November Albums of The Month

Hey y'all we're back and sooooo so excited to share our picks for November

Ultramarine - Every Man and Woman is Star

Analog, Hypnotic, Jubilant

By Hayden Asiano

November is the time when the bikes stay chained up, the scarves come on, and Oberlings must mentally fortify themselves for the trudging march to class. The weather is miserable; there’s no way around it. This california boy is still looking for a way to cope. Yeah, Vitamin D gummies are delicious, but I’ve found Ultramarine’s Every Man and Woman is a Star to be the true cure. Put your headphones on, your head down, and enter a trance of jubilant (and somewhat folksy?) beats. The album’s hypnotic rhythms float in from a nostalgic 1980s daydream. The electronic drums, synthesizers, and samples are all analog, resulting in a collage of lucid moments pieced together in a fragmented psychedelic experience. Its beeps and boops, the clash of its drums, the subtle bending of the synthesizer and guitar parts – it all feels both immediate and distant. While Every Man and Woman is Star is definitely dance music, it’s not the kind of sound you would want to drop acid in the club to absorb. Instead, one can imagine waking up in a hilltop cottage with your friends on a Sunday morning, the sun-soaked breeze drifting in through the window, and tucking a tab beneath your tongue before going out to frolic in the cornfields holding hands. In essence it’s like if Midsommar was chill. Or maybe it’s like if the Sound of Music went really hard. Somewhere in the middle there. Reader discretion advised — please don’t do this at home kids. But definitely give the album a listen.

Bucky Fellini - The Dead Milkmen

Goofy, angry, messy.

By Charley Burns

The Dead Milkmen have always been in my orbit in one way or another, whether that was my friends and my dad being really into them, or their weird history with my hometown. Like I have been chronically aware of them for most of my life, but I have never sat down and listened to anything more than “Punk Rock Girl.” This month has lowkey been insane, so when feeling like a punky silly sound was needed, I immediately turn towards The Dead Milkmen. Though Beleezabubba and Big Lizard in My Backyard stand as their most notable albums, Bucky Fellini has been the one I’ve come back to the most. It houses some of their funniest songs (“Watching Scotty Die” and “Going to Graceland” being personal favorites) and the twangy aggressive nature of every single song on the album makes it my personal favorite by a long shot. It stands with Tenacious D and The Lonely Island as comedy bands that actually make good music, with their almost country-esque approach to punk making every track uniquely stupid in the best way. The vibes of this entire album are so unmatched and bring a real “fuck it, we ball” energy whenever I put it on. 

Yank Crime - Drive Like Jehu

Unrelenting, Sprawling, Best Played Loud

By Owen Neaman

The second and final LP released by San Diego noise legends Drive Like Jehu, this record is as mesmeric as it is heavy. Drawing influence from early emo and hardcore, this record sounds extremely original for something released in 1994: songs built around piercing, distorted guitar parts, dizzying odd time signatures, and impassioned (mostly screamed) vocal delivery from Rick Froberg. Froberg and writing partner John Reis splinter through song after song, through punishingly fast numbers (“Golden Brown”), feedback-laden slow burns (“Do You Compute”), and immaculately crafted epics which, if they weren’t so horrifyingly and sublimely shambolic, could be considered prog. I think there’s also something distinctly autumnal about Yank Crime, probably because of the warm sonics mixed with the extremely harsh production on the album. Despite the length of some of the songs, this album is perfectly paced and refreshingly spare, sounding like it was recorded in someone’s garage. It’s a 53-minute album so spontaneous that it sounds like it was recorded in an hour: excess buzz and hum is kept in the mix, the countless time-signature jumps are sharp and imperfect, but throughout the entire album, the musicians never tire or let up. Undoubtedly a must-listen for any noise rock fan with the patience to sit through an album that’s an hour long.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show - Original Soundtrack (1975) 

