Category: dream pop

TRACK | Alas de Liona – Violet

5/5 golden merles

Art more than anything I know allows for the contorting of bad fate to good. A negative occurrence, through studied observation and documentation, can be subverted from a collapsed, crushing roofbeam into a fundamental pillar of support, so long as you don’t give the last word to god or coincidence or whatever. The universe tends toward entropy, but we are the arbiter of whether or not it succeeds.

Alas de Liona’s excellent indie pop track “Violet” reminds me of this sardonic repartee regarding nightmares: “Don’t worry. You were just having a bad dream. Heavily influenced by your nightmarish life.”

The lyricism present is rigorously bound to the melody but doesn’t suffer from it: “Victorious,” “Curious” (in the sense of unusual/of interest), “lamplight,” and the dream-based staircase ascent all hold a kind of balance between minimalism and tactically elaborated grandeur.

The non-lexical ligatures/ligaments give binding and body to what would otherwise be more ephemeral, negative space. It can also act as a symbolic representation of the quasi-coherent language of the dream, if you like. In either case, it’s a really fine melodic and semi-percussive foundation for the work, and a rewarding, chimeric balance of design and function.

There are several points in the production in which an abrupt fade or swell emerges, synth & orchestral, and that variance is well designed to distinguish segments amidst the steady delivering of the melodic spell. That intermittent puncture adds depth to the form that might otherwise go unnoticed or implied but invisible. It is not employed enough in most other production in the name of uniformity, cohesion, or some such vile and compromised thinking.

Lu Xun wrote that “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.” The cataloging of the event makes a map and the map becomes a shared experience. The map makes walking in the woods a joy instead of certain death.

It’s a strong track of lofty hooks, offering commiseration and mapping out subconscious space you didn’t know you shared. I am morally obligated not to link to spotify, but please see the soundcloud above, youtube video, or follow on bandcamp for more.

TRACK | Sandy Pylos – La Modelo De Mis Fantasias

5/5 golden merles

Sandy Pylos is the psych/power pop project of Portland-based Paraguayan multi-instrumentalist Ana Belén. It is bedroom synthpop undeniably stacked with invention and melodic charm. Eschewing all manner of kitsch that plagues the genre, Belén allows wonder and devotion to manifest in a genuinely thoughtful and compelling account, all delivered to you inside a series of superb hooks. “La Modelo De Mis Fantasias” is the lead single off of the debut album, Notas de Voz. It is what pop music can sometimes be at it’s best: experimental, cunning & heartfelt.

There are aspects to the lyric and phrasing that are similar to the routes Dig Nitty or The Cowboys might take: language singularly formed, freshly dispatching the burden of invention, defiantly in search of the feeling but actively allergic to established routes. These turns and extrapolations tweak the universal and better reinforce the narrative, offering the listener the opportunity of discovering new paths between two points of familiar earth. The question is put to us by proxy: “Have you ever even been on a giant slide?”

In “La Modelo De Mis Fantasias” the chorus is given the right amount of time to wind its recursive variants: first as anthemic refrain, then reappearing within a field recorded rendition of writing or reciting, finally, later, among other elements, it emerges in a distinctly stripped-down acoustic version that ushers in the end. The duplication reaffirms the sentiment. Its inclusion seems to offer a glimpse of love expressed at other angles, the melody fluctuating with time and suiting evolving exterior circumstance. Arrangements morph, time passes, but the obsessive dedication nonetheless remains transfixed, an ever-present undercurrent and preoccupation. Witnessing that reification is as fun as it is compelling and enriching.

There’s plenty to admire in the works constituent parts, harmonizations and percussive fills. But simply dissecting the organs and putting them back together would miss the point. Whereas most creatives infatuated with 60s/psych rock might offer earnest but antiseptic covers and fine enough tributes, the great power and grace of this EP is reinterpreting particular methods in the pursuit of impact. It is assured and realized, utilizing what still works and subverting the rest. It is the difference between mimicry and mastery.

It is good when so very many things are not. Tapes are $8.00, mp3s/wav $5.

