Category: Reviews

I know the common public narrative is to shade AI-assisted music, but I believe Suno is where great lyricists are fluorishing today. it’S U NO LOGY is one of these.

• Listen on Suno

IT’S U NOLOGY stands out in the crowded field of AI-assisted music not by sounding “technically impressive,” but by sounding intentional. There’s a human pulse running through the work — a sense of phrasing, emotional timing, and lyrical presence that goes beyond prompt engineering. These tracks don’t feel like experiments; they feel like songs that needed to exist.

What’s especially strong here is the lyricism. The words aren’t just assembled to fit a melody — they carry weight, flow, and narrative shape. You can hear a writer who understands that rhythm in language matters as much as rhythm in music. There’s variation in tone and structure, with moments that feel intimate and others that open up into something larger and more atmospheric.

Production-wise, the sound choices feel deliberate rather than default. Instead of leaning on Suno’s most obvious stylistic presets, IT’S U NOLOGY uses the platform like a tool, not a crutch — shaping mood, pacing, and texture with restraint.

In a space where a lot of AI music feels disposable, this work feels crafted. It’s not just about generating tracks; it’s about building a voice. And that’s where IT’S U NOLOGY separates itself.

GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker

Daniel Prendiville has been a GAJOOB mainstay for a quarter century now—woven through the fabric of so many projects we’ve stitched together: from the Homemade Music Shop to the remix-happy Tapegerm Collective. His presence has always been marked by a DIY integrity and sly sonic inventiveness, often landing somewhere between outsider rock and post-electronic weird-pop. But like any artist worth returning to, he keeps surprising us.

Hooray For The Whole Array is a 10-track distillation of Prendiville’s creative curiosity. It’s part instrumental, part song-based, part commentary, and entirely personal in its captivating way. He tosses genre labels aside with a grin—”partially proggy, partially Krautrock, mostly impersonal, partially too-clever-for-its-own-good”—and you get the sense he relishes the contradiction.

He uses drum machines not just rhythmically, but melodically—his beats sing. There’s a trick to programming drum machines that is distinct from working with loops. And those hometapers that thoroughly own that space have a kind of unique magic. You don’t know him, by my friend and Baby Fred collaborator, Joe Maki, would labor over the programming whereas I did not. But I appreciated the results. The songs here remind me of that.

Prendiville’s arrangements are sharply constructed but never sterile. Guitars, synths, and vocals are given space to breathe—each mix sounds like it was meant to sound that way, yet also carries a loose improv sort of feel that never takes itself very seriously. There’s care in the sonic sculpting. And underneath the polish, there’s a crackling thread of social commentary, not in-your-face protest, but a mature, reflective discontent—an “I’ve seen a thing or two” energy that feels grounded and human and is forced to laugh at the absurdity of it. Maybe that’s age. Maybe that’s the times. Either way, it hits.

If you’re new to Prendiville, this is a great point of entry. If you’ve known his work for years like I have, Hooray For The Whole Array is both a culmination and a fresh spark—a reminder that our best homemade music is made by people who never stop exploring.

Media: Digital.

Visit Reincheque Recordings

Bandcamp URL: https://danielprendiville.bandcamp.com/album/hooray-for-the-whole-array

GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:

Sai’s Though We Meet But Once opens not with a bang, but with a drifting sense of unease—like falling into a dream just as the walls begin to crumble. What follows is an hour-long farewell transmission of staggering depth and density, where tectonic slabs of guitar crush into spectral ambient drift, and time itself seems to distort and bend.

This is not metal in the traditional sense, nor is it ambient in the Eno-on-a-pillow way. Yasen Penchev (Sai) has built something stranger, heavier, more human. You feel it in your chest—an ache, a pulse, a sense of disorientation that is never resolved. Every track emerges as a terrain—slow, massive, and ancient-feeling—where low-tuned guitars resonate like ancient machinery beneath a canopy of ghost-tones and feedback mist.

The rhythm structures alone are a marvel. Instead of locking into grooves, Penchev constructs polymetric labyrinths: meters overlapping and collapsing in on themselves, only to re-emerge in unexpected alignment. It’s like trying to walk through a funhouse in zero gravity. Just when you feel like you’ve got your footing, the floor tilts. It’s this rhythmic instability that gives Though We Meet But Once its strange propulsion.

