Month: May 2022

TRACK | Ganglians – Hair

5/5 golden merles

Ganglians’ “Hair” is an experimental pop rock track that is both burnishing and brandishing the light. It is a celebration of style and form, embodying a rush and bounding, and the hail of dust and ash as one in motion unsettles the earth.

There’s a kind of sublime sense of movement that rallies quickly into stride, pivoting proximal at the mutations of the landscape.

Torrents of yelp and drum collide in sequence, and it’s a lot of fun; mostly joyous, largely incoherent. It is something I would imagine Karl Meltzer listening to while breaking the Appalachian Trail record on a diet of candy and beer.

It can be acquired for a reasonable price in the physical form, though the bandcamp no longer appears to exist, if it ever did. Or get the s/t 12″ new directly from the good folks at Woodsist.

TRACK | GZ Grant – Bonds of Love

5/5 golden merles

Whether it’s Rules of Love, Hands of Love, or Bonds of Love, GZ Grant’s new single is in good company examining loves hidden facets and exploring its less celebrated aspects. Full of much aura and ache, it is psych-pop rock which questions the many-splendored thing.

Direct and undiminished lyricism gets enveloped in lo-fi texture, its merits heightened in the haze, while outlining the catch or comeuppance tied to ever being known. The language is borderline eternal pop fare, both classic and slightly alien: terms, conditions, a stage to assuage or embrace your fears.

There’s a lot to admire in the additional experimental and ulterior elements: a lead guitar line that chokes on its own distorted tail, the idiosyncratic hurl and hum of the lead vocal delivery, and the crystal chalice of a synth to help drown the remnants.

There is also an immensely admirable music video accompanying the single offering a rich tapestry of symbols and fine cinematography, depicting well the double-edged sword of it all. Give it a look / What’s the worst that could happen? Sacrifice a few moments of your freedom, youth and fortune to find out.

TRACK | Milk Music – Twists & Turns & Headtrips

5/5 golden merles

Heartfelt and hanging on the knife-edge at all times, there is a fervor to the making that feels borderline heretical in “Twists & Turns & Headtrips.”

Much heart piercing sentiment and enough texture to make it seem real, this time. Formidable and fleeting passages that balance the content and form, momentum with purpose in contrast to so much other sound and fury lashing into the void.

The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, and the response to any social strife or environmental collapse is a further militarization of the police.

I was torn on a track to feature, mostly between “Headtrips” and subsequent song, “Who’s been in my dreams?” They’d sell the skin off your face / if the money was right / who’s been in my dream? With the tones and manic right-of-way approaching the likes of Television, The Violent Femmes, and The Cramps. If these are things you have and will again appreciate: go, conspire.

TRACK | The Padla Bear Outfit & Mak – Love

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi pop rock courtesy of our Russian friends The Padla Bear Outfit & Mak, “Love” is candid, carefree, and flickering track. Melodies carom about, concentric and determined to revel. The cover is well suited to this sentiment, featuring a Christmas tree built of drums, a soaring dragon in place of the angel.

Does Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public affairs at Colombia University, know she is featured in one of the summery-est songs ever to come out of Saint Petersburg? The odds are unlikely. But it should be an honor if unearthed.

While our two failed empires bicker at one another, expanding outward at great expense even as they collapse internally, the subjects of these respective oligarchies can appreciate the art produced and commiserate. We have brothers everywhere and they too are ruled by bastards.

TRACK | Household – Phases

5/5 golden merles

I am very happy to pay tribute to the minimalist post-punk of Household’s “Phases” every time the shuffling god demands it. In the rumbling and rancor, there is also a kind of courtesy in its blunted cutting.

this is no accident / it’s never yielding fate
rationalize my friend / but it is far too late

A small, honed document of some devastation, the designated point at which two trajectories were changed from alignment. Not ending in undue harm, but an extraction.

There is undoubtedly a bit buoyancy in the blood feud, the mutual respect to at least document the severance. To take its significance and repurpose it into a new beginning. And an explanation provided before the exodus; the point of a breach and breaking as an amelioration. I do love these tracks that in this processing can be seen demonstrably contorting the bad to good.

