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New Album Review

ALBUM REVIEW: Best Sleep – Hummingbird

BEST TRACKS: Three More Months, Furnace, keys, Indiana Dropout

FCC Violations: Weird, Three More Months

Recommended if you like: Rozwell Kid, PUP, Jeff Rosenstock, together PANGEA, Fuzz

2019 has been an eventful year for DIY punk rock, producing skull-shattering albums like PUP’s Morbid Stuff and BRUTUS’s Nest. Hummingbird is an exciting, captivating DIY punk rock album that belongs right up there at the same level as Best Sleep’s more well-known contemporaries. Song after song, this album just kept drawing me in with the rawness of the lyrics and power of the instrumentation. Best Sleep is a relatively new 4-piece band from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Though they haven’t been on the scene for long, they released an amazing EP last spring that pulled on my heartstrings so hard that they snapped. To my delight, they carried that momentum and released a gut-wrenchingly melancholic full-length album, Hummingbird, right in time for seeping in the winter blues.

Hummingbird has strikingly beautiful, dark melodies and enthralling intensity. Every time the energy shifts, introducing the booming percussion and fuzzy bass, it will release your soul from its earthly bond. My favorite song on the album is track 7, Three More Months. The song opens with a hauntingly dark riff and transitions into anguished vocals. If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you know that I’m a huge sucker for intense fuzz and feedback, which this song (and whole album) has a ton of.

Just so you’re warned, there is no subtlety or sugarcoating here. Obergfell and Richardson are not afraid of writing blunt lyrics straight from the heart. This album tackles a lot of heavy themes, especially about the struggles that come along with getting older and getting tossed out into the cold, cruel world. Track 2, Furnace is about not having enough money to keep the heat on through the winter. Track 3, Son of the Year, confronts the pressing guilt that comes with feeling like you don’t talk to your family enough.

If Winter is a hard time for you, give this album a spin and you might feel a little less alone.

-Safia