Foreboding and uproarious, EULA’s “I Collapse” kicks. The oscillating vocals unnerve and taunt around a gloom-core structure of perpetual/grinding bass. In this internet dipshit’s humble opinion, it’s great.
Structurally the thing has more than a few asides which all conspire and compile credibly. The kinetic has been captured pretty well intact. It is always eroding and disintegrating but in a stable sample both capable and worthy of study.
In these dark times, alongside the great mass of voices demanding to be heard, pleading, there can sometime be a week or more in which I don’t hear anything I like. In these times I think maybe I should back away for a bit, that I’m not in an ideal mental space for processing new material. And that maybe I wouldn’t even know anything good if I heard it.
Then, sometimes, with great reassurance, comes, guided and meditative, a calm voice of distinction and craft. Point No Point’s “Are you OK?” is a tuning fork clanged against the side of the universe, spirited and uncommonly well calibrated.
It is that which is becoming, tangential and tactile, built before your very ears. It contains all the joys and horrors of being known. A tame trajectory, familiar, left unimpeded, that nevertheless hits the intended target. It sounds like the end while discussing the new beginning, which are coincidentally, mercifully, the same thing.
If there’s any future worth having our degraded/spoiled era will be bound up and bundled with the dark ages. But maybe some documents like this will make it out and convey we had a bit of sense and the capacity to craft things of value.
I Found You Amongst The Roses is, wonderfully, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The traditional folk form, bounding, plodding forward, with the simple electronic drum pattern, and the calming melody: it is all cover for what is coming.
The usual line and truism about a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down is applicable. There is here a valuable expanding of what is agreeable within the window of initial expectations.
When the Prince lyrics enter, the subtle warping becomes stark. The track deconstructs itself, the tempo distends, ultimately ending in field recordings and samples that bring further context to the unease.
But it all works so well that those drawn in through tradition leave with a greater appreciation for experimentation, their conceptions of ‘good’ ever so slightly extended. And that is a valuable endeavor.
All along the length and breadth of Happy Happy & Hardcore Pop Print Head have constructed a balanced audio experience with remarkable depth and detail to get agreeably lost in.
For €2 EUR you’re not likely going to get a better bargain of lo-fi art-pop any time soon. As I write, one tape remains, also, if you’d like it mailed from Valencia.
I know my dear friend Darcy of Ought has found himself with some US Girls in the new band Cola. Firetalk are trawling the talented depths of the freakfolk/art rock scenes and coming up with many gems. But it sounds like maybe he is here as well, at least in spirit, sounding off in the resounding of the caterwaul, the bellow.
There is within One of These inventive melodic structure that has made an effort to stand apart from the standard expansion of consonants and vowels within rhyming schemes and octave shifts.
False dichotomies are rife and ravaging all areas of our existence. Pepsi or Royale Crown Cola. Chevron or Texaco. Rule of 3’s or rule of 4’s. Politically, their names aren’t worth mentioning, but let’s just call them ghouls or goblins.
Choosing one hell or the other is presented to you as though they are the solution to anything. And in fact the only available options: A ready-made shortcut to a superficial sacrifice that will show Real Results or at least delay the inevitable while we wait and collect more data in order to reassess and circle back on our way into the tomb.
But mercifully you still have an actual choice. Choosing to be ‘none’ is always an option. Opting out of these irrelevant debates/choices is very often the only way to win in any meaningful sense, in so many aspects.
I don’t know what this song is about but the melody is good.
It is unusual to see musicians take from their own influences internal mechanics and pull from them with purpose, to see them take components retooled into new structures as though they are transmittable. Wombo does this.
Whereas, outside of general stylings and instruments, most bands attempt to replicate the feeling, a solipsistic slant drilling at a common reservoir. And I am one of them. I have misunderstood my influences, from an engineering perspective.
It is hard to remember, but you must play the game as it is, not as it appears to be.
Here are bands I love that Wombo reminds me of: The Strokes, Ought, Broadcast, Lower Dens, The Mallard, Television, and so on… That should be enough good things.
Here is a quote from Annie Dillard, promising alternate cores or reservoirs and the mechanisms to get there:
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”
Wombo’s Blossomlooksdownuponus is end-to-end the best full length I’ve heard in awhile. No doubt some variation of the recent singles, EPs and LPs will find their way onto the next few mixes I spam unsolicited at my friends and family. And, again, I owe it to the folks at various small flames. Go there, it’s better than this place.
There are extreme levels of grace on this thing. What a talented team of folks, threading the needle of perception, of content and form, of what is tolerable and what is memorable.
As the old saying goes, a camel has a greater chance of passing through the eye of a needle than an art rock band has of creating a convincing hook.
There is here a form of post-punk that aspires for much more than novelty or style, that backs aesthetic with songcraft and substance, using the energy in either to propel the other forward. Sometimes one or the other is sufficient, but it needn’t be.
I can’t help feeling like my merely mentioning it degrades it’s quality slightly, which is maybe why I haven’t heard of the thing to this point. But there is too much to admire within.
I have blundered slightly in purchasing the WOMBO COMBO, denying me unlimited streaming rights to the LP. However, it may genuinely be worth purchasing twice.
Plainly & Painfully 