Caught Between Worlds turned 20 this year. A decade prior to its 2004 release through At a Loss Recordings, Philadelphia instrumentalists Stinking Lizaveta were putting together their first demos, so if we’re talking anniversaries, the band being 30 years old certainly warrants note. Their first album, the Steve Albini-produced Hopelessness and Shame, was came out in 1996. This was their fourth, following behind 2001’s III, which came out via Tolotta Records (run by Joe Lally of Fugazi), and the first of three that the lineup of guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos, bassist Alexi Papadopoulos and drummer Cheshire Agusta would do for At a Loss, which in a catalog of nine full-lengths and various splits and 7″s is a long as they’ve stayed with anybody. Hazards of this level of restlessness, perhaps.

And as for that level? Call it “characteristic,” though the persona of the band is something that’s evolved into itself over time as well. From a punkier, rawer foundation, Stinking Lizaveta have evolved a studio ideal of performance as a moral ethic. True to the very tail end of the CD era, it runs 61 minutes long and features 16 tracks, most under four minutes each. It shifts from place to place and its slowdowns don’t so much feel like they’re there to let the listener catch up as to throw down a gauntlet of instrumentalism. Stinking Lizaveta even two decades ago were no less clear in their purposes than the paragons of sans-vocals heavy riffing, Karma to Burn, but the Philly trio’s structures are quirkier, the turns brazenly angular, the stops and starts willfully unpredictable. The tense chugging and crashes of “I Denounce the Government” — at least as relevant in 2024 as 2004 — unfold with their own language of squeals in Yanni‘s guitar, answering the twisted depths conjured by Alexi‘s bass at the finish of “Beyond the Shadows” with a more animalian howl than the riffer title-track provided in the wistful melody of its shred and ensuing doomly march.

Parts are fast, parts are slow, ideas take shape in and around building cycles of riffs and are soon vaporized by impulsive-but-not-random redirects. “Out of Breath” seeming to hit a wall before pivoting to a creep before it’s halfway though, “Over the Edge” proffering a jammier, open and melancholic jazz fluidity, less manic than the crux of the record from which it comes but essential to it just the same, “Staying Here” getting its own acoustic intro before unfurling a Southern-style nostalgic sentiment, gradually flowing into improv-sounding meander but managing not to lose the plot by the finish, and so on. The focus throughout is less on atmosphere than one might expect having heard their more recent output — last year’s Anthems and Phantoms (review here) was born of the same roots as Caught Between Worlds, but the band have never stopped evolving or exploring — but the trade for that is a markedly live feel in the sound resulting from Ben Danaher and Joe Smiley‘s recording and mix, and Caught Between Worlds conveys its vitality in a way that, if it wasn’t all tracked with everyone in the same room playing at the same time, having that musical conversation and shaping the dynamic as it happened, is perhaps doubly impressive for sounding so much like it.

Granted this wasn’t a new band at the time — four records in 10 years isn’t nothing, however much they’ve done since — but in both their connections to punk in the drums, to jazz in the bass and to classic heavy rock via the guitar, the deep individualism of their writing style, and the verve with which even the urbane, largely mellow “Someone’s Downstairs” seems to soundtrack an invisible cartoon of someone walking tiptoe carrying a lamp with their shadow projected on the wall behind them — did it just move on its own? — is palpable and defining. Parts are fast, parts are slow, as noted, but Stinking Lizaveta remain unflinchingly themselves. It is a combination of elements that works simply because it does, and in the frenetic elbow-thrower “Stop Laughing” and the chunkier-style groove of “Last Wish” — still a live staple — and the greater tonal threat issued by “Side Naked,” which is even more striking for the human voice captured in its sample, the chemistry is plain to hear. It’s not about showing off, or maybe it is just a little, but each piece of Caught Between Worlds brings something to the complex picture of the whole.

That’s going to be most heard by those who put something into it. That is to say, Stinking Lizaveta have never been light on challenge when it comes to listening, and Caught Between Worlds — which front-to-back does what it says in presenting the band as drawing strength from existing in the spaces betwixt one style and another — is no exception, either in runtime or the various shifts in sound, tempo and mood put forth. They bring it back to ground near the finish for “Day of Dust” after “Someone’s Downstairs,” “Staying Here” (plus its intro) and the prior “Prayer for the Living” push into various oddball niches, and “Man Day” provides an insistent finish that feels well placed in providing a convincing closing argument. The more you put into it attention-wise, the more you’re going to get out of it, but as dug in as the band are throughout, it’s accordingly an easier dive for the listener to make at the outset, and once you’re in it, you might as well forget whatever else you had on for the day as you’ll be too busy trying to convince your head to stop spinning to get anything else done. This might make it distracting if you’re not committed to giving their songs the attention due, but if you can get on board, Stinking Lizaveta are good for the soul in a way few acts could ever hope to be and many don’t care enough to try to become. I promise you this is restorative music.

