Virga – “Perception Management” & “Impassable Monolith II”

I'd never heard of the Lawrence, Kansas trio Virga before they got booked to open the first leg of Chat Pile and Soul Glo's current North American tour, but I'm very glad that I smashed "subscribe" on their Bandcamp. (They've only got two more dates on that tour, by the way — tonight in Houston and tomorrow in Dallas — before Shallowater take their spot.) Virga have been around since 2022, and they've got three EPs to their name, the most recent of which is this year's The Perfect Freedom Of Single Necessity. Today, they've got two new songs that really knocked me on my ass. Virga's sound is a sprawling, guttural churn. It's got a certain windswept romanticism, and it can be pretty, but the riffs and howls can get downright gnarly, too. Did you ever hear Gowns, the band that Erika M. Anderson had before she started making music as EMA? God, they were awesome. In Virga's two new tracks, especially the seven-minute epic "Perception Management," I hear some of the vast, fearsome vulnerability that I heard in Gowns. One of the genre tags that Virga use on Bandcamp is "prairie goth," and I'm not really sure what that means, but it also sounds exactly right. Check out these new tracks be...