Category: Folk

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 | 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 | Hand Habits – Flower Glass

5/5 golden merles

“Flower Glass” is a work of not insignificant insight. The reliable and relatable lines pour out of the track, with inventive pacing and distinction, at the normal wartime speed of something under 20 kilometers an hour.

My first exposure to the album was walking into an ACLU/Planned Parenthood benefit mid-way through Hand Habit’s opening set, the crowd rapt in silence, as this track was played. Lots of good was seen that night from Van Etten, Beirut, Rossen, Morby, et al. But with distinction that moment is set apart in the gray matter.

Apparently there is a great breadth of material that has been written and recorded since this time. I have to catch up on Hand Habits releases from Sub Pop, Saddle Creek and a collaborative album featuring Angel Olsen composed of variations on the track “wildfire,” and donating the proceeds to the Amazon Conservation Association. There’s a lot I have missed and I am so far behind.

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.

TRACK | Magic Potion – Deep Web

5/5 golden merles

From 2015’s Melt EP, “Deep Web” is composed of alt-pop and lo-fi form, all crust and quiet conviction. Effortlessly injected through the sluice of any standard issue headphones, the tremolo and echo phase about in their own time, kindly warping by its recollecting whatever it reverberates around.

After the Geiger counter count us off, the track is calmly plodding and delicately estranged. Without ornamentation it’s baldness quickly assuages any initial threat of alienation and welcomes you into this amicably mangled realm.

Sold out on the Bandcamp beyond the infinitely affordable digital form, the Beech Coma cassette tape can still be found on Discogs.

TRACK | The Shivas – Beach Heads

5/5 golden merles

“Beach Heads” is a track both levitating in a vacuum and yet bound to the surf. The breadth of it’s soundscape is the width of radius between the earths crust and the outer exosphere.

With most tracks you’re lucky if you make it within a country mile of the mesosphere. Meanwhile this tune is demonstrably adrift, both pristine and coated in sand.

For the first minute exactly there is nothing but the ba’s. And they’re very fine ba’s at that, probably the finest since Ben Kweller fell through that very same aether packed envelope in the year 2000.

The views that are expressed thereafter appear to embrace uncertainty, a kind of doubt that is plotted on the horseshoe of future expectations somewhere between enlightenment and resignation. Time is rapidly expiring but panic won’t help. Calmly survey the expanse for some kind of clue as how to proceed.

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 | Dick Diver – Keno

5/5 golden merles

Dick Diver’s “Keno” contains some heartbreak, a lot of precision of phrasing, pacing, and knows when to twist the knife. Previously we’ve written about their similarly excellent “Calendar Days.”

I really like the rising and resourceful merger of the choral vocal delivery. The melodic phrasing latches onto those early vowels, compiling into great peaks for the rest of the sentence to subsequently leap from.

It is almost within the context of the song a form of misdirection, a style-centric focus pulled swiftly/directly in the opposite direction, ushering in lots of warmth and craft to the recollecting.

“Keno” is a strong track. There is a lot of mass to the thing, it could hold up a lot. In “New Start Again,” the song acts like a steady cornerstone for new beginnings.

TRACK | Andrew Jackson Jihad – Temple Grandin

5/5 golden merles

“Temple Grandin” is one of the finest lo-fi pop openers of the common era. The track combines a chorus-refrain of “find a nicer way to kill it” with a vibrant series of industrial-grade hooks.

Throughout the verses, individuals whose origins set them apart from the civilizations in which they find themselves (Stevie Wonder, Temple Grandin, Helen Keller) are celebrated for their efforts to overcome this apparent gulf.

Beyond that, each individual’s outsider perspective provided them with a greater appreciation for the hypocritical cultural and structural faults present within the larger in-group. And each acted heroically, with decency and moral courage in the face of possible further ostracization, in an effort to improve the conditions they observed.

There is no singular map, each persons route is different, but there are others who have demonstrably trekked great distances, decently, without forfeiting their humanity.

in the days before the damage
human beings were the ones
that did the chasing


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.