Zilched – Earthly Delights

Similar artists: Florence + The Machine, Joy Division, Sky Ferreira, Wolf Alice, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Genre: Alternative Rock

Zilched offers an interesting, often exciting stroll through her favourite alternative records of the past decades. 

If you want to make exciting records, you’re better off not owning the records that everybody else owns. Sure, critics will wax lyrically about Velvet Underground and The Clash records. But while it’s nice to hear them, you shouldn’t have them in your collection for long. Everyone sounds like those bands, and frankly, it’s enough. 

Alternative rock, at its best, promised new solutions to familiar problems. It promised a different way of looking at the world. And even more importantly, it hinted at the possibility of using sounds and influences discarded by the majority of musicians. You know, the kind of music you hadn’t heard before. 

Zilched’s “Earthly Delights” is a pleasant stroll through interesting and exciting alternative records that not everyone has had the chance to quote yet. Furthermore, the songwriting is moved by a genuine desire to do good to others and see good being done back. Those are interesting concepts, different at this moment, and in keeping with what alternative music could be. 

Discord Theory – Cabin Fever

Similar artists: Mayday Parade, Bayside, Hot Mulligan, Taking Back Sunday

Genre: Post-Hardcore, Pop Punk

Discord Theory make pop-punk melodies sound angry or mournful when they damn well please, and that’s a good thing. 

Somehow pop-punk has proven the most versatile and commercially viable rock proposition. Who would’ve thought this could be the case? I mean, just utter the term “pop-punk”, and in the mind’s eye of most people, you’ll immediately convey images of shorts-wearing skaters tormenting mall-goers with their silly antics.

Then why do most of the pop-punk that is gaining an audience today so sad? Well, perhaps all of the silly antics leave you with some empty feelings. And maybe, after all, pop-punk is a great format to write catchy, occasionally meaningful rock music nowadays. 

Discord Theory’s “Cabin Fever” is a modern rock song about modern anxieties. It’s highly melodic but also anguished, describing trauma in a very believable way. It’s not mall music but rather a funeral tune. But life gives all of us sweetness and bitterness, and the rain falls the same on pop-punk kids, after all.