Category: bedroom

TRACK | Simon Joyner – Joy Division

5/5 golden merles

Shattered in the heart and scattered in the brain... you asked for a chorus but you got a refrain.

Such is the quality of the storytelling that I’m hearing it for the some-hundredth time and still unearthing new lines or implications within couplets.

It probably gets a bit tiring being called a songwriter’s songwriter. But I have no time and I refuse to look into it. It’s a great compliment. Please just take the compliment, Simon.

The track is full of wonder, much compelling musing and brooding. It hosts a novella of characters conveyed in rapid sequence, their dialogs interleaved and exposed in momentary visions. The pastiche is formed from a scattershot of misgivings, commiserations granted a ceremonial quality, and articulated in a structured sequence that captures a larger feeling chronically an era of impressions. The thread is maintained in a consistent tone from a narrator that endears throughout by the beauty of his phrasing.

It is a testament. And it is beautifully balanced to captivate. If it wasn’t immediately apparent from the tremolo and distortion off that early strumming, when the instrumentation hits around the four minute mark, and the wailing rises to meet it, there is created a small clearing. You can escape for a couple minutes into it.

TRACK | Tender Prey – Time Will Steal

5/5 golden merles

“Time Will Steal” is some foreboding and explosive Welsh garage pop from Cardiff-based Tender Prey. Echoing and incisive, it’s part incantation, part tempestuous alt-rock anthem.

The track really feels as though it was recorded at the ideal moment: somewhere nearing the end of the creative refinement but before the melodies stales from performance and repetition. The result is some soaring and mesmeric lo-fi rock.

The ephemeral and forceful vocal core, it’s delivery and production, is formidable. When the refrain hits and the gears shift again, interleaved harmonies coalesce and something good becomes great.

For more check out the Bandcamp for Tender Prey’s additional EPs and LPs, including the 2017 release “Falling Off Chairs.”

TRACK | Ricky Eat Acid – april six

5/5 golden merles

“April Six” is my favorite of a very fine set of tracks, more instrumental material of imminently lovely proportion from Ricky Eat Acid (Aka Sam Ray).

I’m a month (and a decade) behind posting this empirical wonder here in March ’22, but the piece feels to me like a pretty fair embodiment of spring (What year? Every year. Get out): a fragility of form, but resolute and more or less eternal.

There is documenting here the capturing of ‘becoming’ as a measure of being. It feels simultaneously like an end and a beginning. That is likely what all art should hold a bit of, the acknowledgement of phases: more ambiguity, more uncertainty, more transitory; that which appears to be paying respect to change.

The collision of time with tone and whatever runoff makes its way along the sluice onto the tape. Anyway, it’s quite pretty and you can take it however you like at whatever price seems fair.

TRACK | Household – Phases

5/5 golden merles

I am very happy to pay tribute to the minimalist post-punk of Household’s “Phases” every time the shuffling god demands it. In the rumbling and rancor, there is also a kind of courtesy in its blunted cutting.

this is no accident / it’s never yielding fate
rationalize my friend / but it is far too late

A small, honed document of some devastation, the designated point at which two trajectories were changed from alignment. Not ending in undue harm, but an extraction.

There is undoubtedly a bit buoyancy in the blood feud, the mutual respect to at least document the severance. To take its significance and repurpose it into a new beginning. And an explanation provided before the exodus; the point of a breach and breaking as an amelioration. I do love these tracks that in this processing can be seen demonstrably contorting the bad to good.

TRACK | Mount Eerie – Voice in Headphones

5/5 golden merles

Julie Doiron (Eric’s Trip) and Phil Elverum (The Microphones) collaborate in this nocturnal, potable mantra of a track. The harmonies here are special and good. The content balanced across that form (“It’s not meant to be a struggle, up hill”), recurrent and reaffirming, is about as close to some therapeutic advising you’ll get in America without a silver spoon to exchange.

I saw Phil Elverum (as Mount Eerie) play in a high school gym somewhere I think in southern Indiana. I don’t remember when, but it was during or shortly after college, maybe 2005-8. Nobody I knew wanted to go but I was hopelessly invested in The Glow Pt. 2. He sat on a metal folding chair or stood in the middle of the basketball court and played a lot of songs I didn’t know. But they were good, kind, inspiring things.

I am most familiar with Julie Doiron from 2009’s tremendously heartfelt and forged I Can Wonder What You Did with Your Day. I’ll write about that later, at least one of the tracks. To my not immodest discredit, I haven’t listened to much Eric’s Trip, but look forward to doing so.

TRACK | Graffiti Welfare – Just Follow

5/5 golden merles

“Just Follow” is a track derived from five years of work, culminating in the experimental electronic pop album Revolving Shores. The song acts as a recollection that is demonstrative, a lesson or how-to on keeping pace with altered states; it is drenched in synths, wringing dry the experience.

The song is described by its author, Denver’s Graffiti Welfare, as documenting a “moment of post-anxiety clarity regarding the path ahead.” In the coiled nest of tincture and texture, there is established this great sense of the amalgamated emotional space and the varied pathways from which to emerge.

Vaporous and contracting, the instrumentation rappels about the vocal core, vividly revealing an accessible point of egress. Just follow the stream / floating away.