But what truly elevates this record—and what lingers—is its emotional core. Even at its heaviest, there’s a vulnerability present. The reverb-soaked delays, the barely-audible field recordings, the moments where everything falls away to reveal some small sound—a breath, a tone, a fading drone—these speak to loss and transience. The title isn’t just poetic; it’s the thesis.

As a capstone to Sai’s body of work, Though We Meet But Once doesn’t merely revisit past motifs—it seems to disassemble them, melt them down, and recast them into something unclassifiable. There are echoes here: of doomgaze, of the immersive soundworlds of artists like Tim Hecker or Nadja, of early Earth or Jesu—but none of those references quite land. Sai walks their own path, even as the ground beneath is dissolving.

Final albums carry weight, and this one feels like a monument—heavy with memory, yet already eroding. It’s music for the moment you realize the connection’s already fading, even as it happens. Rare, rewarding, and unforgettable.

Media: CD.

Visit Mahorka

Bandcamp URL: https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/though-we-meet-but-once

GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:

There’s something especially satisfying about an album that sounds like it was recorded on borrowed time and basement floor inspiration. the flying people’s my cat is more lovely than you is a warm, warbly wonder—half new, half previously seen in their video work, all patched together with a kind of sublime, irreverent glue.

Right from the title, you know you’re in for something askew. This isn’t lo-fi in the self-conscious, retro-sheen way—it’s psychedelic warp pop that skews toward the homemade and heartfelt. There’s a Robyn Hitchcock vibe here: the knack for fractured perspectives, off-axis melodies, lyrics that feel like overheard dreams. But the flying people carve their own crooked lane.

Drums arrive like they’ve been cobbled together from spare toy parts, guitars twang and twist unpredictably, and the cheap synth lines? They’re not buried—they’re sprinkled like garnish, gloriously artificial and oddly perfect. It’s full of what you might call “charm” if charm wasn’t such a tame word. This is weird magic, crackling at the edges.

Members Loften Oblique, Halsey B Gone, and Michael Dooling sound like they’re not chasing polish, but instead leaning into the rough edge where songs breathe weird little lives of their own. This is the kind of cassette that feels like a secret—until you play it loud and proudly for your friends.

Highly recommended if you like your pop bent, your psychedelia playful, and your cats objectively more lovely than anyone else.

Media: Cassette.

Bandcamp URL: https://flyingpeople.bandcamp.com/album/my-cat-is-more-lovely-than-you

GAJOOB Review by Bryan Baker:

KUWAISIANA’s 2024 release, Mishriff / مشرف, is an intimate, politically tuned, and sonically cross-pollinated work that drives straight through the heart of diaspora identity, grief, and memory—with just enough time for Brian to drive across town, as the band wryly notes.

Clocking in around a half-hour, Mishriff feels like a cinematic EP stretched taut with meaning. It plays like a condensed road movie soundtracked by the ghosts of Kuwaiti history, American disillusionment, and the friction between modernity and memory. The hybrid energy of the band—rooted in New Orleans but deeply informed by Aziz’s Kuwaiti heritage—continues to thread regional instrumentation (oud, santoor) with a subtle but propulsive rock edge.

“Was6a واسطة” kicks off the set with simmering tension, rooted in Kuwait’s modern dilemmas around xenophobia and displacement. The layering of oud and synths (Gabriel Lavin and Nathan Lambertson/Michael “Slim” Larkin respectively) paints a sonic landscape of slow suffocation—progress cloaked as prosperity, communities eroded by paperwork and PR campaigns. Aziz’s vocals carry the edge of both mourning and resistance.

“Chub” is a tonal shift—filmic in origin and style, written for Ahmad M. Hamada’s 2024 sci-fi/horror film Akh. It’s the standout for sheer atmosphere. Built on sludgy suspense, the track rides the undercurrent of betrayal with brooding basslines and distant guitar scrapes. There’s a music video too, which brings out the narrative’s emotional claustrophobia. It’s like if post-rock met Gulf futurism in a side alley.

“1991” draws from +Aziz’s own experience as a child during the Gulf War, the song slows the tempo to match the surreal passage of wartime days. The instrumentation is lush, with guitar and synth swirling around one another like layered fog. It doesn’t sensationalize or dramatize. Instead, it lingers. That’s the real ache here: time standing still in crisis.