TRACK | Jason Hill – They Like Me, They Love Me

5/5 golden merles

Experimental LA pop rock from Jason Hill, “They Like Me, They Love Me” is a dreamy and delicately disoriented tune. Lyrically ponderous, an obsessive narrative yarn is delivered concerning personal presentation and the series stories that ultimately construct the self. The tale is told over some faded percussive gears and accented with a richly detailed accompaniment that allows the 4:45 runtime to feel positively tight. There’s a lot of pretty shimmer coinciding with the dreary divulging, everything broken up in an intriguing elaboration.

The tune has rightly captured the feel of an interrogation, including the competing of illusions and a progressively faltering devotion to a lie. A cello punctuates the middle movements as the rhythm guitar sways across the soundscape, dancing by itself on the periphery. Vocal layers clamber along the octaves, corroborating in the chorus half the time, probably contradicting elsewhere. All of that lumbers harmoniously along, graceful enough to warrant further study.

There’s a great warm wrath to it, derived from fermented fog and bottled in. The track was featured in Netflix’s The Confession Killer and written from the perspective of Henry Lee Lucas, “once suspected to be the biggest serial killer of all time but was really just a serial liar.” It stands up on its own, the wilted and creaking confessional, but you get the feeling there’s further illumination in the coupling of these spectacles. What’s the harm in hearing what they have to say?

TRACK | Frankie Traandruppel – Ocean Song (featuring bontridders)

5/5 golden merles

We previously celebrated Frankie Traandruppel’s timeless “The Darkness (Comes to town),” and on the strength of that track I am obligated to consider anything else he’s putting forward. On Yadda Yadda the most effective track is the collaboration and closer, “Ocean Song,” featuring Anderlecht’s bontridders. It’s something like unreckonable lo-fi bedroom rock stained with texture and tonal radiance.

The track is warm and refractive, a brightly self-contained geode of a tune. In it the plaintive gliding vocal scales the percussive friction of a looping synth-string sample and the steady bloom of the rhythm guitar. It’s a lot bigger than the sum of these crassly cataloged parts, concave, immense and foggy around the edges of the glittering expanse. For a sense of scale you can, for instance, pretty happily live and die in it.

It motions to you from the beach. It’s intentions aren’t clear but the attention is enough. Music is a tool that can be used for many different things. I don’t know what it does but it seems useful. Yadda Yadda is out now on Ronny Rex for the low, low cost of making up a number.

TRACK | Leoni Leoni – If there is Magic it is made in your Womb

5/5 golden merles

Starry and skeletal with a rich contemplative warp, “If there is Magic it is made in your Womb” is a strain of diy lo-fi ambient synth-pop. Neither orthogonal nor evil, the price of the piercing is being held together around the hole after. There are concerns expressed and they are catchy, lots to empathize with in speculative and instructive the utterances.

There is a command not to misunderstand. Winter crumbles away, summer is a stain left from dust; the only constant is change. The percussive instrumentation is in a sort of sequence within the sickly gunk of time, by which we are affixed to this or any given era. The rhythm is the minimal rate by which we must claw through it to get anywhere at a respectable pace, or before it’s too late.

Anyway, it’s skirting the edges of eternity. Anyway, seen from above it resembles a gulch filled with jello and paved over, gauged and assuaged. There is vinyl available from Les Disques Bongo Joe in Geneva, black for €18 & white for €20.

TRACK | Goon – Angelnumber 1210

5/5 golden merles

Los Angeles’ Goon has delivered to us more hypnotically drifting, catastrophe cooing psych rock. The band is in a unique place, confidently contorting melodies and multifaceted textures around otherworldly tales. There’s much care and craft to its interlocking layers and marbled phasing.

From the first moments of the field recordings discordant rumble, then the turning into a steady spine of percussion, it carries itself forward into being with great assurance. The piece feels sculptural and fills the audible void by pushing in many directions. There’s plenty of subtle sequences and attention to detail, each caringly extracted from the aether and melded into the elaborated structure.

The language is casually cryptic or explicitly ambiguous: environmental, a gathering, on earth, belated or in dream. The point is the feeling and the sense of collaborating within a stunning phenomenon and in a world of possibility.