TRACK | Reading Rainbow – Stand Back and Take a Good Look (The Nerves)

5/5 golden merles

Off the superb Volar Records 2013 comp Under the Covers Vol. 2: A Tribute to Paul Collins, Peter Case, and Jack Lee (of the Nerves), Reading Rainbow’s version of “Stand Back and Take a Good Look” is more than a cover, structurally reengineering the track to great result.

It is a minimalist but dynamic adaptation: rolling hills of reverb careening and overlapping the dual vocal melodies, reciting the refrain as command. A bit of the coarseness has been refined formalistically, but partially reintroduced in the richness of guitar tone. It is a fitting tribute and feels like the hooks have only been honed over the elapsed decades.

The opening track, Grass Widow’s “Why are You Walking Out on Love,” also stands out as another especially constructive modification. A gateway to some great songwriting/songwriters, available for $7 from Volar.

TRACK | Women – Eyesore

5/5 golden merles

“Eyesore” is a clinic on texture and tone. The track is a How-to with respect to texturing a track so well that you don’t need a proper hook to emerge until 4 minutes in. Once it lands it can only be extracted surgically.

There is so much more room for experimentation in pop/rock that can venture into new territory and yet remain catchy and instantly resonate. Women were comfortable operating within this space. The album itself and the ST before it are legendary stuff, and so is the continued work by Flegel under Cindy Lee.

I’ve written on “Heavy Metal” here, as “pretty captivating, and contorts the space of any room into which it is freed.” A sentence I don’t remember writing but am very happy to find here, reminding me that sometimes articulation happens and it isn’t just incoherent rambling, desperately melting down thesauri and clumsily reconstituting them.

TRACK | Johnny Thunders – You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory

5/5 golden merles

He wrote some stunning tracks, Johnny. On “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” the guitar tone and strumming pattern come through the divide of the speaker enchanted, enveloping the perfectly pitched vocal core.

If all tracks had this much passion applied to nuance, I guess the relative goalposts would move. But it stands out like a thumb in which the rest of the hand, and arm, and body is badly sore.

It doesn’t pay to try / all the smart boys know why / doesn’t mean I didn’t try / I just never know why

I recently heard another version and find this performance/recording far, far superior. I’d like to link to one of the two version on bandcamp (with the discordant percussive acoustic guitar and wayward instrumentation) or the bit rusty and rare full band take, so that it would appear in the Hype Machine feed. The craft and killer instincts are still there, but this embedded version above seems to harness the heart of it a bit more securely and cut out the crap while keeping clean the conveying.

TRACK | Toe Ring – This is the End

5/5 golden merles

In 2021 Philadelphia-based Toe Ring posted two strong No Wave/ Post-Punk / Lo-Fi / EPs, Collapsed Mine // This is the End and II. Shimmering and sculpted into a small dense wonderous specters, there are four well arranged and illuminated noise pop tracks found here.

I condone this behavior. A few months later there was a tape of these combined sets put out on Spared Flesh (Also recently released C.A.T.S. 99 Ways To Fix a Broken Heart). Technically the tape was released 2022, January, so scratch a line off that rough draft of a year-end list.

But these landfillable artifacts are sold out, their forced scarcity a luxury you literally can no longer afford. How about purchasing the digital version, transferring it to your own tape deck, and printing out the cover instead? That would be a nice little project for you.

TRACK | Mount Eerie – Voice in Headphones

5/5 golden merles

Julie Doiron (Eric’s Trip) and Phil Elverum (The Microphones) collaborate in this nocturnal, potable mantra of a track. The harmonies here are special and good. The content balanced across that form (“It’s not meant to be a struggle, up hill”), recurrent and reaffirming, is about as close to some therapeutic advising you’ll get in America without a silver spoon to exchange.

I saw Phil Elverum (as Mount Eerie) play in a high school gym somewhere I think in southern Indiana. I don’t remember when, but it was during or shortly after college, maybe 2005-8. Nobody I knew wanted to go but I was hopelessly invested in The Glow Pt. 2. He sat on a metal folding chair or stood in the middle of the basketball court and played a lot of songs I didn’t know. But they were good, kind, inspiring things.

I am most familiar with Julie Doiron from 2009’s tremendously heartfelt and forged I Can Wonder What You Did with Your Day. I’ll write about that later, at least one of the tracks. To my not immodest discredit, I haven’t listened to much Eric’s Trip, but look forward to doing so.