I already mentioned it, but the band’s latest LP, Anthems and Phantoms, is hardly a distant memory. I was lucky enough to catch them over the summer in Germany at Freak Valley (review here), and to absolutely no surprise, they were stellar. If you can see them, do. If not, they’ve got nine records for your plunge. Do it up.

Good luck, and as always, I hope you enjoy this one. Thanks for reading.

—

I was back and forth on whether to close out the week — it’s after noon now, which is later in the day than I’d prefer to be doing so, for sure — but I won’t regret it. In like an hour and a half I’m going to leave the comfort of my home and drive to I-don’t-know-where in Brooklyn to the TV Eye venue, try to find a place to park for however many hours and sit in my car rather than wait to drive in. I’m doing this because traffic and because it’s that much easier to get out of the house before school pickup, which is a little after 3. Traffic’s going to suck either way; going in or coming out of New York, that’s just a condition of life, but yeah. It’s Mars Red Sky and Howling Giant, and I swore up and down I was going, and I want to go, so I am.

The intervening time I’ll spend at least part of putting together the back end of the Quarterly Review I’ll be doing next week. Sneaking one in before year-end list time, and absolutely part of that is me trying to keep up with releases before I close out the year around here. It’s just one week — 50 releases, as opposed to 110, which we did, I don’t know, like four weeks ago, maybe? — but there’s some good stuff in there from the whole year, in addition to new releases. Things like Gnome, Fuzz Sagrado, Hermano, Thou, Sergeant Thunderhoof, Cortez (which I wrote the bio for but haven’t reviewed yet) Cosmic Fall and Coltaine — I don’t want to let these slip before 2025 hits and I start yet another year of listening at a deficit. Not that music has an expiration date, not that any of it matters in the first place, blah blah you get the point.

But doing the QR next week will help me finalize the shape of my own year-end list, and I’d feel awfully triumphant if I could get that out the week before the Xmas holiday — when I’ll almost certainly have a ton of other crap going on — rather than the week of. There was one year it was Xmas Eve it went up, which is ridiculous. I’ll do my best, but while I’m working on that it means I’ll be doing fewer reviews, so yeah, having just banged out 50 and needing to get caught up on news anyway — there was so much this week; anyone remember when the music industry shut down in December? — should put me in good position to start wrapping my head around what I think are the best releases of the year. I also feel like I need a special section to mention that I haven’t heard either the Opeth or the Blood Incantation records, but I can plot all that out as I get closer.

So that’s the plan for the rest of the month. Quarterly Review, list as soon as I can and whatever news and reviews I can fill in around it. There are less premieres, which is fine. That frees me up to chase down stuff on my own rather than follow what comes in for PR pitches, and that’s not a hardship when there’s a lot to do. If I get through it in a timely manner — I never know how much I have to say until I start saying it with these things, and sometimes it’s a lot — and have the week of New Year’s open, I’ll see where I’m at and what I want to do writing-wise with that time. I’ll do as much as I can, when I can. If you see me in my car this afternoon in Brooklyn typing out a 180-word review of the new Space Shepherds outing, perhaps you’ll have some semblance of the truth of that.

Whatever you’re up to this weekend — 16 are also in town but I can’t commit to driving to the city twice given how much I both hate it, it takes time away from duties at home, and I have a fair amount of travel set for the end of next month; Morris County, North Jersey needs a 200-cap venue on the underground circuit so god damn bad; anyone want to open one with me? — I hope you have a great and safe time. Have fun, maybe relax a bit, and enjoy the break if you get one. I’ll have the review of tonight up either over the weekend or on Monday, depending on when I have time to sort photos. Ugh, photos.

Okay, here I go.

FRM.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

 

Tags: At a Loss Recordings, Caught Between Worlds, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Stinking Lizaveta, Stinking Lizaveta Caught Between Worlds

This entry was posted on Friday, December 6th, 2024 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.