Category: lo-fi

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 | Samuel Campoli – One Eye

5/5 golden merles

Samuel Campoli’s “One Eye” is a delicate and multidimensional track, something who’s size is difficult to assess. It is a kind of glittering aura phasing through a rift seen from great distance.

Parts psych-folk and freak-folk, there is within it an array of quasi-familiar attributes positioned on a foundation of vibration. The concerted warble feels equal parts ornate and obliterated.

Still, the sway has a good sense of purpose to it and in this weaving course we are united. When the drums pick up the ponderous becomes quietly devastating. The feeling reminds me of a quote from Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”:

For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.

Glacial and gracious, it can be purchased here.

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 | Staring Problem – Eclipse

5/5 golden merles

Staring Problem’s “Eclipse” has a kind of masterful production which clocks in somewhere around the hi-er-fi of the lo-fi. Seemingly unadorned but performed and engineered with great precision.

The driving bass keeps all the moving parts locatable, everything in its right place. Discrete and eerie, the lead vocals amass into a rolling wave, layered but unvarnished.
Many admirable and complimentary tones are situated within this lucent and mammoth track.

I’m the sort of fella that thinks the generic pop music over the radio starts to sound a lot more compelling when the signal gets worse. And much of it, frankly, once consumed in pure static. But there is only a bit of noise here, the right amount, to politely remind us of our return to dust and that entropy will eventually triumph.

TRACK | Sooner – Pretend

5/5 golden merles

Sooner’s “Pretend” is a work of great strength. It has a respect for form, foremost, and is a celebration of it. The track exhibits an immense understanding of pop components and pacing, offering no weak passages within its fine alt rock sequences and transitions.

Beyond that it is an excellent example of art acting as a means which uniquely allows for the processing of experience, particularly the prospect of contorting trauma into a force for good.

The work resides within the same galactic neighborhood of formidable forces like The Cranberries, Mazy Starr, The Limiñanas, and other go-tos of alternative pop with invention.

In the last few seconds we hear the gentle rumbling of another transition into what will be the closing track, Dusk; it’s not yet accessible but will soon be March 25th on Good Eye Records.

TRACK | Sneers. – Black Earth Shining

5/5 golden merles

From Rome via Berlin, Sneers. “Black Earth Shining” is a track of woe and woah. What a terrible sentence! But nonetheless true. Nonetheless, accurate. It is morose and glowing.

The singular note and choral monosyllabic chant transubstantiate the early soundscape, teasing the tattered and triumphant. The minimal but staggering instrumentation is soon accompanied by a raw and irrefutable vocal delivery. Ossified and merciless it proceeds in a manner reminiscent of our dear friend Tom Waits at times, in form but also the play with melodic structure and of the appropriately designated repetitions within it.

This is some very keenly constructed hybrid of anti-folk partnered by the tone of doom-core. It is a rarity to find this level of clarity and simmering rage properly incorporated and articulated. It normally vents into another form or genre, and it is more than a little refreshing to find it refined in this manner. Grim, gnarly and a lot of fun.

TRACK | Filthy Huns – Fake Ass Muthas

5/5 golden merles

In quick summation: From LA, released on the indomitable Not Not Fun, two albums removed from the common era.

“Fake Ass Muthas” is likely the first and last eight and a half minute track posted to this platform, so don’t get any ideas you epic/jam band freaks. But also take note, this is how you collapse time into a malleable unit.

Wonderous and empirically strange, the pacing and texture of this instance is something to hold up as an idol. Some kind of masterclass (…if that phrasing wasn’t recently besmirched by capital). But that isn’t without its risk. Just because it can be admired doesn’t mean it can be replicated or the right lessons learned or applied.

How does the orbit not collapse or dull around that digi drum over the prolonged runtime? How is anything ever in a stable state or find a form of homeostasis? It is an adaptive system which draws on ample resources and manages to remain inventive despite the glut.

The track always manages to tire of itself moments before the listener might and appropriately reinvent or contort the structure. One melody is relieved of duty and a well-textured instrument is replaced by a complimentary but stark alternate. Sounds simple. Isn’t.

TRACK | EULA – I Collapse

5/5 golden merles

Foreboding and uproarious, EULA’s “I Collapse” kicks. The oscillating vocals unnerve and taunt around a gloom-core structure of perpetual/grinding bass. In this internet dipshit’s humble opinion, it’s great.

Structurally the thing has more than a few asides which all conspire and compile credibly. The kinetic has been captured pretty well intact. It is always eroding and disintegrating but in a stable sample both capable and worthy of study.

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.