of the relation of people to the environment throughout. There are allusions to the world the band became so immersed in, environmental emergency, the role of domesticity, and the displacement you feel when you’re away for a long time.
Expansive, evocative and hugely varied, O Monolith retains Squid’s restless, enigmatic spirit, but it still holds surprises for those familiar with Bright Green Field. It’s a reflection of the outsized progression of a band always looking to the future. Like its namesake, O Monolith is vast and strange; alive with endless possible interpretations of its inner mysteries.
Water From Your Eyes
Life is horribly dark right now. And yet, it is not unfunny.
That’s the sentiment that animates Water From Your Eyes on their new album, and first for Matador, Everyone’s Crushed. On the follow-up to the Brooklyn duo’s 2021 breakthrough, Structure, Rachel Brown (they/them) and Nate Amos (he/him) find silliness and fatalism dancing in a frantic lockstep, using heart palpitating rhythms and absurdist, deadpan lyrics to convey stories of personal and societal unease. Described by Brown as Water From Your Eyes’ most collaborative record ever – and, as such, a kind of reset for the pair, almost like a debut, despite technically being their sixth – it’s a swollen contusion of an album: experimental pop music that’s pretty and violent, raw and indelible.
The duo started making music together in 2016 while living in Chicago, after Amos played Brown some New Order and they decided they wanted to start a “sad dance band.” Both musicians in their own right, and a couple at the time, they made their self-titled debut EP in a week. Over the next few years, Water From Your Eyes’ music drifted toward rangier and less conventional sounds, incorporating serene industrial polyrhythms, ambient drone music, and contemporary composition.