Category: experimental

TRACK | Prison Affair – Nice Guys

5/5 golden merles

Spanish lo-fi texture god-ghouls, Prison Affair return with Demo III, a slick and bountiful repeater. Top tier sludge and melody worship, it is both sickly and perpetually fun.

The aesthetic sense is something akin to reliably nailing Jell-O/jelly/ectoplasm to the wall; take your pick. Hard to quantify and deceptively simple, spatially ingenious, modestly amuck stuff.

The excited and concurrent release among the lo dash fi pipeline was impressive, dropping last month across Tremendo Garaje, Harakiri Diat, and tagoschlucam, among others, to much outpouring of love. They are highly consistent and rightfully flourishing, short and detailed tracks hyper focused on quality over quantity yet regularly uploading great sets of EPs/demos.

TRACK | Times New Viking – Half Day In Hell

5/5 golden merles

With the proper balance of muck and bile, “Half Day In Hell” conspires to deliver noise pop rock with great wrath and fission. In this base of static hum, no melody is sacrificed to the texture but heightened by it.

Not exactly discordant, it is raised to extremes of saturation with very modest deterioration to melodic intent. Elliott and Murphy trade vocals in the haze, refining the wavelengths. It’s the best produced thing I have listened to (revisited) in ages.

After the last week of inconsequential societal response into a myriad horrors, lines like “we will stay forever for a week,” “we have done all that we can do,” “and don’t agree on what to do just to kill time,” and “we couldn’t come together even if we tried,” land a little bit differently, arbitrarily recontextualized to the present in the constant mire of all that is. But these statements remain vaguely stated enough to interpretively address any given scope of social incongruity.

It is modestly miraculous, full of fine trepidation, not reliant on habits and precedent but reaching in its forms to match the emotion and intention. It feels refined but natural and that is a bit freeing. Often when this path is followed it leads into greater abstraction that discounts melody and a greater loss of coherence. Which is fine, but needn’t be the case. Finding that balance is powerful and admirable.

TRACK | Tawings – Listerine

5/5 golden merles

Post-punk/pop from Japan, Tawings sculpt tunes that blend various rock influences minimalistically but with much warble and precision. The instrumentation shakes and severs, fitful and concerted, to great, elaborated result.

With “Listerine” particularly the track is paced in a sophisticated lurch, with many flourishes punctuating the soundscape.

The internal logic of the tactful ornamentation locks decisively around the steady bass and drum foundation. The phrasing and lyricism is agile throughout, happy to fall apart, but prevailing in the act, composed and resolute.

Unique and fun, the vinyl is available for about ~$35 including the shipping from Japan on the bandcamp. There’s also a super cool looking partially clear/cutout case for the single version, but so far no availability on the Discogs.

TRACK | Christian Fitness – Kill the Bored

5/5 golden merles

Finding a bit of humor in the proverbial hemorrhage, Christian Fitness is equipped to reframe the general malaise in a way that may bring you amusement. Striking synths and string-approximations hammer tones into shapely assemblages, with much invention in the language, its phrasing of fine hooks.

Would you say you are a timebomb ticking / or just a normal person dealing badly with change?

There’s a great deal of care put into the honing of textures and lines. Blatantly tactful, manifesting the mess but with levity, it’s truly a nice state of mind to get trapped in. Not a band I know well. It didn’t stick on first exposure but the tab was still open in the rancid nest of endless windows, and now I realize I’m about a 100 tracks behind on something quite special and good.

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 | Ganglians – Hair

5/5 golden merles

Ganglians’ “Hair” is an experimental pop rock track that is both burnishing and brandishing the light. It is a celebration of style and form, embodying a rush and bounding, and the hail of dust and ash as one in motion unsettles the earth.

There’s a kind of sublime sense of movement that rallies quickly into stride, pivoting proximal at the mutations of the landscape.

Torrents of yelp and drum collide in sequence, and it’s a lot of fun; mostly joyous, largely incoherent. It is something I would imagine Karl Meltzer listening to while breaking the Appalachian Trail record on a diet of candy and beer.

It can be acquired for a reasonable price in the physical form, though the bandcamp no longer appears to exist, if it ever did. Or get the s/t 12″ new directly from the good folks at Woodsist.

TRACK | Women – Eyesore

5/5 golden merles

“Eyesore” is a clinic on texture and tone. The track is a How-to with respect to texturing a track so well that you don’t need a proper hook to emerge until 4 minutes in. Once it lands it can only be extracted surgically.

There is so much more room for experimentation in pop/rock that can venture into new territory and yet remain catchy and instantly resonate. Women were comfortable operating within this space. The album itself and the ST before it are legendary stuff, and so is the continued work by Flegel under Cindy Lee.

I’ve written on “Heavy Metal” here, as “pretty captivating, and contorts the space of any room into which it is freed.” A sentence I don’t remember writing but am very happy to find here, reminding me that sometimes articulation happens and it isn’t just incoherent rambling, desperately melting down thesauri and clumsily reconstituting them.

TRACK | Fievel is Glauque – Bring Me to Silence

5/5 golden merles

Gods Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess is a devastatingly catchy 2021 jazz/rock/pop album soon to be reissued on vinyl through Kit Records. There is revealed within great creative invention and problem solving, keeping each moment imaginative and alive. It’s coalescing on a variety of levels and by each player, in the language/phrasing and all across the individual contributions from the accompanying instrumentation.

What’s the use of blowing flutes / at a mad hyena on attack?

For example, lines like this are landing particularly effectively here after this week of craven madness, in which evangelical regressives attempt to drag our localized civilization back into a pit we’ve only very recently scaled. But there are many like it throughout: scathing, soothing, thermal, the echo of something that was extant at the time of recording.

And without a doubt part of the goodness of what has been captured is the live energy of the room: the resonance of the moment, the throat clearing, an ambiance of the instrumentation played by humans and within an inhabited space. The document is direct. There is a record of the proximity of its performers, their audible range on an orb rotating in orbit at 460 meters per second, and the device engineered to faithfully replicate it.

An uneasy international coalition of postal service’s willing, I will at some point in the not too distant future be one of the 300 owners of this limited run vinyl ring in which the album is imprinted. Purchase through Kit or the bandcamp.

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 | Brian Eno – Here Come the Warm Jets

5/5 golden merles

“Here Come The Warm Jets” is all about phases, pacing, and a stupidly rich pallet of textures. It is discordant in intriguing ways, none of which dissolve that core melody entirely, but instead provide it with a shine and sheen to reflect back off of.

The core is always intact and remains there as a life preserver. The drums appear to drip out of the lead riff. The late vocalizations offering an alternative vision of how the track can proceed toward the end of its coursing, slightly warped and nuanced.

Mr. Eno knows a bit about introducing variance to keep things fresh and focused. Big but it is worth celebrating. Known but not often revisited. It hasn’t appeared on the Hype machine since 2011, and even then as a remix, OK? When was the last time you sat down and listened to it?