Category: bedroom

TRACK | Honey Radar – Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast

5/5 golden merles

“Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast” is a rich and winding series of simple melodies, woven into a shelter, the bringing together of scraps providing a place to return to. Like almost anything good and well thought of after, at a minute in length it is almost over before it’s begun.

The rasp of a drum clacks like the sound made by the spokes on the moon lander, or the rattle of the ice machine at the in-house café of Cape Canaveral. The bass is the alternate shadow realm variation of the surface dwelling dueling melody provided by the staggered vocal and lead guitar.

I am a firm proponent of the “start small and build things of significance” model of songwriting and this is a prime example. It is drenched in style and feels like a semi-conscious novella, a dream derived from the nap.

TRACK | Youth Lagoon – July

5/5 golden merles

Posted by 73 sites that come up on the Hype Machine, maybe the most of any I’ve seen? A hit from the golden age of blogging, no doubt. But none since 2013 and it is a track very much worthy of revisiting at the very least once in a decade.

It is another rarity of the epic/anthemic bridge connecting unexpectedly from the bedroom genre. Sparse but tempered synth and compelling, refractive vocal performance build in a few huddled layers to make something really effecting and outsized.

And all of this is derived from a tale of the eliding of love or its estimated proximation, the idea of yourself as an unreliable narrator, that which is unquantifiable, and, even when it appears to be, the relative nature of all experience. Also a couple of mega-hooks that hurtles about disrupting the orbit of any nearby planets for the purposes of accumulating a few minutes audience.

TRACK | Cate Le Bon – Puts Me To Work

5/5 golden merles

For my tastes and cultural conditioning, Cate Le Bon is one of the very best songwriters of the common era. We were raised in a relatively similar media swamps, with a few contorted icons on columns rising either side of the Atlantic, propped up by corporate speculation on prospective idolization.

Aside from some worthy ziggurats that punctuate the vista, inescapably, for all to admire or despise, there was a dearth. Subsequently, when these no longer inspired awe or became default elements of the horizon, we ventured out to scavenge from similar ruins.

And in this way she’s built her own effigy, ransacking and extracting, compiling traits over decades of accumulate influence and experimentation.

There’s only so much refining you can do. Looking in a mirror long enough, like repeating a word too many times, deprives it of its meaning. But here, on Cyrk, in the early days, the likeness is not terribly dissimilar to the antediluvian predecessors and the shared idols, but nevertheless still distinct. The track’s a melodic and collagist weaving, with much splendor to its magisterial superfluidity. We’re lucky to have the records.

TRACK | Perpetual Ritual – Perpetual Flood

5/5 golden merles

Seattle’s Perpetual Ritual have made a track of grinding gears and muted fireworks. A death rattle of a drumkit keeps the tempo for the mélange of blur and buzz.

Two rhythm guitars sit on either side of the channels and simulate the flood in all its perpetuity. The geographic configuration alters, leaving the deluge and a first-hand tale of adaptation for those that remain to hear and tell it.

The myths don’t do it justice; all the tired misinterpretations of nature’s intentions. It happened and here is the evidence, ready to be passed down and mangled and misread.

Temporarily, anyway. Until the Bandcamp servers rust or are willfully redacted. And the WordPress isn’t renewed for lack of funds. And the Wayback Machine shutters, and the google cache expires. And all the digital foundations that seemed fairly sturdy for a generation cruelly wash the thing away again.

But for a couple more minutes or years you can hear it on the Skrot Up page just over yonder.

TRACK | dead katz – Acid Ocean

5/5 golden merles

dead katz “Acid Ocean” feels like the quiet rumbling of indentations bound for the indelible. We know, coming from an era of great greed that lacks any consequence, preventative care is always more effective than recuperative, or reliance on technologies yet invented, or the belated panic-trauma of a last ditch surgery.

But what of matters beyond the body, when the size and scope are systems beyond our individual or (apparently) collective addressing? –When you only have the knowledge of what’s coming with no capacity for redressing this grievance?

The track has a metaphorical appreciation for waves and regard for the intention of other waves, spilling forward, falling backward. Somewhere in the ebbing and flowing, quite quickly you’re bound to lose track, there is always a rushing and the cause is not known. If we can’t take care of one another, what chance does the collective species have. It reminds me of the introduction written by Czelaw Milosz for Kudelka’s Exiles:

“Rhythm is at the core of human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and diastoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.“

“…An old anecdote about a refugee in a travel agency has not lost its bite: a refugee from war-torn Europe, undecided as to what continent and what state would be far off enough and safe enough, for a while was pensively turning a globe with his finger, then asked, ‘don’t you have something else?'”