Camp, flirtatious, messy

By Logan Modan

For as a self proclaimed Broadway fanatic, I am embarrassed to say that I had not listened to this album until October of this year. I was building my Halloween playlist for my WOBC show, and my boyfriend suggested I listen to this! It was on my radar, but besides that one episode of Glee, I had never really paid this show much attention. I am a changed woman. I love how this show is unapologetically weird, it reminds me a lot of Avenue Q, though more likely, Avenue Q reminds me a lot of Rocky Horror. There is not much of a fear that I can pick up on saying the wrong thing, no one in this cast holds back. It’s not just the words they’re singing, it’s the way that it’s sung, it’s the crazy instrumentals, and the wonderfully marvelous outfits. Since listening to this for the first time, I’ve listened to this album several times a week and also sang the full album with my boss at Dominos. He’s a great singer, shout out Chuck! This album is really helping me combat the grey of November, Midterms, and finals season, so I’d really recommend giving it a listen! 

Twin Plagues - Wednesday

noisy, dynamic, uneasy

By Benjamin Rosielle

This November, I’ve found myself listening to an obsessive amount of Wednesday. I’ve been listening to so much Wednesday, in fact, that I recently received a message from the #3 most frequent Wednesday listener on Airbuds, informing me that he was coming for my spot as #2. Music isn’t a competition about who or what is #1 (or #2 in this case), but you’d be hard-pressed to find me claiming Wednesday to have a better album than their 2021 release Twin Plagues. Characteristic of the band's sound, Twin Plagues is replete with squealing shoegaze riffs, crushing amounts of overdrive, and a healthy dose of slide guitar. In an indie scene flooded with noisy 90s-revivalist bands, Wednesday stand out thanks to frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s lyricism and vocals, straddling the line between beauty and malaise. There are hooks galore, and everything is played with enough force at enough of the right moments to keep me coming back. Check out how the band crescendos with Hartzman’s vocals (or is it the other way around?) on slow-building tracks like “Cody’s Only” or “Cliff.” The alt-country tunes are beautiful and bittersweet (“How Can You Live If You Can’t Love How Can You If You Do,” “The Burned Down Dairy Queen”), and when the band cranks up the tempo (and their distortion pedals) the results are nothing short of indie-rock excellence (“Handsome Man,” “Toothache”). I find Twin Plagues to be ideal listening accompaniment for grabbing some fountain soda, watching the leaves blow by, or taking a hot shower after being out in the rain.

Transangelic Exodus - Ezra Furman

Conceptual, Personal, Urgent

By Natasha Dracobly

The words I used to describe Transangelic Exodus might seem contradictory, but they meld seamlessly in this album anyways. Before this month, when a friend recommended this album to me, I’d never really listened to Ezra Furman, and I was shocked by just how good Transangelic Exodus is in all its capacities — as a concept album, as a political album, as a collection of great rock songs, and as a very personal and very religious work of art. According to Furman in a 2017 interview, the album is about “Transangelicism,” a condition in which people become angels, “or rather manifest that they have always been angels by growing wings.” Society, though, is distrustful of angels, thinking it a disease or a danger to humanity, and so they are forced to go into hiding or escape; the primary plot of the album is about a human who chooses to help and go on the run with an angel.

Stranger in the Alps - Phoebe Bridgers

blue, quietly tragic, misty

By Sloane DiBari

It’s November, the final stretch of fall that, here in this intersection of the Northeast and the Midwest, kind of straddles the line of early winter. There are these cloudy days and evenings that have this dim blue glow to them, there’s a melancholy in the air all the time that feels like the nighttime does after it’s been raining all afternoon. That’s what Stranger in the Alps sounds like to me, and how life feels right now. November is a time for bittersweet nostalgia, for missing people, for love long gone, for looking back on the past and wondering where it all went wrong, for feeling like a stranger to yourself and sick of yourself at the same time. Bridgers manages to bring this dreamlike, reverberating landscape to gloomy indie folk sparseness that makes every track feel as Huge as Life Itself and intimate at the same time. “Smoke Signals” and “Scott Street” bring me back to early winters spent in my hometown with people who I haven’t seen in years; “Motion Sickness” has been on repeat during my nights spent pacing in Tappan Square; and “Would You Rather” is just indescribably perfect. Recommended for a long drive somewhere so far away from this time and place that you eventually just feel it all coming back to you.