Month: June 2022

TRACK | Vivian Girls – I Heard You Say

5/5 golden merles

It is mercifully easy to be absorbed in the cascading vocal harmonies of “I Heard You Say.” Its many graceful hooks effectively converge with a sense of punk dread and foreboding. And there is some real force of these coalescing influences.

The instrumentation is quietly elaborate for the garage rock genre, sneaking, rattling and smashing in support. There is much smoldering grit to the production. Everything collapsing through the phases into its right place, nothing extraneous just perfectly balanced.

Between Vivian Girls/The Babies, Cassie Ramone is one of my favorite songwriters. 250 days into this project, it is difficult to believe that I haven’t yet featured either and this is the remedy to that. It’s an oversight.

TRACK | TENTENT – Nieznany Ląd

5/5 golden merles

TENTENT provides dynamic post-punk from Warsaw. The title roughly translates as “Unknown Land.” It’s rallying and transfixing garage rock, patiently coursing in accumulated spirals that venture carefully outward from the sturdy melodic core.

There’s lots of intricate plotting to the instrumentation, tightly performed and locked into the bass exemplar. The track gives us a lesson in how to unfurl a melody that has otherwise fastened around its center. And when the lead breaks later and is freed from this orbit the culmination is deliberate and transcendent material. There’s a great deal of fine pacing and interplay.

The vinyl from Shovel head Records remains available in mint and gold, sent from Poland for about ~$25 with shipping.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – What To Do

5/5 golden merles

“What To Do” is rapid, direct garage pop/rock. The static-distortion rises up to embrace you from the pyre beneath, fizzing and rasping. It’s finely fermented in its own haze and heartache; a joyous melodic sludge.

The production is a slushy stint of metallic rust, stormy and straightforward, strung together with the copper wire pulled from an abandoned home. Akin to The Riptides or Charlie and the Moonhearts, or any garage within view of the ocean.

Like the recently covered Can’t Get No, the Burger vinyl can be found across the globe with various dings and dents.

TRACK | The Mountain Goats – Aulon Raid

5/5 golden merles

A wonderful project, series of songs, and example of adapting material between mediums to appeal to a different audience. Life is brief and it’s a gift when two fine storytellers combine in collaboration. Also it’s the first set recorded straight to boombox since All Hail West Texas.

From the mouth of the horse:

“I WROTE A SONG EVERY DAY for the next ten days while reading A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, starting with “Aulon Raid” and working in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like; write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately.”

I was late to this one and maybe you missed it as well, but a nice reminder Darnielle and goats are on tour.

TRACK | TELE/VISIONS – Bloody

5/5 golden merles

The introduction and embrace of imperfections in the recording mirrors the chaos in our midst, the ever-present unknown. And this represents cumulatively less kitsch than if it were refined or faithfully and tediously extracted.

This inclusion or allowance of these attributes is a means of conveying that discordance (via distortion, in echo, etc, however reverberating), it approximates these symbolic and the metaphorical misgivings. It is the appropriate representation of factoring in uncertainty into your model, of both your collected perceptions and their conveying through representation in auditory art. And with this admission present upfront —the prospect of erring around the margins, the looming suspicions, the muck and mire— the intention of the work becomes more honest and true, its testaments more convincing.

“Bloody” is a marginally mangled lo-fi clinic on how melody can successfully conspire with tempo under these carefully crafted circumstances. The oscillations swing between movements, flagging and then forceful, hesitant and emboldened. The doubt grounds the professing in a world that resembles our own.

It stands in contrast to corporate refinement. That which has the power and engine to polish style down to bone and yet with all its menacing, perfected honing comes away saying nothing at all. Maybe, largely, because if it had anything of value to add it would promptly undermine the unjust hierarchies that lead to its ascendance?

I don’t know. I like this song, I think it’s fun and has good style. Now people can easily approximate either interpretation in their bedroom — the bile and barrage of the single mic garage or recordings from a pristine sound-proofed void— for now wrapped in the symbols of the past, sand always shifting beneath us. These things won’t mean the same thing to people later. But it is made by people from relatively now and for people from relatively now and in my present subjective opinion it is very good.

TRACK | Cotton Jones – Blood Red Sentimental Blues

5/5 golden merles

Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw have always had a great sense of production, properly documenting the smoke in the air, the curving and crashing that elevates the storytelling. This is still firmly in that tradition but a bit bigger.

