Author: z-s

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.

TRACK | Eric Angelo Bessel – Kindly Rewind

5/5 golden merles

“Kindly Rewind” is the second single off Eric Angelo Bessel’s upcoming ambient and experimental Visitations LP. Within the first few iterative whorls you can feel its resonance and reach, replete with much wonder and otherworldly artifacts of interest. Make of it what you will, but there is good raw material collected and methodically ordered as though it is a gift. The melody and its deterioration reads as though conflicted, situated at the helm, wary but intrigued, gazing into a great abyss.

The track contains a worthy extent of daunting search charted across this route; you will accompany it, feeling out the loop through interlocking synths and the steady pull of movement in some direction. The rich texture and tone provide credulity, allowing the listener to indulge in the peculiar and startling act of remaining within the motion and moment. It is transportive and properly weighted. It lends itself to speculation, curiosity, and feels like a soundtrack for celestial expanse or the uncharted subterranean. It knows the act of careening results in eventual harmony and has the craters to prove it. I find it to be delicate and consequential noise.

If work is described as “cinematic” you can in fact add it to your own life and enhance whatever small intrigues you find yourself embroiled within, ok? Not everything must be subsumed and reframed through yet another vignette of media, narrowing the field of experience down into manageable units of another’s intention.

In any case, it stands on its own. I would be proud if I had made it. If we are primarily defining ourselves through consumption of various media, best to have at least a few pieces included that allow you to focus primarily on your own becoming. The piece seems to encourage considered action in this way, elegantly embodying a balanced sense of doubt and hope, and that is a rare and valuable quality.

Vinyl preorder is available on the bandcamp for $20 from Portland’s Lore City Records, or $8 for the digital album. It releases April 21st.

TRACK | Beta Maximo – Voy a salir a vengarme

5/5 golden merles

Úbeda, Spain-based egg punk, crammed to the gills with gatling gun digi drum and deliberate melodic delineations. If you find amusement or solace in one glancing, angular component of this, good news: the entirety is composed of similar muck. The visions clear and hitting what it’s aiming at. Only as crooked as it takes to fulfill the composition, there’s a lot of joy in this pop rock forming and sprouting outside of industrial confinement.

We’ve written on Beta maximo before, but the album has been disappeared. However the new stuff is just as good. As stated at the time, the band was described as “DIYARI (Do It Yourself And Release Immediately), this aesthetic remains intact and uncompromised.” In fact, there has been a new single in the subsequent weeks after this LP, released March 9th, “Hornos de ladrillo.” I am a million miles behind.

Since the 17th of February you could name your price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Max García Conover – 5 to 4 (ft. paula prieto)

5/5 golden merles

In Max García Conover’s “5 to 4” there is an attempt to reclaim wonder from the pit of kitsch, and dance delicately around that border, lifting. It’s got rare quality and a kind of playful but ruthless cunning that keeps the lines fresh and rewards instead of the normal, standardized route of punishing attention. A novel approach. The EP set is “somewhat inspired by a suitcase full of letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother in the 1940s,” when she was in a hospital for the consumptive poor and he was a different person.

The EP has a good concept and a better execution, most of the value situated in its coherent perspective and phrasing. The featured track including killer lines like “The endless metal barbed in metal,” and “it came down just like you said it would, five to four against the poor,” landing resoundingly within the rhyming scheme.

And that feels not too distanced from Townes or Woody, far more in line with that school than the modern conception of folk that always seems to diminish in its refinement of style above substance, paralleling our diets and or assorted gods. There is a great rarity with which folk music seems relevant to me, with this calibrated style and substance, feel and fondant. It’s been given such a bad name through regular consumption that it feels such a shock when you do get a dose of the decent.

Found and stolen from the esteemed scouting of Jon Doyle at VariousSmallFlames.co.uk. Everything in Winter EP is $5 on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Punter – A Minute’s Silence

5/5 golden merles

Hardcore punk from Melbourne with great scope, focused on the vast rot. The vocals are appropriately raving in a perpetual alarm propelled by an undercurrent of backing hooks and lead guitar melodies that facilitate agreeable ingurgitation.

You’re not going to get a better opening line than “Chuck a piss-up on a grave site” for awhile. The primary concerns explicit in the text are privacy in an era of unbidden observation, militarized police forces, and the general degradation and abuses of the social contract. It’s also anthemic. And it’s also a lot of fun.

