Category: freak folk

TRACK | No Lonesome – Good Hurt

5/5 golden merles

No Lonesome’s “Good Hurt” offers a nice, vibrant stain derived from the guttural undercurrent-slurry of Americana, freak-folk and anti-folk. There’s a rich hybridization fermented in its depths, at least a bit of alt country, psych and pop rock in there as well. The tune provides so much joy and triumphant careening for something seemingly repelled and defined by its antitheses.

But as well it should be. “The ultimate hidden truth of the world,” as Graeber wrote, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

It is again the care in the compiling that appeals to me most. There’s a lot to admire in the accumulated decision making, investing the piece with details, small phases arranged and melding the rougher edges: the spoken background chatter around the one and two minute marks, the gently mangled vocoder chorus of backing vocals rising in support, its plumed horns and alternating drum lanes that reinforce from differing angular plots upon the soundscape. It all invests the structure with greater meaning and acts in the service of the feeling which is evoked.

“This time / it’s a good hurt… / I’ll love you all I can.”

Friends of Goon / Women / Nerve City / Casual Technicians will likely find some camaraderie in its viscid texture, winding melodic sensibilities, and earnest, heartache-hemorrhaged proclamations.

The four track digital album “Am I What I’m Not?” is available now for $5 on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Goon – Death Spells

5/5 golden merles

With “Death Spells,” Kenny Becker and Goon have again (and again) produced some of the most engaging melodic psych folk around. In the elaborately warped structure you are agreeably consumed, intricacies compiling and enveloping, comfortably saturating the self without obliterating it. Some trick.

“Death spells are coming down / don’t go outside.” That’s how it begins. It really seems to me like some small banner held aloft in attempt to redeem the medium from utter ruin. Its composition and manner of maneuvering stands out like a healthy thumb amidst the swollen hand and arm and body and world at large.

Why don’t more people do this, don’t even seem to desire it? Probably because it is difficult. For most songwriters, after a couple of bars the intention is lost or staggers. After a couple iterations the melody conforms to a bare, essential framework, the tendrils and impulses are shorn and hewn for functionality, reproducibility. While writing a song you have to remember it.

There’s a fair amount of bravery to desire this type of expansion. And it’s something the maker must consider during the making, from the outset, as desirable. The risk of either excess, mathematical purity or utterly indistinct irrelevance, begs for a balance. And the only scale is an intuitive understanding of form and the history of shared forms/symbols with the audience. Awareness and ability do not often go hand in hand.

It breaks my brain that the first reviews of Goon on this blog are now 3 years old for how fresh the tracks still sound, timeless I guess. The track is $2 on the bandcamp.

If you like it, see somewhat similar operators: memory card, Melaina Kol, Windowsill. This is the direction (anti)folk should move into and a good illustration of how to incorporate uncertainty into the model without losing the essence, a bridge that has been burned but remains traversable.

Short recommendation:
For a similar level of attention to detail and world building, see Georges Schwizgebel, “78 Tours.“

TRACK | Casual Technicians – Dark Matter Falling

5/5 golden merles

America’s heart is effectively vestigial, the body running on delusion alone. But every now and again it beats, startling and amusing us.

Folk rock, alt country, freak folk, anti-folk; whatever dendritic subgenre Casual Technician’s “Dark Matter Falling” roughly fits into beyond Rock, these are things that exist in a state of defiance to the grotesque bulk of another definition. Please remember that the heart is also an outlier in relation to the other organs and would be considered an outcast among them.

We don’t need to retread that in the general appraisal Folk lacks self awareness and Country‘s sick bravado and sweetness makes me want to peacefully disassociate into an eternal coma, god willing, at the expense of my demonic private insurers.

But on the periphery and in the shadowy wasteland of upstate New York there exists at least one aggregated cabal of Portlanders intent on redeeming noise and structuring it in a manner that makes people feel whole and not diminished. If you’re familiar with Townes, Csehak, Von Schleicher, and Van Gaalen (North American, at least), it’s a bit like these things.

A large part of it’s glory is the celebration of real collaboration, unions of narration and melodic intentions merging. The contrasts and collisions are all of similar quality and keep it from congealing.

Otherwise it’s just experiment and invention informed by history but not beholden to it, offered up thoughtfully without conceding an opulent melodic core, conducted with utmost conviction and replete with distinct language. Maybe it seems easy when put like that, but it isn’t.

There are two super strong singles already up. Cassette via Repeating Cloud on 11/15/24. Digital on the bandcamp for $7.

TRACK | Little Oil – Hey Judas

5/5 golden merles

Coming 2nd among Twelve Songs, Little Oil’s “Hey Judas” is a psych-folk tune composed of deftly piercing hooks dispensing immense compassion. Piano’s plonk and murmuring synths ferry the arbitration neatly forward, familiar myths reconfigure, agreeably heralded in the heat of the room. The melodic components are strong. The envoy offers consolation, there’s very little dread to be found within a context usually larded with it, only sunny reconciliation.

How to even begin to approach this subject and themes in its gilded iron sarcophagus, or deflect the baggage of the bastards who claim its copyright?

