Month: September 2022

TRACK | CRASH THE SUPERYACHT – Sitting on the stairs

5/5 golden merles

Timeless lo-fi bedroom punk sounds from CRASH THE SUPERYACHT, maybe avoid this one if you’ve made a happy habit of spurning the uncommonly good or fixating on the dawning of doomsday. There’s a rich vein of diy charm and pop cunning to the set. I put to the forefront the closer, “Sitting on the stairs,” fortified with hooks and familiar tone, easily believably extracted from an indie 80s alt history timeline.

Wading through the windows, you’re first met with those resonant sentiments about part-time pals, the ones you can always sync up with, wavelengths and bullshit tolerances amenably aligned no matter the interim eons. I’ve never seen EastEnders or any soap opera outside of by accident and in a laundromat. But if it inspires this quality of rock-ooze, let them rip. Similarly bring on lockdown 4 or 5 or whatever, let’s recreate these ideal conditions and spawn another tape: £3GBP for digital files or £7 for the cassette + zine.

TRACK | Smirk – Minuscule Amounts

5/5 golden merles

Some of the finest lo-fi punk you can gather in your basket, recently brought back to my attention by the Tr0tsky’s mixcloud show, “Pretend You Like It.” Criminally, I didn’t write on it yet, only mentioning one from the prior pile. Smirk’s 2021 EP has cornered the market on collapsible hooks, retracting into the deep fried tones, only to be strategically released upon closer inspection. It bites back.

An analgesic itself, the staggered overlap of the chorus and the tones & textures on these guitars make most other production look like a pile of puke. I shudder for those who can’t hear the nuance in the noise, this one is calibrated. Some field/sample elaborations round out this alternate dimension in which everything can be found in its right place.

Supporting music video is gorgeous and crafted with a commensurate amount of care to parallel the track itself. Digital for the cost of naming your own price. Or the vinyl is on a second pressing through Portland’s Total Punk Records.

TRACK | SOOKS – U.D.

5/5 golden merles

I’d advise you to at least consider any track that contains the line: I will find my enemies / and crush them in a warm embrace. Or at least this one, who knows what the future brings. “U.D.” is punk rock from Perth, Australia. With righteous anger the track laments the impotence of citizens within modern nation states, navigating the hoops and decoy levers of power, while true power is held through legalized corruption and representatives beholden to special interests.

But far from defeated, the chorus beseeches real organizing and the active deconstruction of unjust hierarchies. All generations seem to eventually sour and amalgamate in the hospice or the home, but hopefully we can productively stagger a few more feet further afield than is traditionally within one eras capacity.

The other good news is that in addition to the smiting and fury it’s a lot of fun and sharply constructed rampage. Seek out the whole set. Physical pulp from Richter Scale Tapes who also put out the superb Rude Television – Distractions, Demo 22 is five lbs for the Cassette while supplies last. These are both listed as free downloads, you ghoulish ingrates. Found through Amber Rambo yt curation.

TRACK | Belly Jelly – Half Fluorinated Man

5/5 golden merles

From the neonatal subsection of the Discontinuous Innovations Inc. archives, 2022‘s The Universal Language is a cohesive wreck of a record. Certified synth punk, it has leaky guts. It has a kind of belligerent whimsy that seems for all intents and purposes indefatigable. It’s probably best paired with eating gravel off an ill-advised grind to save face after some prior cataclysmic blunder; the botches compounding, proudly multiplying.

Make no mistake, it is a corpulent peach of a series, bleeding blood we don’t rightly recognize as such. You’ll break a nail picking some of the hooks back out of your brain. I haven’t technically been the same since, for better or for blurst.

“Half Fluorinated Man” is the pick of that litter for me, it opens with misdirection, some foaming at the mouth before a tall drink of water. Half a century of pop rock is recontextualized as having been a terrible mistake, and all in about 90 seconds. The digital album is $1 USD. The Audio Cassette Tape is $5. These are reasonable requests.

TRACK | MENU – Actually Dreaming

5/5 golden merles

“Actually dreaming” is a thing of lo-fi shoegaze and uninhibited abstraction. It was summoned in or near Philadelphia. It has a great sense of how long to linger in the status, levels with you, offers a stasis of texture and tone, any intent amplified by their deteriorated beauty. Rarely is your patience punished here, cutting content with form in an imminently compelling fashion.

Concentric in form for the most part, each loop banishing another or building off its remains. You can more or less see what you like in its patterns, it’s a foggy mirror with some writing you got to breath on a bit to see. There’s lots of graceful skulking about and premonitions of indeterminate value. Lately, if Eno/Ricky landed, maybe this will too for you; a means and agent for teasing your own ideas out, another kind of catalyst for coherency.

