A great, soundly built garage rock track, strumming and bashing about over the tapes sturdy hiss. When the organ arrives to accompany the chorus you know you’re in good hands for the remainder.
The vocal and audio peaking is skillfully used for intensity, never overstepping into painful or distracting but instead gracefully bracing itself off of this ceiling.
If I had five golden merles to give I would give it five golden merles.
Toulouse-based Cathedrale have made one hell of an album in Houses are Built the Same.
The selected track here, Hidden Museum, begins with the tube amp warmed tones of some lackadaisical dueling guitars, just a bit of bass lurking underneath. The direct payoff of the well-controlled and appropriately contorted vocals arrive shortly thereafter, agreeably raving about secrets and understanding.
There is a controlled chaos that is admirably achieved here, and the vision is clear and well realized throughout. Consistently catchy and permeating vitality, this is a kind of treasure.
The instrumentation and hooks are given space to breath, the attention-trap detailing is superb, and the metered and mastering is an assemblage of worthy influences. For some larger touchstones, it is the spiritual cousins of Ought, Metric, and Protomartyr; warped but well wrapped.
Well, well is a stunning track and, good news, the whole album is built like this. Maybe a full, proper review to come when things settle down a bit.
But Black Bug’s s/t is a well contained rampage of burning saw patterns, choral uproar and properly clobbered digi drums.
15 tracks and no song is longer than 2:08.
Female/Male tradeoff the purging, vocal utterances and I don’t know if any album is as much fun as this is fun.
Name your price.
San Diego’s Teenage Burritos 2016 s/t has much good within it.
The standout tracks for me are Prom Song and the one rated here/posted below, Kamikaze. But the whole thing is so fluent in building convincing garage rock fragments that it appears effortless.
A real compelling alchemy of elements, dodging and compiling. I prefer this version featuring Andreas from Holograms to the other two listed on their bandcamp:
This is some combination of gut and sucker punch. A brilliant French-Canadian garage rock tune that launches right out of the gate into several varied strong melodies. There are also some superb driving vocals and excellent jangly guitar production.
The strength of the melodies and production mean that the 90 second run-time is brief even by my standards. But this allows for borderline infinite replayability.
Solid backing vocals and production accompany the mildly manic delivery. Everything comes together nicely in a scourging, flailing sort of fury.
Fun and frantic, marauding around the standard pop structure. it’s nice.
Ok, give them more listens here.
Plainly & Painfully 