Category: garage

TRACK | The Numerators – Dead

5/5 golden merles

“Dead” is Psych-Surf circa 2013. With a loping start that builds into a veritable gallop, the essential elements of the genre are soon assembled into a, to mix the metaphors, well-earned avalanche. Why didn’t I just say stampede, hm? No.

A little hard to place in the homestead: maybe equal parts garage and bedroom. It features a bit of the grit and pulp of either.

Full of texture and heart in a way that resonates with my cultural conditioning, the track reverberates in the manner only matter can seem to muster. By which, to add to the confusion, I mean energy condensed to a relatively slow vibration. But, fortunately, its output is one within the audible range of our lowly species, the decline of which the song itself laments and celebrates in equal measure.

When it pours from the speakers there is a comforting nuance to the noise, the distinction a product of tens of thousands of hours you and I have spent consuming similar external stimuli. And within all that experience, narrowing and selecting, “Dead” is plotted within the very narrow percentage of what I arbitrarily consider to be Good. Credulously, gullibly, naïvely I take it to be an earnest testament. And if it isn’t, so what?

TRACK | Banned Books – Fuselage

5/5 golden merles

“Fuselage” is Banned Books stunning opener from their 2016 self-titled LP. Full of stars and false starts, the track asks: What’s the worst thing that could happen? Then later addresses the picking up and patching over.

Its movement is staggered like an unpaved route navigating over mountainous terrain. The path is guided by fractals of drums and the coursing, world-on-a-wire guitar channels.

There’s a great deal of vacillating, variance to elevation, and the track is no stranger to intermittent silences. This has its own internal logic or natural tectonics, and maintains a balance that feels both original and jarring.

Each jagged and convulsive element is intricately plotted and administered by familiar, well produced instrumentation. Strong work from Philadelphia: Pop, Rock, Noise, with experiments to structure and pacing.

TRACK | Glittering Prizes – GP

5/5 golden merles

This Glittering Prizes blazing self-titled EP was created by Kevin Bell & Allie Torrance of Hamilton, Ontario. It reaches out to us from the good old days of two thousand and seventeen CE, an extremely negligible distinction along a geological timescale.

The EP is composed of a very fine set of highly undervalued, rampant lo-fi pop tunes.

My favorite track of the set is the opener “GP,” a sort of stereophonic blend of shimmering rhythm guitars, magnetic synths, and gently obscured vocalization.

The track is sacred, sharp and sinuous. You can purchase it here and somewhere in the region of 85% of that revenue will go to the artists. Or at the very least it will be sent to a PayPal address they may not have checked in awhile.

TRACK | Celestial Shore – Now I Know

5/5 golden merles

“Now I Know,” though it comes down slightly on the side of content, has an elevated form and does great justice to both. It almost seems as though a song can have both things, style and substance. Judging by the great glut of output across and throughout civilizations, this is something often lost on most people, of which I am regrettably one.

I’m not sure a guitar’s tremolo has ever sounded better. The elaborated drums feel like a chaotic shadow realm behind the composed articulation on the surface, a disunity in the ranks that meet behind a common banner. At first I wanted them buried in the mix, clipped and curtailed. But on repeated listening it is a great strength and attribute. I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the thrum.

If some fool hadn’t written a paragraph about it, I don’t think you’d notice on an early pass the graceful/perpendicular/complimentary “I was in love with an idea” backing vocal layer buried at the 1:12 mark. Aside from an articulation onslaught, this is what I mean about the form rising to meet the moment. Get you a songwriter that can do both, lol. Memes aside, it is tremendously well made.

TRACK | Aloha Units – Mate’s Machine

5/5 golden merles

From Sydney at some point in the last decade, Aloha Units “Mates Machine” is off a 4 track tape of the same name. It is post-punk/diy/lo-fi, and a bit of all the things that are nice according to my subjective yammering and murmuring.

It would be hard to find a better example of a phrase I use as a mantra for both the making and assessing: control achieved through a willing proximity to its loss. Guitars scritch in heaping variables of concerted noise and two drum lanes pace the undertone. The squashy sprawl of the track is composed of a gentle thundering.

If you’re acclimated or accustomed to it, there’s a great deal of nuance to the edifice and its architectonics. It’s one a hell of a Hans Sprungfeld of a tune. And what I want to say, what I’m telling you now, is that Jebediah is really great.

In the petty amount of google searching I did for this post I was very excited to find Finley’s more recent work in anti-folk form as VIPP and, alternatively, synthwave focused with Sex Tourists. And really look forward to diving in when there is a moment to breath or look.

