Author: z-s

TRACK | Sweeping Promises – Hunger for a Way Out

5/5 golden merles

Ear worms are good for you, they eat out the wax on the way to your brain. What happens after is lost to us, all records vanish mysteriously after this phase. But I think it is likely good.

This thing is so well crafted it appears genetically modified by big pharma for the purposes of profit, no regard given to the side effects we’ve come to expect from any form of progress.

But also it is just extremely good pop-rock music: guitars tuned and struck properly, synths decoratively detailing the expanse. There’s not much slack in it. And that which is present is properly and quickly used to reel you back in.

TRACK | Smirk – Mind Temp

5/5 golden merles

I’m 5 or so EPs behind on Smirk’s oeuvre and it’s unfortunate. Mind Temp was on the prior mix and Cassette II is on the year-end list for 2020.

All the fundamentals of tone, texture, melody and structure are in place. And it’s a great relief to me having listened to much that has no sense of itself, much that has no regard for arrangement and harmony, much that does not capture a feeling, much that contains neither compelling doom-saying nor derring-do. Whereas this does.

It’s some Lo-Fi guitar pop, good and good for you. Do as I say, not as I do and go listen to the rest of the assembled tunes as well.

TRACK | KIEFF – Whatever

5/5 golden merles

These KIEFF demos come to us via the fine folks Smikkelbaard. Now would be the perfect time to post a link to KIEFF’s cover of Last Christmas. But I don’t want to. Do they know it’s Christmas? Who cares.

Whatever is recorded and mixed to a near perfect state of presentation. The bass line and guitar lead take the fractal structures of a few art deco struts and builds them into a verifiable sanctuary of a shack.

It is subtle, humble and better than it has any right to be, better than we could ever deserve. You can check shelter off the hierarchy of needs, the manger will suffice.

TRACK | Privacy Issues – Hold My Breath

5/5 golden merles

Privacy Issues’ self titled is some of the lo-est fi-est EP to come out of 2020, which is still relevant to us thanks to the nature of time progressing forward and rarely if ever backward, despite the desires of the regressive.

The guitar hooks interplay with that circular writing structure, everything guided by the minimal drumming, and all of this works alongside the very high quality vocal melodies.

It seems simple, but it isn’t. Or it is, but in the way that a diamond is simple: freely forming, found in dirt, but honed over millennia.

I bought the tape and I have no tape player. But someday maybe I will? Probably one can still be purchased from the goodwill for a few dollars and then fixed for a few dollars more.


TRACK | Death Lens – Witching Hour

5/5 golden merles

It is difficult to keep the bile intact as it populates the mold, all to be bound and set, maneuvering within the pop structure.

If you like The Cramps Psychedelic Jungle but despise this, I would wager that the nostalgia has rotted your brain.

Or you’re partial to The Stooges’ Funhouse but don’t see any redeeming qualities in what Death Lens are retching up here, well then something is off, and future assessment are brought into question. In my estimation your pure perceiver may be found untrue and needs calibration.

TRACK | Hair Peace – Summertime

5/5 golden merles

In the bleak mid-winter, let’s dwell on sunnier times discussed and celebrated in Hair Peace’s Summertime, as featured on their 2014 Summer EP. It has a melody like radioactive molasses. It compels you to have faith in the youths. It reminds you that verses and choruses can coexist in peace, hair peace.

That I am the only individual who has purchased this item (from the Bandcamp page, at least), is a kind of crime against humanity. Some CDs were apparently available at Bloomington, IN’s, wonderful Landlocked music, where I spent a good deal of student loan money at their various locations one hundred years ago.

It was Schopenhauer who said “Man can do what he wants but not want what he wants.” OK, But you should want this EP. It’s good. Contract it today.


TRACK | Sibylle Baier – Tonight

5/5 golden merles

Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green was “Recorded in the early 70’s in her home on a reel to reel recording device,” then sat unreleased for 40-50 years.

It is with a profound sense of dread that you consider this and realize that this set of tracks was one of the lucky ones. That most things of this caliber are, if recorded at all, languishing in moldy basements, storage lockers and landfills.

These were things that played live in a community, maybe, a handful of times, then had no outlet. Songs that the corporate scouting and release structure had no use for on commercial grounds, in a culture plagued by products. Ads on, in , and bracketing all media, like cancer in the body, determining what lives and dies. As artists or creators we have a responsibility to mitigate or eliminate this if possible.

Which is why Bandcamp is such a fine platform and model to emulate. Perhaps it will be bought out and crushed eventually. But for now it is the very best option available.

TRACK | Purple Mountains – All My Happiness is Gone

5/5 golden merles

Howdy, friends, ever bought a digital album from a dead man?

“Lately I tend to make strangers wherever I go / Some of them were once people I was happy to know”

In my estimation, if you ever write a line that good for the rest of your life, it was more or less worth it. David’s death coinciding with the release of this album reminds me a bit of some anecdote from Camus about a young author who wrote a novel then (in part) killed himself to promote it. The joke is that it did get the attention of the newspapers but the work itself was universally panned.

Unlike this dead fellow, Purple Mountain’s self title release is superb. The parallel is only the timing, the creative act, and the demise. I also greatly enjoy Berman’s poetry, like this from 1999’s Actual Air:

“Snow”

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.


Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.


When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.


But why were they on his property, he asked.

TRACK | The Worms – Quality Time

5/5 golden merles

I have so many tabs open… I have not yet gotten to The Worms 2020 release Back to the Bog. But I did enjoy the holy hell out of 2016’s Everything in Order. So it would be no surprise if there are gems in there as well.

There is great buoyancy within this fuzz, and an elastic reverberation of muscle and meat. It is music made by humans and more or less for them. That is a compliment of the highest order, as I am also a man, of sorts, and prefer this type of music.

If you too make music for humans there might also be 5 Golden Merles in it for you. This is incentivization. This is priming the pump of the indifferent universe. I am accessorizing the void.

TRACK | Mar – Mother of Broken Men

5/5 golden merles

Mar make excellent sludge metal and noise rock. This track is an aside, a kind of misrepresentative sampling of materials. But it is also my favorite track among many great ones and the one that fits best this kind of meandering assemblage of posts.

From John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards:

“There are no more secrets today than there were when Sun Tzu wrote. What we do have now is a worship of the idea of secrecy. The brief vogue of existentialism in the middle part of the twentieth century illustrates precisely what has happened. A philosophy which declares that people will be judged by their acts could not possibly survive in the West. (Instead) we believe that people are what they know and can be judged by their power; that is, by what they control. In a society based not upon action but upon systems, our place within the system determines our importance.

“The measure of our power is based upon the knowledge which either passes through our position or is produced by it. One of the truly curious characteristics of this society is that the individual can most easily exercise power by retaining the knowledge which is in his hands. Thus, he blocks the flow of paper or information or of instructions through his intersection to the next. And with only the smallest of efforts he can alter the information in a minor or major way. Abruptly he converts himself from a link into a barrier and demonstrates, if only to himself, his own existence.”