Category: bedroom

TRACK | Surface to Air Missive – Time Being

5/5 golden merles

Surface to Air Missive is another excellent band that I am about 3-4 releases behind on. There is an overwhelming amount of potential sitting there, waiting for me to sift through its promises… and to then provide more relevant text to the common era, and more relevant promotion for people who exist in the here and now.

But, nevertheless, one track I am already deeply familiarized with is Time Being.

And I can confidently say, without reservation or hesitation, that here the arrow of time has been captured, honed and crafted into a hook.

I suggest you go in expecting something too good to be true. I doubt that it will matter much. I think you’ll probably come out satisfied despite these impossible aims. I am confident that you’ll be privately impressed enough and happy losing track of these arbitrary designations in the hazy field of positive experience.

TRACK | viridian – Vichy Waters

5/5 golden merles

Whereas my favorite track on the album might be dwd001 (Because it did what it was supposed to. Because the introduction introduced. Because I heard it and knew that there would be others worthy of inspection within…), I think that Vichy Waters is the strongest display of what is on offer here.

And that is an excellent sense of melodic craft and structure within the texture of noise-lo-fi rock production.

Immediately, the guitar-lead and the vocal melody are built around the well laid drums and you are granted the soundtrack to your youth. That is, maybe, if you hear it at the right times, in the right places, at the right impressionable moment.

Or maybe also if the plaque of nostalgia hasn’t built a wall around your heart so hard only the finest hooks can pierce it. And, still, maybe even then. It’s as good as any of it’s influences, referenced by name (The Jesus and Mary Chain, Les Rallizes Dénudés) or otherwise embedded.

Give them your krona at an exchange rate paypal finds agreeable.

TRACK | Casey Wells – Archive

5/5 golden merles

Songs can suffer from overworking and mismanagement of resources. This is the opposite of that. There’s so much subtle detailing throughout outfitted to the 63 second run time that it probably punches at least 64lbs above its weight. Welterweights beware.

The cultural conditioning around genres (that I also am awash and dissolving within) here is present but the attention to the construction is orchestral and there is a rich/great breadth to the soundscape.

I am am a sucker for a bit of texture and field recording phasing in to the pop-core, and after revolving about the track, which helps to ground it in a place and time, and provides a context to err out of or embrace. but either way a nice stage to move on.

TRACK | KIEFF – Whatever

5/5 golden merles

These KIEFF demos come to us via the fine folks Smikkelbaard. Now would be the perfect time to post a link to KIEFF’s cover of Last Christmas. But I don’t want to. Do they know it’s Christmas? Who cares.

Whatever is recorded and mixed to a near perfect state of presentation. The bass line and guitar lead take the fractal structures of a few art deco struts and builds them into a verifiable sanctuary of a shack.

It is subtle, humble and better than it has any right to be, better than we could ever deserve. You can check shelter off the hierarchy of needs, the manger will suffice.

TRACK | Privacy Issues – Hold My Breath

5/5 golden merles

Privacy Issues’ self titled is some of the lo-est fi-est EP to come out of 2020, which is still relevant to us thanks to the nature of time progressing forward and rarely if ever backward, despite the desires of the regressive.

The guitar hooks interplay with that circular writing structure, everything guided by the minimal drumming, and all of this works alongside the very high quality vocal melodies.

It seems simple, but it isn’t. Or it is, but in the way that a diamond is simple: freely forming, found in dirt, but honed over millennia.

I bought the tape and I have no tape player. But someday maybe I will? Probably one can still be purchased from the goodwill for a few dollars and then fixed for a few dollars more.


TRACK | Hair Peace – Summertime

5/5 golden merles

In the bleak mid-winter, let’s dwell on sunnier times discussed and celebrated in Hair Peace’s Summertime, as featured on their 2014 Summer EP. It has a melody like radioactive molasses. It compels you to have faith in the youths. It reminds you that verses and choruses can coexist in peace, hair peace.

That I am the only individual who has purchased this item (from the Bandcamp page, at least), is a kind of crime against humanity. Some CDs were apparently available at Bloomington, IN’s, wonderful Landlocked music, where I spent a good deal of student loan money at their various locations one hundred years ago.

It was Schopenhauer who said “Man can do what he wants but not want what he wants.” OK, But you should want this EP. It’s good. Contract it today.


TRACK | Sibylle Baier – Tonight

5/5 golden merles

Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green was “Recorded in the early 70’s in her home on a reel to reel recording device,” then sat unreleased for 40-50 years.

It is with a profound sense of dread that you consider this and realize that this set of tracks was one of the lucky ones. That most things of this caliber are, if recorded at all, languishing in moldy basements, storage lockers and landfills.

These were things that played live in a community, maybe, a handful of times, then had no outlet. Songs that the corporate scouting and release structure had no use for on commercial grounds, in a culture plagued by products. Ads on, in , and bracketing all media, like cancer in the body, determining what lives and dies. As artists or creators we have a responsibility to mitigate or eliminate this if possible.

Which is why Bandcamp is such a fine platform and model to emulate. Perhaps it will be bought out and crushed eventually. But for now it is the very best option available.

TRACK | Mar – Mother of Broken Men

5/5 golden merles

Mar make excellent sludge metal and noise rock. This track is an aside, a kind of misrepresentative sampling of materials. But it is also my favorite track among many great ones and the one that fits best this kind of meandering assemblage of posts.

From John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards:

“There are no more secrets today than there were when Sun Tzu wrote. What we do have now is a worship of the idea of secrecy. The brief vogue of existentialism in the middle part of the twentieth century illustrates precisely what has happened. A philosophy which declares that people will be judged by their acts could not possibly survive in the West. (Instead) we believe that people are what they know and can be judged by their power; that is, by what they control. In a society based not upon action but upon systems, our place within the system determines our importance.

“The measure of our power is based upon the knowledge which either passes through our position or is produced by it. One of the truly curious characteristics of this society is that the individual can most easily exercise power by retaining the knowledge which is in his hands. Thus, he blocks the flow of paper or information or of instructions through his intersection to the next. And with only the smallest of efforts he can alter the information in a minor or major way. Abruptly he converts himself from a link into a barrier and demonstrates, if only to himself, his own existence.”

TRACK | Timber Timbre – Black Water

5/5 golden merles

Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Unless of course you’ve got some bleach, in which case sunshine can go screw.

This is a timeless track. Many distinct elements compile in concert, with great measure and purpose: horns, synthetic strings, a bass line that goads and simmers throughout.

There’s no reason to be afraid, technically. It probably won’t help. Unless the fear is a prerequisite to the release of adrenaline. Unless the body can’t administer this panic without adequate fear, a mere recognition of the danger insufficient to trigger the response.

TRACK | Coma Cinema – Satan Made a Mansion

5/5 golden merles

I don’t think anybody can in good faith argue with how good a line, “Satan made a mansion for love to live when it dies,” especially in the way it is casually uttered here, and considering its fine abbreviated state existing as both precursor and title.

Few and far between are such killer refrains.

And that is not yet to mention some of the best lo-ish-er-fi production this side of the infinite lapse.

You don’t need me to tell you whose fingerprints are on this one. I only wish I could do my influences this kind of fearless and forthright justice.