Category: garage

TRACK | Violent Change – Unit A

5/5 golden merles

“Unit A” is the easiest point of entry to a great experimental lo-fi rock set, VC3. Awash in fuzz and form, the rampant melody augments and deviates in plenty of soaring and delicate ways. There’s enough feinting at traditional form coinciding with the stylistic subversion to keep it fresh and engaging.

There’s a lot in the way of texture and the weighting thereof: the processing all around, the vocal layers elevating at the chorus and a sparingly employed harmonica stretching the tactile wave. All of this is solidly plating the hooks, enshrining and embracing the more established elements.

Within the genre and particularly to those acclimated, there’s a lot of admirable gradation and nuance to the discernible creative problem solving. This refinement pulls some aspects of the abstraction away from suspicion, provides a benefit of the doubt in areas that lack explicit mechanisms of conveying meaning.

See also the Chunklet Industries Honey Radar/VC split from 2021 for some complimentary schemes.

TRACK | The Woolen Men – Head On The Ground

5/5 golden merles

The Woolen Men are Portland-based Oregonians who remind us that pop + punk need not be anything kitsch, that one can take some of the redeeming qualities of either and make a tremendous, infectious thing. Venerable and vacillating, the stakes are kept high, the form is relished, and it only seems intent on inflicting a moderate amount of damage.

The sirens of the synth gild everything, disintegrating it, opening the lane elegantly for when we’re cut back to bass and drum alone. And then the pronouncement: i hit a wall / but it wasn’t hard at all. It’s a convincing consultation or induction to the rumination, unadorned but substantive; blunt but never dull, a great and graceful cudgel.

Why do these two genres, pop and punk, so often combine to such supremely reprehensible results? Possibly, it’s the noxious hypocrisy of their purported intentions: one includes the implicit ideology of rebellion and the other has a cloyingly myopic fixation on the interpersonal or at-best abstraction. Not here, however. There’s a balance struck. An assembly of influences filtered through a prism of good intentions. It all comes across as earnest, a frank and alluring synthesis.

The vinyl is $10 from Woodsist.

TRACK | Needle Exchange – Shut Up, Shut Down

5/5 golden merles

Berlin-based punk with melodic surf and garage elements, “Shut Up, Shut Down” pounds about, nimbly refractive, mutinous. The residual discontent is ingrained in the sturdy melody, collecting like soot between the abbreviated rotary of the verses.

Having grown accustomed through regular exposure to either the empty vessel or diatribes devoid of style, for my tastes the balance of muck/bile to harmonious refinement is well weighted.

I have been assuming the title has a reference to Nowak’s 2004 book and poetry collection of the same name concerning corporate greed. If that’s wrong I’ll gladly correct and update it with some other half formed idea. Some used versions of the vinyl run are scattered about Europe.

TRACK | The Funs – Don’t Let Go

5/5 golden merles

The Funs make exceptional experimental garage rock. The project is composed of two of the 321 people residing in New Douglas, Illinois, reminding you that goodness, though it is rare in overall instances, can come from anywhere and everywhere and at any time.

The minimal instrumentation is humming and ignites in the kindling of lo-fi tones. Despite some tempo and structural invention, the fuel burns out quite evenly over the track’s 4 minute runtime. Throughout the drums land spacious and torrid alongside the lead vocal until it extinguishes upon one final plea.

In its subtlety and delicate directness, particularly the way the concepts are married to their delivery, there is present a lot of empathy for the era. It is easier to dismiss or omit the devices that dominate our daily lives in anticipation of their antiquation or irrelevance. And with that, there is a temptation to also omit the accompanying alienation. It is harder and more honest to imbue them with great style that warrants attention and then proceed to process the implications. That honesty and directness is ultimately more enduring than getting lost in abstraction.

The Double LP can be got from the Manic Static webzone. Check out the new project, glow in the dark flowers. Digital is $12.

TRACK | Druggy Pizza – Radium Canyon

5/5 golden merles

More glint and relentless corrosion from our friends at Druggy Pizza, “Radium Canyon” spells doom for us all but in a good way. Garage and psych rock veiled in withering and decadent tones, I wager the rendering of which will please fans of good things and anger or confound most of those who aren’t.

The melody of the guitar lead roams freely around the bass’ substratum, prowling the chasmal expanse. The reverb is slathered across the channels and stings. A Fender quad is purring, graciously and expertly propelling the audible tones produced by the bending of metal at certain wavelengths.

