Them Airs.
“Exploded Whip,” from the new album of the same name by the New Haven-based Them Airs, starts with chiming guitars, keys, and bass, a steady rhythm with skittering beats beneath it. “He drive exploded car,” the vocalist sings, “he never intended to die / I watched as he spun out / turned his human skin outside.” The dark surrealism of the lyrics is set at an oblique angle to a song that sounds written by musicians with a lot of experience, yet who are still bursting with ideas.
It’s an apt summation of Them Airs — Evan Nork on drums, keys, vocals, tape manipulation, and piano, Cade Williams on guitar, vocals, and electronics, Adam Cohen on bass, noise, vocals, and ratchet, Luke Schroeder on guitar and brass, and Amina Rustemovic on synth — whose members hit New Haven stages as teenagers (remember the Foresters?). Now they are in their 20s, and their creativity sounds as if it still hasn’t reached its peak. “Exploded Whip,” after all, is in some ways a warm-up for the driving chaos that follows on “High Tension Spigot,” an almost 10-minute jam that shows the members throwing melodic, textural, and rhythmic ideas to see how they collide, at least for the first four and a half minutes. Those who listen through the maelstrom are rewarded with a musical left turn that finds the band jamming on a texture that wouldn’t be out of place on a Yo La Tengo album. Them Airs is a band that plays with maturity and dexterity beyond their years, but imbues it with all the youthful energy they have.
Them Airs’s latest effort arrives amid a series of new releases from New Haven-area acts, from the jam band Eggy to the prolific Matt Pacheco, to a short, sharp shock to the system from The Ratz. Among them, Hamden singer-songwriter Robert Daniel Irwin stays the steady course he began with 2020’s Nature vs. Nurture and continued with 2021’s Chasing the Tone. Clockwise, his latest release, finds him delivering his direct, sometimes nostalgic and often wry lyrics set to music over 14 songs that pull equally from rock, folk, and punk.
“Milk and Cookie Days” works an anthemic sound to build to a climactic chorus that looks back on a youth more felt than remembered (“What happened to those milk and cookie days? / What happened to our wicked wedgie ways, / When we were all new and light and young, / And every day was about having fun? / I really don’t remember much about those days, / But I feel I need them in a thousand ways.”) “Walk of Consequence” marries peppy lyrics with sharp, painful memories, to disorienting effect (“I took a little walk, just me and my dad. / I had my lightsaber out, thought I was real bad. / He said, “My little Jedi, be one with the force, / but your mom and I are getting a divorce”). “Juliet Killed Her Romeo” gets sarcastic about Shakespeare, while “A Year of Januarys” rails hard against the passage of time. “Dengue Fever” is a surprisingly peaceful song about catching that particular illness. Of them all, though, perhaps “Scream for a Generation” pulls the camera out the farthest to make a point about what exactly the parents of today are handing their children, and asking them to take care of. “Scream for a generation / as brilliant plans turn to rust,” Irwin sings. “Scream at a generation / The next generation screams at us.”
Where Them Airs and Robert Daniel Irwin’s records are decidedly group efforts, Colebert’s latest album, Pirouette, is nearly entirely written, recorded and performed by Cole Crawford, who offers a charming slice of hazy, dreamy pop. The opening track, “Caves,” is made from shimmering guitar parts and gleaming synths, with Crawford’s voice meandering amid a gentle groove from laid-back drums. “It All Comes Back Around” struts forward on a warm, sunny, spaced-out guitar hook. “Goodbye” marries dense, jangly chords with a lyrical slide guitar that brings the emotions, and “Orange Juice moves along on a bubbly keyboard line and playfully programmed drums. Citing their sources, Colebert ends the album with a Cocteau Twins cover that indeed captures some of that seminal band’s aura.
The slew of recent releases from New Haven bands in recent weeks point toward a swell of activity as the city heads into summer, with the promise of shows indoors and outdoors. Whether the pandemic is over or not, the music just keeps coming.