January 2022 – Page 2 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | The Mallard – A Form of Mercy

One of the 24 albums I own is The Mallard’s Yes on Blood. But this might be my favorite track that they put out, and it is from the second Castleface Records album Finding meaning in Deference.

In A Form of Mercy there is a good kind of haunted harmony that has been fused together in fuzz. It rides a balance of coherence that endearingly draws one in. It is just decipherable enough to know that you have been warned.

It is a shame they don’t make music anymore but maybe they do under another name I don’t know, or maybe they’re happy in their undoing or otherwise agreeably tasked. We are fortunate to have these two sets.

TRACK | Young Prisms – Honeydew

Ever since Jon at VariousSmallFlames reviewed Wombo this has become a fire talk records appreciation blog.

In their assessing and surveying I’m not sure they can do wrong? But I am afraid to investigate further. Why ruin a good thing? Let’s all ignore them going forward, maybe cut our gains for once.

Instead, Young Prisms grants us some shoegaze that hits like an icepick to the heart before melting conveniently away.

This is also very good. It is in that style of but also adding to the genre’s goods and greats like MBV, Lush, Wild Nothing, et al. And at their best, in the balance of the content and the form, quite close to the ones you already love.

TRACK | Print Head – Can You Complain

All along the length and breadth of Happy Happy & Hardcore Pop Print Head have constructed a balanced audio experience with remarkable depth and detail to get agreeably lost in.

For €2 EUR you’re not likely going to get a better bargain of lo-fi art-pop any time soon. As I write, one tape remains, also, if you’d like it mailed from Valencia.

I know my dear friend Darcy of Ought has found himself with some US Girls in the new band Cola. Firetalk are trawling the talented depths of the freakfolk/art rock scenes and coming up with many gems. But it sounds like maybe he is here as well, at least in spirit, sounding off in the resounding of the caterwaul, the bellow.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – City of Electric Light

In 2008 I was working for Democratic Party as a field organizer on a couple of campaigns for congress and governor, but also in support of one particular presidential candidate that purported to offer hope and/or change.

I had free housing and ~$300 a week in exchange for my labor of 16 hours a day. This comes out to somewhere in the region of $3/hour before taxes. Once I tried to buy one of the regional organizers a beer and he said, “Don’t be insane, I know how much you make.” I was 22 and looked 16, but for an awful, awful beard. I was a terrible public speaker.

Soft Airplane was my reliable soundtrack for driving down from the volunteer-housing mountain-hill every morning, winding off to our shared office in downtown Madison, Indiana. The songs are deeply tied to this moment of relative youth and although I love them they are a little painful to revisit.

We were clearly on the side of good and decency, it seemed to me. The moment appeared full of potential. The technically anti-war, pro-healthcare candidate was about to win a landslide national election.

This was before the military surges, the corporate bailouts, the drone assassinations, the heritage foundation healthcare plan, the squandered supermajority, the absolved Iraq war criminals, and all the other weak-willed incrementalism that damned us and continues to provide momentum for the ongoing backlash.

I didn’t know then what Adolph Reed had accurately assessed in 1996, over a decade prior:

“…a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future… We have to do better.”

I am both somewhat nostalgic for this sense of purpose and opportunity in youth to fulfill it and ashamed of it, the actual legacy and faith in a couple of morally compromised figureheads. I am also ashamed that I made a lot of good friends that I immediately lost contact with after the election. I will hope to do better going forward and continue to relish the capacity for change.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | Myers Rooney – I Hope It Is Only A Room

The latter significance of things is sometimes not clear upon the initial impressions or even after years of insistent exposure.

Years later some sense memory has attained a monumental symbolic personal value, or someone says something offhand that sparks an unrelated but crushing recollection or onrush of nostalgia.

Once I had a friend who had a Facebook page. And upon that page I inadvertently saw that one of her other friends wrote about a longing for a shared period of time, for when they lived collectively in a dormitory.

They wrote that often they’ll see something funny or good online and get so excited to run across the hallway and show it directly, to experience the thing together. But that period has passed… a sequence of shared moments that approximated happiness.

And now they can text it over. And get a response in a minute, or an hour, or a day. But it isn’t the same, they wrote, the hallway that leads out of the room doesn’t lead directly to my friend and her laugh.

TRACK | Mayge – Fried

The literal description of what is happening here is that there are three simple interweaving melodies of synth, guitar and vocals, centering around a minimal drum track, and later accompanied by an additional guitar lead.

But what’s really occurring within this instance of high-grade post-wave sludge pop is a lot more difficult to describe.

It has been intuitively discovered and teased out from a feeling, and yet it remains mostly that, maintaining the richness and texture of that experience, reorganized but largely unadulterated from it’s incipient form. It is itself some kind of dissection of the fractal, framed.

And this experienced can be purchased digitally from the artist at a price of your choosing or bought on tape from Gravity Hill Records.

TRACK | Ricky Eat Acid – HYPOTHESIS

Finally a cover that looks like it was intended for the digitally ornate frame it has received (at least, I mean to say, classically/traditionally, in some outdated sense that seems reasonable to the outsider…).

When my grandfather was expiring in the hospice we took with him an illuminated painting of the sea. Originally it was displayed in the basement of their old house for a few decades. Then it spent another couple of years more prominently displayed in his bedroom at the condominium.

Maybe it is of the forest not the sea, I can’t find the image of it on my phone. The picture is semi-translucent and a couple of electric blubs light it from behind. I know it is in one of the 20 different family text threads that arbitrarily add or exclude one or two individuals and seem to be used interchangeably.

In any case, I remember it as a representation of the sea. And it followed him around for years, idly glowing. And it resembles this cover image, probably. Ricky Eat Acid makes art with great attention to detail, metering and a deep empathy for the individual listener. That he excels at the projection of their consumption is a matter of public record.

TRACK | Alex Bleeker and the Freaks – Animal Tracks

Within this track wailing guitar and scenic songwriting establish a qualitatively good mood. It’s a good track for fleeing, for a post-reckoning scenario in which a new beginning seems to form just around the bend or maybe on a bridge that feels-to-form underneath you from thin air.

It makes me feel ways about things and nostalgic for a past I didn’t live.

I cleaned out a lot of books from the office today and wedged them into an already overburdened bookshelf instead. But one I kept in here was Ernest Becker’s posthumous Escape from Evil. In this section on page 64 he begins by quoting Rank:

“‘Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over… immortality,’ If anyone doubts this, let them try to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History then can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for death. Or, more momentously, all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life.”

So, it is good work then when you can transport this through a song, or a piece of it, the afternoon or the imagined afternoon.

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