Category: bedroom

TRACK | King Tears Mortuary – Crash Report

5/5 golden merles

From King Tears Mortuary’s 2012 Safe Sex 7″, Crash Report is a track on that very fine EP.

There is a somewhat broadly shared Australian sentiment around lo-fi garage and bedroom rock that I find very agreeable. Or did, of a certain era, maybe it has passed. The internet makes all this seem eternal.

But from a population of 25m (15m less than California) there is a pervasive consensus about what guitar-music should prioritize closer to my own predilections. And the quality dispensed by this culture seems disproportionate in the extreme.

Maybe we are both just defective/mutated in a similar manner.

KTM here deliver some undeniably pointed melodic hooks and fun/inventive lyrically playful phrasing such as “light of my life goes on and off.”

TRACK | Video Age – Throwing Knives

5/5 golden merles

One song that I never skip when it appears in the shuffle is Throwing Knives by Video Age. It is so admirably wrought, not overly so, but like iron. I find it hard to get away from, it is undeniably inspired material.

Each melody builds off the last, including the hearty bridge and “It’s all in my head” refrain. The song is an admirable force of nature that covers a lot of ground by the tenable three minute mark; a great and luxurious thing, maybe as elaborate as lo-fi will allow without some sacrifice to coherence.

TRACK | White Poppy – I Had a Dream

5/5 golden merles

White Poppy’s I had a dream is one of the finest closers to an album I have heard. Over the mild hiss and drum, one line is repeated like a mantra:

I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it

The tape was put out in 2012 on Not Not Fun records, an extremely reliably excellent CA label over the last couple of decades.

About a year after this release in 2013 Britt from NNF wrote me a very kind and thoughtful rejection email regarding some poorly recorded demos I had sent them. I proudly showed this note of pleasant renunciation to my friends at the time as though it proved something or other, something beyond their patience and goodness.

TRACK | Young Prisms – Honeydew

5/5 golden merles

Ever since Jon at VariousSmallFlames reviewed Wombo this has become a fire talk records appreciation blog.

In their assessing and surveying I’m not sure they can do wrong? But I am afraid to investigate further. Why ruin a good thing? Let’s all ignore them going forward, maybe cut our gains for once.

Instead, Young Prisms grants us some shoegaze that hits like an icepick to the heart before melting conveniently away.

This is also very good. It is in that style of but also adding to the genre’s goods and greats like MBV, Lush, Wild Nothing, et al. And at their best, in the balance of the content and the form, quite close to the ones you already love.

TRACK | Print Head – Can You Complain

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

5/5 golden merles

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | Myers Rooney – I Hope It Is Only A Room

5/5 golden merles

The latter significance of things is sometimes not clear upon the initial impressions or even after years of insistent exposure.

Years later some sense memory has attained a monumental symbolic personal value, or someone says something offhand that sparks an unrelated but crushing recollection or onrush of nostalgia.

Once I had a friend who had a Facebook page. And upon that page I inadvertently saw that one of her other friends wrote about a longing for a shared period of time, for when they lived collectively in a dormitory.

They wrote that often they’ll see something funny or good online and get so excited to run across the hallway and show it directly, to experience the thing together. But that period has passed… a sequence of shared moments that approximated happiness.

And now they can text it over. And get a response in a minute, or an hour, or a day. But it isn’t the same, they wrote, the hallway that leads out of the room doesn’t lead directly to my friend and her laugh.

TRACK | Mayge – Fried

5/5 golden merles

The literal description of what is happening here is that there are three simple interweaving melodies of synth, guitar and vocals, centering around a minimal drum track, and later accompanied by an additional guitar lead.

But what’s really occurring within this instance of high-grade post-wave sludge pop is a lot more difficult to describe.

It has been intuitively discovered and teased out from a feeling, and yet it remains mostly that, maintaining the richness and texture of that experience, reorganized but largely unadulterated from it’s incipient form. It is itself some kind of dissection of the fractal, framed.

And this experienced can be purchased digitally from the artist at a price of your choosing or bought on tape from Gravity Hill Records.

TRACK | Ricky Eat Acid – HYPOTHESIS

5/5 golden merles

Finally a cover that looks like it was intended for the digitally ornate frame it has received (at least, I mean to say, classically/traditionally, in some outdated sense that seems reasonable to the outsider…).

When my grandfather was expiring in the hospice we took with him an illuminated painting of the sea. Originally it was displayed in the basement of their old house for a few decades. Then it spent another couple of years more prominently displayed in his bedroom at the condominium.

Maybe it is of the forest not the sea, I can’t find the image of it on my phone. The picture is semi-translucent and a couple of electric blubs light it from behind. I know it is in one of the 20 different family text threads that arbitrarily add or exclude one or two individuals and seem to be used interchangeably.

In any case, I remember it as a representation of the sea. And it followed him around for years, idly glowing. And it resembles this cover image, probably. Ricky Eat Acid makes art with great attention to detail, metering and a deep empathy for the individual listener. That he excels at the projection of their consumption is a matter of public record.

TRACK | Angel Olsen – My Last Date (With You)

5/5 golden merles

This was my first exposure to Angel Olsen and I’m glad at least one track is easily available on bandcamp to still preview. The talent and emotive power was early and obvious.

The EP is a list of covers (Skeeter Davis, here) and not one of them is done poorly. Straight to mic, a handful of layers laid over the top, it is immediately compelling and convincing material.

I’ve been calling this the “Our” Lady of the Water Park EP for the last decade and am surprised to see it has none of the religious connotations to it I’ve ignorantly applied. Woops. The experience itself is still a bit akin to it, I think, but ours no more. and not for a long time. and also never.