garage – Page 19 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Obnox – It’s so hard to break a habit

Obnox’s phenomenal cover of The Webs is what I imagine American pop music would presently sound more like if we were better capable of grappling with our shared degraded condition.

Never has such unimaginable wealth been localized within a region and disseminated so unevenly among it’s inhabitants. With every opportunity for alternative, there is an extreme disregard offered the general well being.

Simultaneous with this disparity, no other nation has such a collective misunderstanding of itself, it’s glories and indignities.

Not only are the people defeated, routed, but proudly so. Rabid nationalism is exclusively here an obvious humiliation, frothing and raving, we pledge our devotion to an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and a kleptocracy, which hold dominion under the false label of democracy.

And how do you make pop music within this context, knowing the conditions? It’s hard to break a habit.

TRACK | La Secte Du Futur – Future is Better

From the bass synth and bass guitar out the gate intermingling, to the vocals metallic net of echo, every tone in this is great.

There are a couple buried synths in the mix, something I am deeply sympathetic to, offering up their own variant melodies to the alter of noise. They are just apparent enough to flesh things out and keep things interesting.

This gentle revisionism speaks to the chaos at the heart of the track. Whether The Future is Better or Never is better, something must change.

TRACK | Grass Widow – Disappearing Industries

The mind is pretty easily fooled into seeing miracles wherever someone has put in a small amount of effort. Some well-honed slight of hand or a few rehearsals later, we spectators are ready to see the divine. It is evident.

In Disappearing Industries keenly crafted melodies careen about the finely tuned structure. To me, it seems like a kind of magic.

It is, at least, a minor engineering marvel, like the innerworkings of a clock, gears interlocking, determined to determine. The albums title is appropriate, few songs have as compelling an internal logic.

TRACK | GEE TEE – Z-ZERO

Z-ZERO is 90 seconds of blown-out synth pop punk.

The bifurcated melody lets for once the bridge also be the chorus, and it is no small wonder that this works out fine. Yet again, Australia has shown us the way.

It’s all very good. There’s enough style that it lapses back into substance at some point in the general mire, the rhythm guitar bounding back and forth across the soundscape throughout.

TRACK | The Stevens – Chancer

“Give me a chance to be a stranger / give me a chance to be forgotten”

The drums land in the mix somewhere at the base of the skull, in the limbic system or lizard brain. I’m not sure I heard them the first 10 times I listened to the song, but you feel them.

And anyway with Chancer the guitar hooks are the centerpiece, adorned in fuzz and jangle.

There are at least three vocal tracks spread across the headphone range in various states of singsong and staggered slightly in delay and octave. They all unite in a fine megazord in the mix, sword accessorized.

TRACK | Total Revenge – Jeep Cherokee

There’s a few great tracks on Total Revenge’s S/T, but Jeep Cherokee is my favorite of the set.

Drums that register somewhere between trashcan and streetlight corral a blown out but triumphant melody, bleeding out graciously into the verse. All of this builds pretty quickly to some kind of boil before dissipating in feedback to close out the record.

“I do all the things that I should / For once in my life I feel good”

Check out also The Fair for similar sludgery that reaches comparable heights of wonder.

TRACK | Girl Racers – Rubber

In Rubber, Girl Racers have created a single worthy of your great fondness.

Direct but also bound up in much playful production and a glut of buoyant layers, the fine vocal irreverence is attenuated by a steady, unflinching instrumentation.

Hearing it makes me miss being in a proper band, whiling away in the basement preparing heaps of markedly hopeless material. But it was fun. And this captures that sense of joy.

You, there, boy, what day is this?

This is good. This is inventive and more than a bit volatile. Check out the other offerings from Three Door Records as well.

ALBUM | Katie Von Schleicher – Shitty Hits

Shitty Hits is one of the best albums of the last decade. It is endlessly impressive and inspiring material, awash in fervent commiseration, fearsome eulogizing, and in this way it is difficult to choose one track to feature.

Knowing how good the subsequent offerings are, starting with track one makes sense.

There are no fewer than several dozen instances in which effortlessness combines seamlessly with the elaborate. Like in Going Down when it almost sounds like it’s all about to fall apart, stalling just after the field recording, then careening back into the chorus, outdoing the previous effort’s loop. Or essentially all of The Image, or Life’s a lie... or Isolator, or Hold…

There is a great quote that is applicable here from an article reviewing Denis Johnson’s Lament of the Sea Maiden by Geoff Dyer, “Control is achieved through willing proximity to its loss.”

And that is anything with content and form, style and substance, design and function. But rarely is it metered so consistently with such exactitude and genius.

With great rarity does the lo-fi indie bedroom-rock world produce things that are both believably personal and properly anthemic. Generally speaking, for most working within this subset, the ambition doesn’t stretch much farther than the size of the room it was crafted in.

Exceptions include the occasional track by Joanna, Spencer and that immensely talented okie who wrote Funeral. But they are everywhere here. If you play it you too will become pleasantly impaled on one of the very many hooks.

Katie Von Schleicher has written two remarkable albums in the last few years and I doubt either of you vulgarians own them yet. You can still buy Shitty Hits on vinyl at the bandcamp.

Also follow on Instagram for quality bird-centric social media content second only to Marianne Williamson.

TRACK | Unity – Big Dreams #2

“Big Dreams, don’t know where to put them / up on the shelf”

Big Dreams is a sandcastle made of sugar.

It is 25ft tall and even when the water comes in as a tide that afternoon it takes 8 days to dissolve, fully one day more than it took some lord to create the world and it’s peripheral, irrelevant universe (as it is alleged).

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying about science, probably, “It should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” And that is also a pretty good way to think about pop music.

A distillation and honing of hooks into their purest form. Unity have made here a good example of that phenomenon.

I prefer the demo version posted here to the one that later appears on the subsequent S/T LP. Fortunately the world is big enough for both.

TRACK | Friendo – Pass Times

Pass Times features many characteristics I greatly admire when done well: some fine, howling backing vocals, symbol splashes that connote momentum in the chorus, reverb that begins to bite on the build, reaching the edge of the expanse and folding back over onto itself.

Listening back to it now, it’s almost as though the people playing the instruments can hear one another and are able to react accordingly, like there exists a framework but also some agency within it.

And though it sounds easy, why don’t more people do it? Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t effortless but that which is hard earned.

Plus, despite it’s detestable monarchist nomenclature, I prefer Royal Crown Cola to the other sodas… not that I would ever buy or drink any of those paragons of chemical castration. But if I had to choose, gun to my head, it’d be RC most of the time.

In the last decade since the release of Pass Times its creator, Cookie Brunel, has been making heaps of exciting art, some of which is new music.

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