When they gradually grew away from the charmed lo-fi folk of Page France, the goal seems to be to create a warm ambiance of fertile soil in which to grow their melodies.

“Blood Red Sentimental Blues” would work as a title alone. But there’s a lot more to it than that. The organ cements the foundation of the thing. The dual vocals route a pincer maneuver on the heart. When the tambourine track clicks the drum into a richer stereo around 1:23, all of this gets more tactile. It is eminently lovely stuff.

TRACK | Quasi – In The First Place

5/5 golden merles

Quasi’s “In The First Place” is a harried track about the shifting of perceptions, time’s capacity for altering values and melting dreams into mud. It is plainly spoken and pursuant to the mounting dread.

The rocksichord and strings loiters about craning their necks at the existential crash. The drums shatter and shrapnel about the air. I like the way it all feels, and admire all that undergirds the summoning and conveyance of this doubt. It’s a great and hearty disillusionment, a compassionate ache.

In the lyricism we find that the novelty of any given thing fatigues rapidly, each goal is met with either a prompt dismissal of significance or the unraveling of imposter syndrome. If one set is achieved, the next must be focused upon. Even after a series of unqualified successes, there is always the proving, temporally, that you haven’t lost it, that you can still do what was previously accomplished. I don’t know of a practical solution for this, but its lovely commiserating.

TRACK | Long Neck – Gardener

5/5 golden merles

“Gardener” is a track which dwells upon dichotomy, the contrasting duality of both the sheer wonder and staggering fatigue of being. This is a report from the doldrums accompanied by a concerted reaching for the will and hope to continue. Not only that but to move one step further, to inspire the self and others, and to reassure among great doubts.

Music is a tool that can serve many purposes. I’ve used the term “commiseration” a good amount recently, but it is well suited and applicable here. I’ve listened to this track probably 100 times over the last couple of days. I need and appreciate the commiserating. The twist toward the track’s conclusion, after the recounting, to rally in concerted effort at contorting fate to good, is comforting.

The song is not solely a faithful account, which has value in itself and the act of ‘making’ is an implicit means of acknowledging this. But the lyric pushes further, and conscious of the subsequent self, appreciates explicitly its own agency and capacity for altering or influence. The strings help elaborate upon this ascending. There is a breadth of backing vocals, their intermittent choral convalescing the community referenced within.

There is some cutting humor and much truth in the contrast of lines like: “mornings are unbearable,” I said to no one / and they responded, “but won’t you miss it when it’s gone? And it reminds you of the old joke, “The food here is terrible.” / “Yes, and such small portions.”

In any case, I found it from Jon Doyle’s beautiful writing about it at VariousSmallFlames.co.uk, and you should read that assessment.

TRACK | Armandinho – Fado Fernandinha

5/5 golden merles

If you are looking for a moment of masterful melodic phrasing and elegant passages interweaving, Armandinho’s (Armando Augusto Freire) His Master’s Voice sessions are a bounty.

100 years out and fresh as a daisy, this is somewhere near the highwater mark of honing the craft and feels like something rich/nourishing to draw upon.

With everything defined by death, it arrives within the interwar years between the first and the second. I don’t know when they were written, but this is the time of their recording, at least, 1928-29. Perhaps written in recovery and optimism before the calamity, the depression, the carnage.

In either case, the interpersonal can provide conflict or rejoicing at any period and everything is relative to subjective circumstances. Add in the abstraction of pure instrumentation and you’re free to draw from it whatever you like, pure admiration of form or this accompanied by the imagined intentions of the dead. In my ignorance, I personally think about the eternal, and true, and cliché Brecht quote 10 times a day, “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times.”

Whatever the case may be, we’re very fortunate to have these recordings of a real genius, such a lovely document. Please check out the full set here, there’s nearly an hours worth of reverence.

TRACK | Nick Normal – Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)

5/5 golden merles

Dense and quietly devastating garage pop from Portland, Nick Normal’s “Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)” opens with a David Lynch cameo and proceeds to bludgeon you with an inventive dredging of the interpersonal.

Lie to yourself / But please don’t ever lie to me

There’s a lot of rich, orthogonal storytelling put to work compiling an era, moving with assurance through the sequential reminiscences. Parsing the pastiche, it covers more ground than seems intuitively possible. The zonal telling is clobbered by some masterfully metered lo-fi tones.