There is an element of proactive panic to the track, even as it proffers a guide for next time. It is a spectacle of the traditionally unsung, something normally weathered and, once cleared, neglected. But here we have some aureate instruction. In the aftermath of the duress, there is a managed focus on the reprieve ahead: a welcome reassurance that this too shall pass.

TRACK | The Lentils – some people sure can leave a mark

5/5 golden merles

I am a fan of The Lentils and think Luke Csehak is one of the best songwriters working in the cesspool of innovation that is our common era. “Some people sure can leave a mark” is a track of great ambivalence, ruminating and rejoicing in the navigation of interpersonal alternate timelines, and of acceptance for the one we find ourselves enduring.

I would settle for being kind to myself / and just once deny the idol of my regrets

The track balances the interlocking plucking and melodic spirals well with the focused yet expansive subject matter. And the depths of the topic are sufficiently plumbed: the outsized influences of some brief instances and acquaintances, influential hinge points of inflection at which dramatic alternate directions might have been taken. There’s extensive scrutiny in the musings and the introspection is finely honed.

TRACK | Sam Stansfield – creeps are out

5/5 golden merles

Carefully constructed and richly arranged, Extreme Falcon is a proper album in a manner of speaking. It is also a good lesson on how to take your influences as seeds and how to use them to grow a hybrid vision of a new, compelling world.

There is a different quality to art you not only admire but wish you had made. The warmth of the world-building within the storytelling and the crystalline structures of favorably overlapping tones, it all come across as a place well observed and conceptually rendered. Minimal elements merge together, often subdued or absent of drums but never seeming to lack a solid foundation or structure, legibly blurred and blossoming.

To put it in a kind of context that roughly approximates lineage, there are somewhat similar guts and graces to projects like Guided by Voices, The Microphones/Mount Eerie, and Julie Doiron. My favorite sequence runs tracks 7 through 9, “creeps are out,” “lazer tang,” and “company car.” The arrangement feels not unlike the honor of being forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. The luckiest of all resolutions.

I recently read that ~90% of Sumerian/cuneiform tablets have yet to be translated. Most appear to be related to basic business or home accounting, but many are journals, myths, histories… It would be nice if future archeologists surveying the muck of the geological record could favor such things that seem to easily contain within them relatable and self-contained multitudes. Black or Turquois vinyl available on Slick Rock Records.

TRACK | Jessica Lea Mayfield – Standing in the Sun

5/5 golden merles

I am occasionally susceptible to bouts of optimism. They afflict even the best of us from time to time. And within these moments I am vulnerable to the influence of works of art that seem to represent this rosier outlook… at least as long as the craft rises to meet the exposition and there is an undercurrent of tenable fallibility or impending collapse.

I would like to see you live / not survive but really live

My first exposure to this excellent album/track was during Mayfield’s 2014 Tiny Desk Concert. Brutal and succinct turns of phrases glide over the accomplished melodic core. Slight alterations or additions keep pace with and expand out from the traditional foundation. There are more than a few layers, the combined attributes of which are getting at something.

“Not survive but really live,” it bears repeating. What a sentiment and phrasing perfectly fit for modern America, in which the living reproach of daily life dehumanizes and deprives of dignity so thoroughly, framing every proposed alternative as by default worthy of consideration.

It almost begins to break you from that spell itself, and starts to expand the realm of the possible. To utter it, at least, is the first step. Both a positive gesture and an act to set us on the path of the gauntlet ahead.

The song embodies the personal struggle within the systemic. Our institutions mirror our infrastructure. At a certain point you stop rebuilding the same flawed, failed blueprints from the same rubble, take what components you can use, and attempt to build something better.

TRACK | Paper Lady – EVE

5/5 golden merles

With much cool and cutting tone about its meteoric structure, “EVE” is a new dream pop / freak folk single from Allston Mass.’ Paper Lady. In it the tale of Eden and the subsequent expulsion is told from Eve’s perspective.

All these fables were pruned and bludgeoned a hundred times after their invention, in translation, misremembrance or intentional contortion, before later stagnating in the evidentiary locker of print and given the illusion of hallowed perpetuity.

The generally agreed upon narrative by authorities features an array of unjust hierarchies ripe for reassessing. The track provides one entry toward a well overdue investment of agency, and with enough style and conviction for a convincing telling. Deft and deliberate, its value is in the considered application of defiance, the stylistic glint and gale of the production, and the inherent virtue of unlearning the lie.

There is much great attention to detail in the production, piercing synth and strings along with carefully incorporated chirps of birdsong in the field recorded elements. An expertly phased and delivered vocal hard cap lands and the end of the verses like lightning and leaves you in an unanticipated sort of awe.

Its lineage is situated in the pantheon of rich parables and commiserations. In both the storytelling and tones the track is reminiscent of some greats within the folk rock genres like Diane Cluck, Townes Van Zandt, and Amy Annelle. There is the feeling of a prairie reframed through the grand metaphor, or a woodland cracked from the frame and wound around your finger.

There are available to us innumerable lies primed for decoding. If we’re going to continue living in these myths, the culture must be malleable. The track provides a good example of the ongoing negotiations resultant from our declining tolerance for the sheer brutality of the world and all its flagrant hypocrisy and pretense. It is a small but welcome offer of a course correction.