Category: bedroom

TRACK | Happy Jawbone Family Band – fireflies make out of dust (take one)

5/5 golden merles

Sister project to Csehak’s The Lentils, Happy Jawbone Family Band is somehow differentiated, possibly meaningfully, possibly arbitrarily. There are some things man was not meant to know.

What is known is that it is good. What I like about this song is that it is immense, worrisomely so, and floating, but may have also been recorded anywhere that is partially submerged underwater.

It has various properties of shock and shiver in the guitar tones bounding off the snare. The dual vocals overlay and waver, and make a serrated cut for ease of accessing the heart of the track. That all comes together in a great and wondrous haze of waxy and metallic tones. Bigger than it has any right to be.

TRACK | moodlighting – Ahead of myself

5/5 golden merles

There is room on this ledger for indie-pop and twee-type rock, particularly when it’s this well arranged and strikes such a balance of buoyancy and dread.

It is difficult to form this combination of melody and malaise, at least so far as I’ve seen in my searching. And the group seems uniquely thoughtful in a timely way that updates the genre into the demonstrably forsaken but sometimes pretty pleasant common era.

Lyrically the track is uncertain yet defiant (come change my mind for me), eager within the context of melancholy, and creates a lovely space in which to brood.

For fans possibly of the Pants Yell!’s instrumentation variety and storytelling, a Pastels gleaming murmur, and in the vocal range and register of Broadway Hush/Page France, if these are things you’re eager to explore the neighborhoods of.

TRACK | Hovvdy – Easy

5/5 golden merles

The melody sprouts from the structure in Easy like a seedling through the roof of an abandoned weigh station. There is an ease and levity to the vocals amidst the weight of concrete piano and drum instrumentation. The collaboration of these elements across the soundscape provides us with an admirable expanse.

The spiraled knots in the melodic structure keep it familiar even as it extends to otherwise untenable lengths.

There is some very interesting techniques of pacing that might otherwise go unnoticed. That it is the work of two drummers seems to make a lot of sense. There are many kinds of ways to build a melody and embed it in memory and this one is both unique and lovely.

TRACK | The Rebel – I Found You Amongst the Roses

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | Pristine Hyur – Somebody Saves Us

5/5 golden merles

It is fairly difficult for me to be grabbed by the pure instrumental outside of an album stretch in which it acts sometimes as intermediary or accent between more explicit entries. I am suspicious of pure abstraction, of where it might otherwise be welcomed.

But here is a good example of the exception.

Many great tones are featured in their own right, elaborately worked and accented with field recorded pulsations that approximate speech but never fully realize it. Phases and segments seamlessly transition. It has a masterful pacing and craft.

There must be a coming together of such coherence that the style/form is so rich in detail and metering it becomes the substance itself. If that sounds damning with faint praise then I am not properly conveying the rarity of it.

I have a great appreciation for language. For me, a good line goes a long way. To remove this attribute altogether from a piece of music puts the work at a disadvantage. It’s not insurmountable but it is nonetheless appreciated with less frequency.

There is a great quote attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer about “Comforting the troubled and troubling the comfortable,” and, well, this becomes more difficult when dealing in abstraction. But I think that it also may very well apply here and that is no small feat.

TRACK | The Bird Calls – Never Better

5/5 golden merles

I found The Bird Calls on Various Small Flames’ lengthy and worthwhile 2021 Year-End “Songs We Missed” list. ‘ But, in snooping through that great gauntlet of articulation, I have taken to feature a different track off this very good album infernal harvest, “Never Better” (The album now also features on our gently belated best-of 2021 list).

Never Better is replete with quality lines that are themselves adorned in well-suited and gentle instrumentation.

To be direct, qualitatively it’s on par with Joyner, Smith, and Alex G. And methodically it operates in a somewhat similar manner, it’s storytelling coming as an elaboration upon punctuations of individual engagements, the accumulated sequence of a life shared, with keenly articulate larger philosophical assessments intermittently assigned.

Search lights dissolving from the sea to the shore / This is what I’ve been preparing you for / I was never any better

There are some tremendous turns of phrase within the lyrical construction of this track. A sound melody and a compellingly direct lo-if performance make it very much worthy of your attention.

TRACK | Bnny – I’m Just Fine

5/5 golden merles

Coming off of 2021s Everything, Bnny moves from strength to strength with this remarkable single, “I’m Just Fine.“

In a few direct lines recounting a brief encounter, swiftly this microcosm extrapolates into wide avenues of longing and of unrealized eventualities. The subtext is immense. This moment, or it’s recollection, acts as a portal to the vast emotional ocean of undercurrent that undergirds our every interaction.

And, yeah, most songs should do this. And most try to, if sort of inadvertently. But rarely do they render this phasing of micro to macro as convincingly, or wed the everyday to eternity in a manner that allows for direct intellectual as well as emotional resonance. Rarely do you feel as though the ground has opened up beneath you. And, better yet, by design.

There is great refinement in the two guitar leads, the quiet chorus of backing vocals that swells late on, and the elegant drumming variance. Where most songs would put the full burden of focus upon one of these individual endearing elements of instrumentation, the glut of quality coalesces here into one hell of a stunning track.

TRACK | Gracie Gray – Morphine

5/5 golden merles

Gracie Gray’s Morphine would fit in seamlessly with Because I Was in Love era Sharon Van Etten. Or maybe just after, think Heart in the Ground.

There is a similar concordant maneuvering between the octaves and in moving from strength to strength as they transition through the various melodic passages.

The track effortlessly stretches the liminal space between confessional singer-songwriter and the quasi-choral, maintaining the organ/synth accompaniment that well suits either.

Also, my parents have a cat named Gracie Gray and she sometimes plays the piano. A fortuitous coincidence.

TRACK | Twain – Nature Song

5/5 golden merles

“Look at those vultures fly, black against the sky, if they eat me I’ll learn how to fly.”

There must be a general reassessing.

the future is begging us to forfeit the values of tradition in the sake of the good, every day and at all times. To serve good and not habit, to form new rituals that reinforce behavior around decency and dignity.

There is embedded in this track a very faint accompanying backing vocals, chiming in at 5-10% and just adding a bit of nuance to the direct-to-handheld recorder operation. It is slightly staggered and suits the unfolding.

It feels like the future, approaching, slightly after and rising. “Go get ’em, little ones.”

TRACK | DRAGGS – HEARSE

5/5 golden merles

DRAGGS makes reliably filthy lo-fi garage punk from the Australian Gold Coast. In writing about this now I have realized there was a 5th record released in 2019 on Slime Street, surely full of muck that I’m very happy to dive into.

HEARSE is a bludgeoning. It is regularly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerable to most fans of the broader genre. But it is always returning, beat from beat, to it’s foundation, a finely honed structure underneath the apparent liberties taken with form.