TRACK | Natural Causes – Like It Should

5/5 golden merles

“Like It Should” is contemplative but also contains a fair amount of the threatening. Not ‘fair’ in the sense of ‘significant’ or ‘considerable.’ But ‘fair’ in the moral sense, it contains the right amount of the ominous and the foreboding.

There is here an equitable offset of the well-reasoned to the kinetic. It has a the sense of the analytic in concert with the rapturous and the enraged, to the refined degree that you get from the Fugazis, the Protomartyrs, and the Oughts of the earth; the ilk who balance the conscientious along with a call to action.

The old man says “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” But why not some fairer balance? There can be a great and good register of the lashing and the misgiving in equal measure. And we can instead unite in that searching, more certain and assured after, with all the conviction that commiseration allows.

TRACK | Cool Ghouls – Gord’s Horse

5/5 golden merles

I am overcommitted to tasks and have not yet listened to 2021’s At George’s Zoo. But one thing I do know is that 2017’s tour tape from Cool Ghouls, Gord’s Horse, is strong stuff, wistful and warped.

Pleasing and affably askance, the title track ambles forward in a timeless sort of tread. There is a parity and tension present in the unfolding, part Americana in its pacing and instrumentation and part freak-folk in its poetic insinuations.

There is created here a well-worn path that somehow remains renewably enthralling due to the gently obscurantist phrasing and the overall loveliness of the wave-like, enveloping backing vocals. It’s an enduring and dreamy track.

TRACK | The Archaeas – Absent Mind

5/5 golden merles

The Archaeas “Absent Mind” is a dose of fiery garage-punk imported from Louisville, Kentucky. Recent P&P favorites Wombo are also from the neighborhood. But the ultimate embodiment of human evil Mitch McConnell also resides there, lest you think it strictly heavenly indie rock turf.

The track has all the peculiarities of elegantly controlled chaos and strikes a marked balance between its upfront, surgical pop characteristics and the smoldering, ruptured punk elements.

In the series of humiliations and degradations known as ‘the world,’ this can be a difficult balance to strike, what with all the distractions and immiserations afoot. But, considered or intuited, it has been achieved; the whole s/t album is great. With respect to Style vs Substance, Content vs Form, Design vs Function, Et Cetera vs Etc, there is enough tasteful thrash and tarnish around the imminently coherent core for you to invest your credulity in.

As the empire collapses, turns its exported brutality inward, and quality of life decline for us all, we’ll surely turn on one another instead of our shared oppressors. But one thing I hope we can all agree upon is that Louisville is making some sick tunes and that we’re both proud of and thankful for them.

TRACK | Saralee – The Motion

5/5 golden merles

Saralee’s “The Motion” has some immediate, panoramic, and vivid language. It is for me instantly displacing of my own or transportive to its own universe.

The lo-fi demo-like quality of the seemingly live recorded accompaniment provides both urgency and credulity as the track leans into the gutsy performance. The variable ranges of emphasis on the lead vocals conduct well the underlying unrest.

A small memory or anecdote, well detailed, acts here as an entryway into a great expanse of wondering, empathy and the unknowable. It is immensely effective storytelling.

So much of pop music is a kind of shoddy mesmeric and definitive declaration, an unconvincingly detailed and performative edict of eternal truths: hollowness and posturing. So, instead, there is a striking and surpassing power in embracing doubt and continuing to operate from a position of uncertainty. I have a great admiration for songs that end in inconclusive proclamations.

TRACK | The Rangoons – Two Minds

5/5 golden merles

The Rangoons’ “Two Minds” is an agreeably caustic mélange of noise. A phrase I promise I didn’t use a thesaurus to locate.

It was written peripatetically, on a walk to retrieve $40 worth of burgers (2) in the night. A rate hike commensurate with the corporate greed that cheapens and saddens all of our lives.

Music is innately funny.

What if I were to sing my woes in rhyming couplets to an arbitrary melody?

Music is innately serious.

I have honed my woes into a format most easily consumable by others in the hopes of being understood, of being tolerable while engaged in the act of conveying, and to attempt to whine in a manner that is pleasing, maybe even appealing. It’s an attempt to make entertainment of unease, or anyway of a feeling. It is a reasonable concession when confronted with the void and a limited time in which to be known.

The Rangoons understand the ridiculousness and seriousness involved in this dichotomy. And that this careening, combustible duality can be calibrated and pretty well conveyed.