Generally speaking I am suspicious of abstraction as it can be a salve for my enemies. However (!) with this much form/balance and pulse there are always exceptions. Original found on Tremendo Garaje via the intrepid scouting of @u2_is_a_government_drone / Sims / Mesh.

TRACK | S.U.G.A.R. – Heartbreaker

5/5 golden merles

Berlin-based gargoyles S.U.G.A.R. have returned with an insultingly good garage punk record, II. Selected track “Heartbreaker” is beaming through a patina of crud and graced with a few golden riffs. It meets the criteria of control achieved through a willing proximity to its loss, shakes and thuds with ease and comfort within that chaotic coil.

The production is aiming for and hitting the best live show you’ve ever seen, coherency emitting from the swell of reverberations; that sort of rare swill composed of bottled blood and lightning. It is perched on the peak of something that is crumbling, all the boys say so.

If you want an informed and competent review, look to Groschi, I’m just here to belch up my impressions and fill a bit of space. It comes in solid gold and/or black vinyl, or digital for the mark of the beast (EU style) from Alien Snatch Records.

TRACK | Why Bother? – Cut to Pieces

5/5 golden merles

Devolving, sonorous synth punk from Mason City, Iowa. There’s a lot more warmth than seems warranted to these melodic forms, fixated fondly as they are around the horror-themed act, telling of and centered on America’s real past time. The production is agreeably amending the timeless proto garage, a pleasant and productive mutation in the lineage.

There’s sufficient synth warble and echo apportioned gluing all other components together. The drums fan the hammer, everything tuned to the clang. It’s all calibrated to killer sensibilities, stylistically/tonally, and the additional morbidly themed track titles offer heaps of promise for the full release.

The files can be got for $1 preordered or white/black vinyl variations are $20. The full album set is arriving September 16th from the highly reliable plague of contents administered by Feel It Records.

TRACK | Germ House – Gum Up The Works

5/5 golden merles

“Gum Up The Works” is the closing track of a striking set of lo-fi garage rock emanating from Rhode Island (Germ House EP). Parenthetical phrasing, scourge and buzz, the nest of production is a silver lined pit. Transfixed in the ticking over, been savoring this one for awhile and finally got back to the buried thicket of lost tabs it was stranded in.

Stinging drums plonk amongst the wired, rasping guitars and everything feels like a field fogged over; you stagger into its melodic turns, feeling out phenomena. The doubled/repelling vocal lanes are unquestioned in their melded merger, coalescing with force. There’s a really skillful wielding of the lo-fi pallet. These are ideal conditions to steep in and an excellent closer to the set.

At the time of writing there are four clear vinyl EPs left through Chunklet. I first seen it on JohnnySick, a great curator of the youtube ilk.

TRACK | itches – Sticky Fingers

5/5 golden merles

itches’ Kingdom Upstairs bequeaths a new and real solid set of Belgian garage punk tracks. In “Sticky Fingers” frank and oblique guitar lines cut through the mesh crux of the motion, the bass anchoring it to the earth, averting a prompt drifting into the sun. There’s great breadth to the soundscape, faithful to a live performance of the thrashing and full of that life.

There’s a lot of merit to the scorched earth policy on display and its presentation here. The drums delivering a tactful clobbering, indivisible and yet unified. Everything breaks together and twists apart soundly. The pieces of individual segmentation compile harmoniously, each era of accrued influences compatible within the context of the subsequent sectors modular mutations.

It was found on the reputable and upstanding roundup and reliable culling from manierenversagen.de. The general dearth of global infrastructure to produce vinyl has also delayed this disc, a lost technology. But, when reinvented through reverse engineering the artifacts found in our great uncle’s basement, it will be coming from Ronny Rex and Hopvil Records under that beautiful cover graphic. The end.

TRACK | That Hideous Sound – Funny Insides

5/5 golden merles

That Hideous Sound has built a bedroom lo-fi rock track from discarded sunshine, utilizing twisted blood as a propellant. Its alternating sync of garage tone is held aloft and amended with a density of layered backing vocals, their varied trajectories glowingly cascading downward. The whole miscellany is shining and the right kind of sordid.

The fundamentals are nailed and the tonal textures irradiated, slickly building momentum throughout. With that rising, explicating over the expanses as it does, I’d wager most will rejoice to share in it. The final minute of three involves transitioning into some controlled experimentation, concluding in a sundry of cloaked loops at the latter stages. It’s all very good and pleasant, if you ask me.

A digital copy of the track can be downloaded to your personal solid state or hard disc drive for $1 USD. Or, for the wise investor, the album of 10 tracks is aggregated at $7, a savings of 30%. It is to be released October 7th, should the world continue to exist at such a time.