garage – Page 16 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Wednesday – Cody’s Only

Twin Plagues is an album I need to spend some more time with but it has already found a way onto the year-end 2021 list. Cody’s Only is a track that has easily & immediately caught me on it’s hooks.

Cody’s Only is indie rock/post-fi at it’s best: emotive in a manner that erupts without unremitting destruction, storytelling that allows for lessons to be learned.

One of the greatest qualities of the creative act is that it has the capacity to redeem all preceding experience and eventualities through the fabrication of something deemed good. I love the Tom Waits quote, “Everything you absorb, you secrete,” and believe it to be true.

I cannot figure out what I meant / by living all those ways I did

For me, when it is done well, in song or whatever medium, all preceding acts or events become an aggregated catalyst, good and bad, but contorted now to good. It is now reimagined into an artifact, or a testament, in an elaborate repurposing of existence.

Maybe we don’t deserve these kindnesses, but they are patiently scripted by Wednesday here. Forged of fragments, lyrically rich in both the processing and recollecting. And it is a very compelling grafting.

TRACK | DRAGGS – HEARSE

DRAGGS makes reliably filthy lo-fi garage punk from the Australian Gold Coast. In writing about this now I have realized there was a 5th record released in 2019 on Slime Street, surely full of muck that I’m very happy to dive into.

HEARSE is a bludgeoning. It is regularly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerable to most fans of the broader genre. But it is always returning, beat from beat, to it’s foundation, a finely honed structure underneath the apparent liberties taken with form.

TRACK | King Tears Mortuary – Crash Report

From King Tears Mortuary’s 2012 Safe Sex 7″, Crash Report is a track on that very fine EP.

There is a somewhat broadly shared Australian sentiment around lo-fi garage and bedroom rock that I find very agreeable. Or did, of a certain era, maybe it has passed. The internet makes all this seem eternal.

But from a population of 25m (15m less than California) there is a pervasive consensus about what guitar-music should prioritize closer to my own predilections. And the quality dispensed by this culture seems disproportionate in the extreme.

Maybe we are both just defective/mutated in a similar manner.

KTM here deliver some undeniably pointed melodic hooks and fun/inventive lyrically playful phrasing such as “light of my life goes on and off.”

TRACK | Video Age – Throwing Knives

One song that I never skip when it appears in the shuffle is Throwing Knives by Video Age. It is so admirably wrought, not overly so, but like iron. I find it hard to get away from, it is undeniably inspired material.

Each melody builds off the last, including the hearty bridge and “It’s all in my head” refrain. The song is an admirable force of nature that covers a lot of ground by the tenable three minute mark; a great and luxurious thing, maybe as elaborate as lo-fi will allow without some sacrifice to coherence.

TRACK | The Mallard – A Form of Mercy

One of the 24 albums I own is The Mallard’s Yes on Blood. But this might be my favorite track that they put out, and it is from the second Castleface Records album Finding meaning in Deference.

In A Form of Mercy there is a good kind of haunted harmony that has been fused together in fuzz. It rides a balance of coherence that endearingly draws one in. It is just decipherable enough to know that you have been warned.

It is a shame they don’t make music anymore but maybe they do under another name I don’t know, or maybe they’re happy in their undoing or otherwise agreeably tasked. We are fortunate to have these two sets.

TRACK | Print Head – Can You Complain

All along the length and breadth of Happy Happy & Hardcore Pop Print Head have constructed a balanced audio experience with remarkable depth and detail to get agreeably lost in.

For €2 EUR you’re not likely going to get a better bargain of lo-fi art-pop any time soon. As I write, one tape remains, also, if you’d like it mailed from Valencia.

I know my dear friend Darcy of Ought has found himself with some US Girls in the new band Cola. Firetalk are trawling the talented depths of the freakfolk/art rock scenes and coming up with many gems. But it sounds like maybe he is here as well, at least in spirit, sounding off in the resounding of the caterwaul, the bellow.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | The Cowboys – Hands of Love (Around My Throat)

As I write this there we’re just shy of half a million confirmed daily cases of the virus known as “Covid-19.” Yes, that was technically several days ago, maybe that number has subsided or doubled by now, easily either. This Blog is prepared beforehand though it doesn’t seem like it.

Point is, given the holiday, that’s a lot of loving hands around a lot of throats.

To make this review more about me, I’ve started to collect low-dollar records that I love/find online. Trying to buy them directly from the artist or label is the way to go, 100%.

But sometimes you miss a release by a hundred or so years and everyone related to it are dead. In this case, you must go to discogs and pay several pennies to have your media mail chucked into the holiday delivery truck and driven across the plague ravaged nation to your door.

The Cowboys are from Bloomington, IN, the home of both midwestern crap rock and my alma mater. Hands of Love, Take me back, Prized Pig, Negativity Scene, Like a Man, Say Hello to the Sun (For Me)… there’s no shortage of quality here. It’s easily one of the best records of whatever year it came out, 2017 I guess.

TRACK | Wombo – One of These

There is within One of These inventive melodic structure that has made an effort to stand apart from the standard expansion of consonants and vowels within rhyming schemes and octave shifts.

False dichotomies are rife and ravaging all areas of our existence. Pepsi or Royale Crown Cola. Chevron or Texaco. Rule of 3’s or rule of 4’s. Politically, their names aren’t worth mentioning, but let’s just call them ghouls or goblins.

Choosing one hell or the other is presented to you as though they are the solution to anything. And in fact the only available options: A ready-made shortcut to a superficial sacrifice that will show Real Results or at least delay the inevitable while we wait and collect more data in order to reassess and circle back on our way into the tomb.

But mercifully you still have an actual choice. Choosing to be ‘none’ is always an option. Opting out of these irrelevant debates/choices is very often the only way to win in any meaningful sense, in so many aspects.

I don’t know what this song is about but the melody is good.