The heat comes off it in radiant streaks, it bends the light around it. It’s a good approximation of a fruitful fever. It deserves to be wound into wax, if it wants. But for this digital 2020 set you can name your price.

TRACK | Druggy Pizza – Like Pigs In A Slot

5/5 golden merles

Featuring members of Dusty Mush, Cédric Bottacchi/Druggy Pizza’s “Like Pigs In A Slot” convenes the crunching and crushing of waves in a not dissimilar manner. Unrest and deliberate deconstruction, it’s surf rock on a sea of molten gloom and Midas detritus.

The blistering, proximal bass synth continues grinding in perpetuity, as the focus shifts from the background grind to the central figures portrait, breaking the established mold a few times in a matter of minutes. The whole EP/split’s worth spending some time with.

If you, like me, hold its contortions in high esteem, look also into the 2020 set and checkout the handful of vinyl from the Peace And Love Barbershop Muhammad Ali split.

TRACK | That Ghost – Moon And The Almighty

5/5 golden merles

Previously I’ve written on Ryan Thomas Schmale melancholic and gorgeous work under Myers Rooney, I Hope It Is Only a Room. “Moon And The Almighty” is an earlier, coarser garage rock track. It was provided to a defunct compilations project made by a defunct label that was funding largely defunct DIY venues.

A marching eulogy of a track, it burns and it is glowing. The vocals and instrumentation collude in a fine mist of metallic static. The unraveling is a spectacle, with vocalizations cruising along it’s descent, Death is coming / To take me soon. Transitioning, the passage moves to favoring yowling at the point of disintegration, embers still alight.

In contrast to the Myers Rooney To Bleed album, this conveys Schmale’s great range of evocation; there a drifting and gilding the expanse, here a measured writhing and smiting. A strong working songwriter that deserves a bit of your support if you are able.

There’s a new 2022 split with mr submissive also to check out.

TRACK | TV Priest – Lifesize

5/5 golden merles

Beneath the bluster and bruised flesh it has a great heart to the thing. The drilling of those two synths into the skull, it’s something to be admired. There’s a clarity to the production that works its way into the gray matter without destroying anything essential in the process. A good balance to strike.

This is in the vein of Christian Fitness, Protomartyr, Idles, and Ought, if you like that kind; all the revelry of an adjunct professor shouting at you, and about a subject they don’t specialize in, and for your own good. At least they seem to think so. It’s nice in small doses, for a few years at a time, maybe there’s an accreditation granted at the end of it all.

It’s a vengeance pastiche, the elaborately fractured usage of language as a cudgel to get at something deeper than our collective descent. It’s an attempt to get ahead of the thing. Purposefully disoriented and in synopsis, it’s a poem. The language is essential and central and the language is sturdy. I don’t know how it holds up in a decade but I recognize its assessment of this brazen, dilapidated zeitgeist.

66 degrees and a haze today, and Subpop has delivered something I admire. Haven’t gotten to the ’22 full length, but excited to spend a minute with it.

TRACK | Wand – Flying Golem

5/5 golden merles

Psychedelic rock from LA, “Flying Golem” convincingly summons something strange and special from the inanimate. The instrumentation approximates something graceful, aloft and massive. Driving melodic guitars grind and latch to the steadfast percussion, synths delicately sprout from the structure.

I have very limited patience for guitar solos in general but this one is adequately shattering and incorporates the discordant with deliberate experimentation. Through its winding and dissolution it manages to say something new and complimentary within the context of the demolition.

Sadly the bandcamp has one selectively available track, so the YouTube link won’t show up in the hype machine. But also check out the beautiful video on youtube directed and animated by Meghan Tryon & Garrett M Davis. $9 for the digital, abridged in its preview. The vinyl’s relatively rare but can be located for the right price.

TRACK | checkpoint – gravedigger

5/5 golden merles

Kicking and combustible punk from Melbourne, “gravedigger” is structurally inventive and paced in variable pulses that keep the ballistic style and texture fresh. Rewardingly unyielding and pleasantly vile.

The digi drum metronome acts as a petri dish that the crust of a culture grows rapidly out of. Ruthless and rejoicing, what lyrics crack through the veil of muck beyond the title concern epistemology, the nature of knowledge. What is known before the graves are dug, what can and can’t be passed on.

An attitude so churlish it would be to the surprise of no one if they were to have dinner with Groucho tonight. On the Bandcamp they threaten an upcoming LP that we look forward to.