It's true that I once bought a Mort Garson T-shirt from Casual Hex vocalist/guitarist Erica Miller, but this Seattle trio has much more to recommend them besides great taste in analog-synth legends. As their 2018 album Zig Zag Lady Illusion demonstrates, Casual Hex evoke post-punk’s disgruntlement with chronic sociopolitical ills, its caustic textures, and its jagged song structures with a severity that’s undeniable. When you feel as if there’s too much pressure from the catastrophically bad news, sometimes the best way to cope with that is to listen to music that absorbs those tensions and repurposes them into dissonant slices of panicky catharsis. Casual Hex excel at this, on record and onstage. by Dave Segal