The vinyl is delayed a few months from shipping due to manufacturing shortages but there are digital, tapes, and assorted articles of clothing if you would like to affiliate your physical body with their audible output, all coordinated at the bandcamp.

TRACK | Cobra Man – Living in Hell

5/5 golden merles

“Living in Hell” is synth pop / electro-punk with a great sense of fantastical demiurge. It’s anthemic and apocalyptical, with a chorus that must redeem any perceived trespasses or misgivings punk purists might have about the synthesis of style. They’re expertly balancing a heightened humor and horror around two premier vocal performances, joyfully heralding our ongoing collapse.

In the dark times will there also be power disco? Can directly 80’s influenced music become self-aware and not have this result in the destruction of the world? Who cares. It’s a lot of fun. There’s a good mix of disco feinting at egg punk/devocore and all as a means to an end, all in the service of melody and evocation. Initially I was a bit put-off by the grandiosity and refinement. But it’s just too damn good. It rises to include those heightened elements while maintaining a palpable sense of impending dread that best embodies the cultural moment.

Spiritually a bit akin to recent p&p favorites LAFFF BOX, Cupid And The Stupids, –or any of the yolkier punks. The new 2022 Demos III from July are real exciting as well.

TRACK | Mo Troper – I Fall Into Her Arms

5/5 golden merles

Mo Troper is returned with another fully fledged set of lo-fi power pop aches. The warp is strong and the warble can be counted on with lead single “I Fall Into Her Arms.” It plumbs the murky depths of the duality of love, wherein the dichotomy of finding true acceptance is considered: now i’m not afraid to die / now i wanna stay alive.

Flame and fuzz provide the context. Timelessly, the plasticine vocal core glides above the static and soft room ambiance, imparting to me, subjectively, as a different human, a feeling of ambivalence despite the explicit text affixed above. The track delivers on capturing that particular sort of hopefulness and queasiness, the kind that comes from ever really considering anything at length, weighing the opportunity costs of the leap, and committing to the bit of existence. But also ultimately coming down on the side of the earnest and heartfelt as the only proper guide amidst the chaos and malaise.

The full document drops into our laps on the 2nd day of September and Violet/Violet swirl versions of the vinyl exist with some fun perks on the Lame-O Records storefront.

TRACK | All Saints Day – It’ll Come Around

5/5 golden merles

“It’ll Come Around” is soaring but densely knotted dream pop, shimmering and shoegazing with an acoustic rumbling as the engine beneath. The lead vocals are provided by Vivian Girls/La Sera’s Katy Goodman, who has always been juxtaposing DIY aesthetic and the acutely anthemic. It’s well calibrated and the great resonance is in the balance of its dissonance.

The intention is direct effectiveness not the comforting simulacra of it. The snare drum snaps drifting centrally above the nested snarl. The synths claw a path forward. As one who feels like writing is at least partially the evasion of your own boredom of repetition, I am somewhat resentful of the resilience to remain within that loop and alter only slightly, coming up for breath in the bridge or verse variance amidst so much crushing chorus — and yet still have it work forcefully.

There are black and red versions of the single (along with similarly great “Only Time Will Tell”).

TRACK | Cindy Lee – I Don’t Want To Fall In Love Again

5/5 golden merles

“I Don’t Want To Fall In Love Again” is yet more Flegel, one of the great living builders of audible notes in aether. Sparkling, it is lo-fi rock with some experimental aspects. There is Reverb, tremolo and the metallic ash of drums, their coordinates coalescing in improbable simplicity and phases.

The work is well modified tradition, timeless infliction of temporality and texture. Not waiting, but hesitating at the start, the world holds off for about a minute, collecting itself prior to forming, knowing all that entails. Deceptively simple, attuned to the eternal, in so far as I understand it within our shared cultural conditioning, in the relative terms of our existence.

What Flegel has done throughout, in Women and Cindy Lee, is forge the familiar with the foreign, survey the zeitgeist and collective comprehension and reflect it back in a manner that is uniquely compelling, catchy and memorable. That’s what any artist is doing, to some extent: building out from the established, branching as far as is possible. But this is a level of fluency that speaks with uncanny accuracy and conviction. It’s good and to be admired.