Month: April 2023

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – CLOWNING

5/5 golden merles

Writing on Busted Head Racket in December I accused them of crafting “delightful and difficult to kill earworms.” The new work is just as infested and likewise just as rabid and relentless, a prized commotion carved in synths and the probable simulacra of a slide whistle. Or is it the real deal? I would ask you to decide. Asundered with intention and contented in collected the notions, it’s rattling along with conviction and guts.

It finally, mercifully, drove out an alternate jingle from my mind. Lyrics are something to do with everything, or faced with the daily phases of self-reported observations, vacillating in the performance of personhood, bounding between enchantment and disenchantment, mockery and conviction. Coherently capturing ambivalence is sometimes later more akin to the feeling at the moment, and a better document for it. The world will grind you into dust but, if you’re lucky, there’s a stage of becoming a fine paste prior to dehydration. A nice soothing balm.

Look at the video by throat.pasta over at Tremendo Garaje. According to TG, the EP will release around this rotten globe in cassette form from Painscale (AUS), Pogo Til You Puke (UK), Idiotape Records (FR), Spyasola Records(DE), Harry Records(NL), Blä Records (SE), SYF Records (PL) and Painters Tape Records (US). Name your own price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Mo Troper – For You To Sing

5/5 golden merles

Good and due praise has been delivered to Mo Troper’s new tune “For You To Sing.” The recent track is an inspired calibration of power pop instrumentation. The only slack is intentional and left to reverberate with complimentary tone, a pure slice of steel and nickel pluck and glimmer. Jealousy and rivalry ferment in syrupy crystalline tones that exceptionally accent the chronicler’s annoyed-anguish. It’s pretty much timeless as far as the run of our lifetimes is concerned and the embodiment of dancing in degraded states underneath an outsized heart.

Guitar leads and vocal melodies interweave in a manner in which each subsection is given room to breathe and compliment every subsequent element. There’s also a good lesson in here concerning how to captivate through storytelling within the medium. From the first ‘well, (pause)’ the narrative lines alter in subtle variations that elaborate on the stakes and intentions, cohesive and reliably unreliable.

It’s built so finely in these numerous elaborations, seeking and retaining rich texture and idiosyncratic lyrical twist that works to buffer it from the passage of time. There’s too much good and unique character to it, built up over eons of influence, reaching beyond the notes and lines at something larger, that any imitators would almost by definition fail to replicate.

Internally bleeding, I really loved MTV and had it among the best records of 2022. Really looking forward to the futures worthy concocting. $1 on the bandcamp for the single.

TRACK | Metal Guru – Manca l’aria

5/5 golden merles

All over this lousy with life lo-fi split by DADGAD and Metal Guru there is a simulacra of residue, a prime patina of appreciable filth. Synths and murky drums stain and stand to reason, in an approximate resemblance of the collision of debris into dirt. There’s the common clamor of degraded infrastructure and unease, but also the intermittent revelry within that context by those that dwell within it. The style is itself a metaphor, one that reflects the world back to itself. This one offers poise with poison in the veins, how to celebrate small victories within an appreciably degraded state or condition. It’s offering capital C commiseration. To be caked in filth and eat it, too. What good can be salvaged from the world and in what form? I don’t know, something like this.

Style allows for allegiance without explicit commitment. It is fashion. If a form must be assumed or the medium itself abandoned — and we’re all subject to a similar cultural conditioning and warping of language — then this type of constructed egg/post-punk feels accurate and for me moves toward a kind of consensus within the moment. We have been sentenced by similar gods to similar fates.

What components can be stripped from the 60s and the 80s before they were hollowed out and taxidermized, gleaming at you from a shelf? The rendering of that representation here feels accurate. It’s essentially pop music that isn’t quite compromised by capital. The intentions are slightly purer and more potent than the general slate. The locus of its power is personal and unrepentant. That’s all it takes. There’s enough field recording and melodic misdirection to keep the simple melodies as very welcome and worthy of embrace when they arrive. They burn and bleed out in real time, at least semi-self aware, and are currently still rooted prior to commodification.

There are two paths toward unity, illusion and ignorance or a form of tolerant acceptance. In a world of dramatically variably quality industrial production astride a framework of global distribution, my salad days were in fact pizza days. I can relate to it, I feel akin to it. I’ve wasted an hour of my life writing out what everybody already intuitively knows. The balance of style and substance, design and function, content and form, here, feels good to me and believable, whatever the percentages are on either side. I’m a compatible host for whatever this parasite is, and maybe you will be, too.

I am belated and the world is a crushing, crushing thing. But you can still acquire the tape and bandcamp streaming from Face Melter Records (Rome). Or, for instance, togoschlam PL curated yt list.

TRACK | pH people – Film For Slugs

5/5 golden merles

pH people released a super demo in December 2022 I have belatedly become acquainted with. It maintains its form throughout, brute force submerged in a 12 meter tall wave of damp fuzz, a sort of struggle like torpor struck into motion. It is a kind of lurching hazard or volatile demystification, but still a sort of salve. Direct and effective, the EP is faithful to its own internal logic and a relief in contrast to overly elaborate rock artifices that lack conviction.

Explaining this particular kind of music is a kind of sickness that doesn’t need doing. The consistent balance of the impulsive and incoherent makes what might otherwise seem a mess into its own sort of ameliorating force, reliably adhering to principles and rules that reinforce and corroborate between the tracks.

It sounds like you’re already deaf, hearing it. Or taking a joy ride in your friend’s dad’s hearse, listening from inside the coffin through the division, the curtain, the speakers obstructing. This is the experiment: devolving to a form that remains recognizable and appreciable, a couple stages before alienation. In my beleaguered state of obligations and unease it feels pretty perfectly balance with personal failings, pairs well.

From Urticaria Records, Nantes, seventy were made in the 5 EUR set of cassettes.