Noun Verb Adjective has some wonderfully crafted lo-fi bedroom pop rock.
If you would believe it, Boys in the Sand does have some Beach Boys stylistic parallels. The hooks and layers of vocals carom over one another and the tambourine/snare provides a warm and welcoming hive to orbit.
A superb owl on the cover guides you home. It’s a good, small marvel.
Sickly strummed guitars and cooing, warbled vocals are good. This song has both. It also has the most minimalistic drum track you may have ever heard in which one remains technically present.
The sum of it’s parts are quietly a spectacle that is worth taking in.
It has all the energy and promise of that first demo draft of a melody and rough lyric, a stab taken on tape, to play back later to build upon, before the verses are nailed down and the chorus repeats, burdensomely, to warrant having taught it to the band in the first place.
At 74 seconds, It’s a non-invasive surgery. What do you have to lose.
A great, soundly built garage rock track, strumming and bashing about over the tapes sturdy hiss. When the organ arrives to accompany the chorus you know you’re in good hands for the remainder.
The vocal and audio peaking is skillfully used for intensity, never overstepping into painful or distracting but instead gracefully bracing itself off of this ceiling.
If I had five golden merles to give I would give it five golden merles.
Cindy Lee’s Heavy Metal is an exemplary track for conveying that lo-fi does not have to mean anti-lush or lacking in vibrancy.
There is great richness and subtle hooks everywhere here, built into the vocal melody and the winding bass. The drum fills and phasing between segments are pristine and luxurious set pieces.
It’s all pretty captivating and contorts the space of any room into which it is freed.
Find further spectral ache and alchemy at the bandcamp.
Toulouse-based Cathedrale have made one hell of an album in Houses are Built the Same.
The selected track here, Hidden Museum, begins with the tube amp warmed tones of some lackadaisical dueling guitars, just a bit of bass lurking underneath. The direct payoff of the well-controlled and appropriately contorted vocals arrive shortly thereafter, agreeably raving about secrets and understanding.
There is a controlled chaos that is admirably achieved here, and the vision is clear and well realized throughout. Consistently catchy and permeating vitality, this is a kind of treasure.
The instrumentation and hooks are given space to breath, the attention-trap detailing is superb, and the metered and mastering is an assemblage of worthy influences. For some larger touchstones, it is the spiritual cousins of Ought, Metric, and Protomartyr; warped but well wrapped.
Amy Annelle is a national treasure, albeit a Texas-based one so it’s a bit of a gray area.
In the alternate timeline in which Bernard Sanders has become the president, I imagine she is universally well regarded and heaped+drowning in praise.
But here we are in this rendition. The good still draws to it the good, but with slightly less gravity.
Regardless, The Cimarron Banks is a great album. The opening title track, the hellhound’s address, wounded man, forever in-between, and Miss it more than you know how, here featured, are all noteworthy achievements in songwriting and performance.
Annelle offers first-rate lyrical content interwoven with enduring melodies and an extremely technically accomplished delivery that is not stripped of character and nuance but rather plastered in them. It is difficult to ask for more than this.
Well, well is a stunning track and, good news, the whole album is built like this. Maybe a full, proper review to come when things settle down a bit.
But Black Bug’s s/t is a well contained rampage of burning saw patterns, choral uproar and properly clobbered digi drums.
15 tracks and no song is longer than 2:08.
Female/Male tradeoff the purging, vocal utterances and I don’t know if any album is as much fun as this is fun.
Name your price.
San Diego’s Teenage Burritos 2016 s/t has much good within it.
The standout tracks for me are Prom Song and the one rated here/posted below, Kamikaze. But the whole thing is so fluent in building convincing garage rock fragments that it appears effortless.
A real compelling alchemy of elements, dodging and compiling. I prefer this version featuring Andreas from Holograms to the other two listed on their bandcamp:
Even given the perpetual deluge of quality bandcamp content that no one of us will ever be able to sort through, it is borderline criminal that Windowsill’s “Twolip” has 9 sales to date.
Recommended to me initially by my internet-pal Paolo Yumol (who makes fine music in his own right), this track is sheer wonder and sweetly confides in its listener in the most appealingly warped and ravaged manner.
The strings and refracted melodic variations and repetitions build to great effect. The detailing and textures are comprehensively plotted. Its greatness is readily apparent. ok?
Katie Von Schleicher has released not one but two essential rock albums of our common era, 2020’s Consummation and 2017’s Shitty Hits.
This track is off the former, which is the latter, chronologically. I don’t have a copyeditor. This is a blog that only people who are getting ping-backs to their bandcamp pages are reading.
The point is that very few people are writing songs on the level of The Image and Strangest Thing. They’re full of majesty and momentum and calibrated to kill. In a kind way.
She’s also doing engineering/recording with Nate Mendelsohn for Shitty Hits Recording Co. If you’re in the NY area and need such services.
Plainly & Painfully 