From what I can gleam as am imbecile and outsider, the son and dotard of many hungry ghosts, the angle is relatively anarchic, I hope, to the extent affiliations don’t damn you outright. There are expressed concerns with left disunity benefitting the bastards at the alternate extreme. Historical examples are cited as everyman martyrs who have been sacrificed for a world they would be ashamed to have been affiliated with.

Your revulsion will either be directed outward or eat you alive from the inside. As an agent within a system of organized degradation with a capacity for self reflection, exercising that capacity for critique is imperative if there is any hope of remediation. And (and) there’s a lot of good hooks in it, too. Revel, wallow, examine, admire the monolithic guillotine on the cover… come up against the limitations of the medium and maybe discover a door.

$6.91 USD on Bandcamp or vinyl from Drunken Sailor Records.

COMP | If, When, & With Whom

5/5 golden merles

Undeniably Spared Flesh are at the pinnacle of the pump, deep in the heart of it, perched near one of the prime spigots for what remains of the corroded valve of rock. Look at this fucking line up of the beloved: Gee Tee, Zero Percent APR, EXWHITE, Billiam, MESH, Nick Normal, Cupid and The Stupids.

Mercifully, these petty thugs are united temporarily in a common cause of good: all proceeds from this release benefit the National Network of Abortion Funds.

True to their individual representations of self, the collected works are not lacking passion and composure. Far from throwaway tunes, each groups reached deep in the pocket and pulled generously from their wares, a welcome sign of solidarity in these dire times.

The compilation is a great introduction to so many inspired acts and creators in the midst of many you must already appreciate if you’ve read to paragraph four of this idiot blog. I live and breath this muck and I didn’t know about the immensely promising My Friend Cowboy or Bruise Linear. But now I do and I can store them where they belong: an endless series of tabs like tombstones in Mozilla.

Why scour through the debris later? These folks are working and making now, you can support them and their causes in real time. You’ve not got to wait for a Tiny Twerps volume to release 20-50 years after the fact, or make a costly pilgrimage to plant your dead gerbil in front of the charred remains of the Elephant 6 house. Cassettes remain at $15 on the edition of 100/$10 for .flac files.

TRACK | Golden Hallway Music – Radiant Park Collage

5/5 golden merles

Golden Hallway Music revels in saturation and subtle intention. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 seems to understand that the purpose of the pulse is a side effect, and that there’s a heart beating somewhere other and the movement is the aftermath echoing throughout the body. There’s a lot of that subterranean engine documented here across a few concurrent sensors, claiming to be live and feeling like it. It has plenty of refraction and careening, but consistently and repeatedly with gentle variations within the coherent structure.

From my dullards point of view, abstraction tends to flatter authority. What is the difference between this and the other abstractions I find distasteful? Not Not Fun seems to know. And I think the work provides some intimation of allegiance. Titles, tones and influence, conspiring in the common era. Minimal but rich in its rawness, paced in a manner that is difficult to convert into something damning or damaging.

It was recorded by expansive mining of the melodies and then an extracting of excerpts. “Radiant Park Collage” works up and charts the sort of layers that have their own intimations of language or kinds of simple systems, deliberately but slowly compounding to give way to larger complexities. And the symbolic representation of that evolution seems valuable.

Redefining some single units of measure, it will be released April 7th.



TRACK | Jason Hill – They Like Me, They Love Me

5/5 golden merles

Experimental LA pop rock from Jason Hill, “They Like Me, They Love Me” is a dreamy and delicately disoriented tune. Lyrically ponderous, an obsessive narrative yarn is delivered concerning personal presentation and the series stories that ultimately construct the self. The tale is told over some faded percussive gears and accented with a richly detailed accompaniment that allows the 4:45 runtime to feel positively tight. There’s a lot of pretty shimmer coinciding with the dreary divulging, everything broken up in an intriguing elaboration.

The tune has rightly captured the feel of an interrogation, including the competing of illusions and a progressively faltering devotion to a lie. A cello punctuates the middle movements as the rhythm guitar sways across the soundscape, dancing by itself on the periphery. Vocal layers clamber along the octaves, corroborating in the chorus half the time, probably contradicting elsewhere. All of that lumbers harmoniously along, graceful enough to warrant further study.

There’s a great warm wrath to it, derived from fermented fog and bottled in. The track was featured in Netflix’s The Confession Killer and written from the perspective of Henry Lee Lucas, “once suspected to be the biggest serial killer of all time but was really just a serial liar.” It stands up on its own, the wilted and creaking confessional, but you get the feeling there’s further illumination in the coupling of these spectacles. What’s the harm in hearing what they have to say?