The answer is: orthogonally, reinventing suppositions around base symbols we’re all locally steeped in, the reframing of the frame within another. Or just generally with a little innovation and the warmth distinct to those who remain in the world.

There’s plenty of good examples within the approximate genre to pull from and a nice suitable lineage. “Hey Judas” slides into place among other fine tracks such as Loose Fur’s “The Ruling Class,” Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “The Ballad of Jim Jones,” Page France’s full “Hello, Dear Wind,” Doug Marsch’s rendition of “Woke up this morning with my mind (staying on Jesus).”

The whole set has a lot of these same sensibilities, cutting melodies, rich images placed aside non-lexical grooves and is worth investigating. Cassettes from Fountain Inc. and digital are $12 on the Bandcamp.

TRACK | Being Dead – Muriel’s Big Day Off

5/5 golden merles

The Being Dead duo put out one of my very favorite albums of last year, Zero Percent APR’s Higher and Higher Forever. They consistently identify and deliver strange causes for celebration in a homogenized period of concentrated wealth and rights restrictions that desperately needs them. The whimsy and wrath is what is warranted, having fun in hell, and holding court on the ineffable indelible shit. Artpop can be good and have a big heart.

A couple of real go getters. Weird but with good cause. Good movements. Melodies as intricate and warbling as the sentiments, complexities that interlock amusingly but always cater first to the feeling of the thing. You, too, could be telling stories in content and form. Probably not this good, but you can do it as evidenced by this thing existing, it’s proof.

There’s plenty taken from convention, the shared language and lineage of pop and anti-folk that makes the work approachable. But every track is also subverted with such care and conviction, ensuring that each effort/song finds a path that leads somewhere new and rewarding. Please just read Szarkowski on the thicket for a brief and compelling summary of this manner of work:

“When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no play that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.”

Slack is anticipated, and the line is cut before it tangles or tied into a bow. Examples are the emphatic lull in phrasing, setting up the spelling of Muriel with a long pause that adds additional equivocating “like this:” or the ‘TV Time’ bridge that reads like a medley-merger and the verses recounting of an immediate return to the shoe store.

All of this can be coopted and killed. And will be, but for now it isn’t and that is good. Discs, tapes, records, digital, all available here, and releasing the 14th of July.

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 | Melaina Kol – Nu

5/5 golden merles

Melaina Kol creates Youngsville, North Carolina-based lo-fi bedroom rock. AMOSAT is layered in rich and compelling material, a delicately discordant ambiance constructed with much persistently viable misdirection stacked around the solid songwriting. “Nu” offers loads of angular pieces approaching of their own accord, an entire woven world of it to delve and get lost in, subtle hooks and abundant texture.

If I ever make anything good, I’ll have taken some lessons from this: its patience and sense of rerouting the narrative within the greater whole. There a lot of skill in guiding the persistent observer or judge in a kind of favorable figment or refracting everything in a favorable light; it’s nice to see such skill given to the refinement of experiment and innumerable unique transitions between tracks.

All of that is of value and is a kind of expertise that slowly accumulates an audience in the world, at least you hope so. It can be held by Naming your price at the bandcamp. Also check out the re-release of a set of 2017 tracks now out on tape/digital from 7th Heaven.

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 | Wren Kitz – Hexed

5/5 golden merles

A deliberate and ravaging album of many intricacies and plenty of codas, Early Worm by Wren Kitz is a real fine set of musical numbers. Promptly following the raw and expansive “Georgie,” the gentlest entry point comes through “Hexed,” a song about crying moons and the digging of bones.

The track is considered and palpable psych-folk and rock. It describes a kind of anti-heroes journey or an escape from ones self in the service of traversing an emotional landscape. The problems are bound to proximity, figuratively or literally — I don’t know. But born of an immediacy that can be at least differed and approached later from another angle or as another person, weathering the hex or inverting the curse.

It is a glinting and extensive track and album, with much fine detailing and world building. It should be a little or a lot more celebrated. And further evidence of the good drawing to it the good, there’s cover artwork by Dylan Jones, who’s also done some for Woolen Men.

TRACK | The Lavender Flu – Demons In The Dusk

5/5 golden merles

Experimental psych and folk rock from Oregon, The Lavender Flu’s “Demons in the Dusk” finds the lugubrious periphery of rock to be a haunting and inviting sector. And they offer great returns residing and mining this quarter comfortably immediately before collapse.

The album as a whole is consistently wailing and receding, working within its own internal logic that promptly consumes the listener. But “Demons In The Dusk” is probably the foremost hook, the crown jewel of a barb that easiest draws you in. It rewards your patience with a strange, strangled style, then an uptick of treble and trembling in the end.

As we hurtle unapologetically toward a new dark age, estranged from the storied ends, adrift and listless, it suits us well. At least the paths run parallel. Craven and composed, it saunters to the threat of annihilation, an easy going end that specifically omits a mea culpa, “The Lies that you breathe / will follow you.”

4 sides for 30 wending tracks, the double vinyl is around.