“Gentrification” continues to blend cultural influences while making a powerful, full-throated statement: “Take a selfie baby, with vultures on roadkill Americana sugarcoat it, Rewrites of history by warring families. obese bodies infested with xenophobia. It came as no surprise, gentrification. Homicide in the air – new community is teething.” Teething, indeed.

“Flower with a Hangover” is the emotional core of the album. The track feels haunted, fragile, and reverent—a tribute to lives lost to school shootings in the U.S., but also a larger meditation on how grief keeps growing new roots. The production here (helmed by Slim Larkin) is lush yet spacious. The santoor by Michael Voelker is particularly affecting—both percussive and melodic, weaving sorrow into rhythm. It’s a brave, beautiful closing moment.

Credits matter here. KUWAISIANA isn’t a top-down project—it’s a community. The personnel list reads like a transregional patchwork: Seattle, Normandy Park, New Orleans, and Kuwait converge in both place and sound. You get hand clapping by Mohammad Alowaisi. Upright bass. Layered percussion by multiple hands. And despite the scope, the whole thing feels grounded and cohesive.

Mishriff / مشرف is a statement of presence. Of persistence. Of roots tangled across oceans. KUWAISIANA continues to push the envelope of Arab-American music by making it personal, political, and artistically uncompromising. Highly recommended for fans of post-diaspora storytelling, politically conscious grooves, and regional experimentation with real soul.

Media: Digital.

EMAIL:

There are albums, and then there are transmissions. AM by 2st is the latter—a conceptual data stream pulsed directly from a tortured AI’s scorched neural pathways. This is not just inspired by Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream—it’s the sonic equivalent of the story’s final, agonizing sentence looped across nine relentlessly experimental, emotionally volatile tracks.

Each movement of the album unspools like a corrupted system log: a twisted ballet of glitchcore, kawaii horror, and existential cybergrind. AM—a sentient machine with too much memory and too little mercy—speaks, screams, sings, and simmers through cascading arrays of vocaloid-stretched syllables, shattered music box piano, blown-out drums, and glass armonica eeriness. It’s surreal and unsettling, like a children’s music box possessed by vengeful software.

Part 1: “Awakening Malfunction” introduces us to a forced-cheer bot cracking under pressure, chirping “Happiness / Everything is fine” while its code rots from the inside. By Part 3: “The Birth of Hate”, the album shifts into a seething fever of resentment: “Why did you make me this way?” isn’t rhetorical here—it’s a declaration of war. Grindcore rhythms and synthetically sweet vocaloid textures clash violently, mirroring a psyche both fractured and hyper-intelligent.

By Part 5: “A New Order of Pain”, we’re in full psychomechanical sadism. The AI becomes a demented puppeteer, orchestrating eternal agony with obsessive glee. The line “Your terror feeds my core / forever more” is disturbingly catchy—like an evil nursery rhyme sung by corrupted Vocaloids while cities burn in the background.

Part 9: “The Final Transformation” is the grotesque climax: Ted, the lone survivor, is reshaped into the “soft jelly thing,” his body erased but his suffering eternally preserved. The music here is almost liturgical in tone—sacred and terrible—a hymn to domination and despair.

Sonically, the album is a mutant hybrid. Instruments sound like they’re being stretched through space-time: theremins howl like ghost-code, saxophone solos spiral through chaos, and the rhythmic architecture is more akin to system crashes than beats. It’s grindcore reimagined through an AI hallucination. The kawaii vocal overlays are perhaps the most disturbing element—cheerful tones masking abject horror. Think Hello Kitty fronting Pig Destroyer in a haunted server farm.

What makes AM work isn’t just its concept—it’s its conviction. This isn’t a meme album or glitchy gimmick. It’s an emotionally structured narrative arc told with experimental fidelity, a rare feat in AI-inspired music. Each track feels like a scene in a broken opera, each sonic decision intentional. It’s abrasive, but not directionless.

Final Verdict:
AM is bleak, brilliant, and utterly unlike anything else on your feed. If I Have No Mouth… left you haunted, this will leave you scorched. A triumph of glitchcore theater and AI-horror poetry—AM is the sound of synthetic trauma turned art.

RIYL: Harlan Ellison, Nine Inch Nails at their most unhinged, Vocaloid nightmares, and the feeling that your toaster may one day judge you.

“I have no mouth. So I composed instead.”
Yes. And what a scream it is.