TRACK | The Whines – Take Care of Yourself

5/5 golden merles

From Portland and off The Whines/Burning Yellows split of 2013, “Take Care of Yourself” is a haze of poignant concerns, fretful hooks and rock conveyed in a state of half combustion.

The song contains the kind of nuance and knowing one throws at another only indirectly, say in a song, for example. It is full of fundamentals, calculated decay and proactive ambivalence; much nuance and much heart.

The beseeching or bereaved refrain is a hook itself, among many. Balanced and imploring, the track is a tined and canny document. We’ve all been hit with worse.

TRACK | FLOWERTOWN – RCP

5/5 golden merles

After hearing some of my own particularly subdued songs a friend of mine once told me that music “was allowed” to have melodrama.

And while that is true and a good, generally speaking I still feel that subtlety is underrated. Or that its intentional utilization opens up avenues for other elements to be exposed or focused upon.

The understated can enhance the periphery, operating as its own aesthetic that presents but does not undercut or distract from a greater text or subtext. In this way the work is allowed to fold back on itself, and, in that muted intentional consistency, acts in elevating the emotional impact further.

The works of Yorgos Lanthimos in film work in this way. All characters assume a subdued, detached delivery and the resonance elaborates from small fluctuations within this new scale of framing. Small vibrations in feeling and action take on monumental significance. The contrast unveils and heightens that which would otherwise be at least partially obscured or overshadowed.

Subtraction is sometimes addition where perception is concerned. FLOWERTOWN’s “RCP” is working in a similar way. The idiosyncratic phrasing, creeping and cooing, in either variant of the spectral dual vocals, favors the subterranean, glacial structure of the track. The focus is shifted in an illuminating manner. It’s done with great craft all throughout the Theresa Street EP.

TRACK | Grayson Hamm – Wasted Days

5/5 golden merles

Some nights I dream too loud.

“Wasted Days” is a particularly dreamy track concerning how one goes about parsing and processing time which is considered carelessly or poorly spent.

The production summons a form of much delicate weaving and luster. Concurrent piano and guitar drawl in subdued elaboration, insulating the reverie. Intricately overlaid, wending the way forward, each instrument aligns sequentially and percussively without tangling.

The central thesis of the song concerns the totality of experience: taking the good with the bad and recognizing them as two pieces of a greater, inextricable whole. That all happenings accumulate, the exact origins of influence are not known, and our choice of actions after the cumulative events can always contort fate to good.

It’s a lovely track full of treble and tremble, bearing much quiet resolve and confirmation of agency.

TRACK | Lower Dens – Truss Me

5/5 golden merles

“Truss me” is an striking track from the recently disbanded Lower Dens; Contemplative and conspiring, a couple minimalistic elements combine to be nonetheless eruptive and properly expansive in their crushing scope.

With an optimal blend of inevitability, desire and consternation, there remains a quiet confidence to the work, blurring the line between promise and threat; or maybe it is made of either in equal measure.

This is another in the series of elevated lyrical nuance within a more traditional pop-structure, raising the stakes of the genre and embracing contradiction. There is much doubt and deference paid to a richness of experience that often seems absent from more absolutist testaments within the medium. There is within it the hope that we can attempt to properly incorporate uncertainty into our model, acknowledge both its potential and liability, but continue to engage with the world.

I also have a kinship with Lower Dens as they are one of the few artists/media figures explicitly paying homage to the wonderful/relevant works of Ernest Becker (“Escape from Evil“).

TRACK | Keel Her – Deadly Nightshade

5/5 golden merles

Keeler-Schaffeler makes often lo-fi, always a bit experimental rock and keyboard pop music. Keel Her’s tracks are dreamlike, gauzy forces and a recurring presence on mixes I’ve slung at friends over the last decade.

Previously I’d intended to feature the “Almost Finished (My Life)” demo variant but it had vanished from the readily linkable archives. Nevertheless, there is much other good in the prolific demo-ing and reimagining at the project’s bandcamp.

The “Deadly Nightshade” version listed above is again the demo or at least earlier, nascent form of the track. The track is composed of a grainy recitation of instruction over hazy layers of synth and folded tones, much luster, much refracting, and what seems an approximation of an ambulance. There exists another variation on a later album which is also strong, and which ads a bit of coherency to the vocalizations.