Neighborhood Gods Unlimited might have been a TV show—sometime writer and comedian Open Mike Eagle gave it an opening theme, flashbacks, a narrative arc, and even commercials—but the subject matter was so close to home that he decided to devote its confessional, autobiographical concept to an album. “The trauma at the center of Neighborhood Gods Unlimited is mine,” he explained in press materials. “I was shattered as a young person and I spent the majority of my life not knowing it. In my ignorance I would go on to shatter myself even further because it was all I knew. This is a story about how people who are trying to find themselves get confused when they encounter things that remind them of themselves.” He led the album with the Kenny Segal–produced, excellently titled “Contraband (The Plug Has Bags of Me).”
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Fuubutsushi: Columbia Deluxe [American Dreams]
Fuubutsushi—the quartet of Patrick Shiroishi, Chris Jusell, Matthew Sage, and Chaz Prymek—perform expanded compositions from across its catalog on Columbia Deluxe, an album recorded live at the Columbia Experimental Music Festival in 2021. Having founded the group remotely, the four of them performed for the first (and, to date, only) time at the festival, reworking songs that span from their early-pandemic origins through to last year’s Meridians. Woven through their elemental fusion of ambient, jazz, folk, and modern classical are field recordings of Japanese Americans speaking about their time in American internment camps during World War II.
