Category: lo-fi

TRACK | Sheer Mag – Expect the Bayonet

5/5 golden merles

Some of you latecomers may know this as the theme to Useful Idiots pod with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper. But with great pride I say that I was among the billion people to have heard it prior to this exposure. Which still puts me in the top 12% of listeners. Not bad.

Sadly, such things are rare, this sort of lyrical content and impassioned delivery, in a format that is meant to be heard and not merely tolerated.

So before the worlds been reduced to soot
Solidarity for those underfoot
I better remind ya
Or you’ll surely regret
And if you don’t give us the ballot
Expect the bayonet


TRACK | Terrible Truths – False Hope

5/5 golden merles

Teetering ideally between math and art rock, pop rock and garage rock, the core essence of it is simply good and engaging.

Rarely does it seem a song is written and recorded at such an optimal time for the elements that make up its composition.

This feels bottled at the right moment, excised from the aether more or less intact.


TRACK | Heaters – Levitate Thigh

5/5 golden merles

For anyone who knows that hooks are made of metal and think that it’s high time they sounded like it.

In the writing I’d have probably lost my nerve and had that build successfully utilized once. But Heaters are wiser and more competent in their construction. And it is a thing of wonder.

Maybe this is all it takes to qualify the grand in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Lesser things have been given bigger honors.


TRACK | Alabster DePlume – Whisky Story Time

5/5 golden merles

This song is built of energy, particles in motion, maybe more so than others. It is full of might and fraught with warmth, threatening to break into pure light at any moment.

There is a great regard for the anecdote embedded in this thing, it feels like a great account. It is a special thing and worthy of revisiting.


TRACK | Timber Timbre – Black Water

5/5 golden merles

Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Unless of course you’ve got some bleach, in which case sunshine can go screw.

This is a timeless track. Many distinct elements compile in concert, with great measure and purpose: horns, synthetic strings, a bass line that goads and simmers throughout.

There’s no reason to be afraid, technically. It probably won’t help. Unless the fear is a prerequisite to the release of adrenaline. Unless the body can’t administer this panic without adequate fear, a mere recognition of the danger insufficient to trigger the response.

TRACK | The Proper Ornaments – Who Thought

5/5 golden merles

On this dead blog we celebrate winding loops of guitars nestling into the parietal lobe.

Also, this from Denis:

It is a fine, beautiful
and lovely time of warm dusk,
having perhaps just a touch
too much

enveloping damp;
but nice, with its idle strollers,
of whom I am one,
and it’s true,
their capacity for good

is limitless, you can tell.
And then—ascending
over roofs, the budded tips
of trees, in the twilight, very whole
and official,
its black
markings like a face

that has loomed in every city
I have known—it arrives,
the gigantic yellow warrant
for my arrest,
one sixth the size
of the world. I’m speaking
of the moon. I would not give
you a fistful of earth for
the entire moon, I might as well tell you.

For across the futile and empty
street, in the excruciating
gymnasium, they
are commencing—
degrees are being bestowed
on the deserving,
whereas I’m the incalculable

dullard in the teeshirt here.
Gentlemen of the moon:
I don’t even have
my real shoes on. These are some reformed
hoodlum’s shoes, from the Goodwill. Let

me rest, let me rest in the wake
of others’ steady progress,
closing my eyes,
closing my heart,

shutting the door
in face after face
that has nourished me.

Denis Johnson, “This is Thursday, Your Exam was Tuesday.”


TRACK | Coma Cinema – Satan Made a Mansion

5/5 golden merles

I don’t think anybody can in good faith argue with how good a line, “Satan made a mansion for love to live when it dies,” especially in the way it is casually uttered here, and considering its fine abbreviated state existing as both precursor and title.

Few and far between are such killer refrains.

And that is not yet to mention some of the best lo-ish-er-fi production this side of the infinite lapse.

You don’t need me to tell you whose fingerprints are on this one. I only wish I could do my influences this kind of fearless and forthright justice.


ALBUM | Cate Le Bon – Mug Museum

5/5 golden merles

The title track off 2013’s Mug Museum is one of my favorites among many. The whole album is intriguingly sonically textured and well written.

One of the two primary reasons my partner responded to my online profile was a reference to Cate Le Bon and another to David Mitchell & Robert Webb’s Peepshow. So I am in it’s/her debt.

Though I have felt slightly distanced from the colder, more abstracted art rock direction she is exploring in the last few releases, it is all still worth looking into. But to my taste, she has not yet returned to this level of melodic and lyrically qualitative consistency since.

On this record, the bridge has yet to be retracted. There is a great effort at precision in the lines and the onus is not put upon the audience to rearrange the fragments of coherence. Which is fine, too. An audience has been built, tediously, over decades. Do what you like. We don’t need the same thing in endlessly mild variations.

All that shit said, I am still very glad Mug Museum exists and it is proudly one of the paltry 19 vinyl records in my collection.

TRACK | Big Thief – Certainty

5/5 golden merles

Similar to the stylistical influences of The Mystery Lights, Big Thief always appear to draw from something deeper &/or richer.

Adrianne Lenker is one of the most imaginative and compelling American songwriters working today. And this timeless track is not any exception to the very fine records she’s been rapidly producing the last few years.

I was lucky enough to see them around Brooklyn/manhattan several times in the Masterpiece era and a little thereafter, the first time with Alvvays and Ducktails at Prospect Park/Bandshell. For free! And I walked over to it! You suckers.

That’s well worth the thousands of dollars in monthly rent that all of us alternate suckers pay to live in this wonderful/hellish city… or, anyway, it’s some kind of compensation. And proof that some of the funds diverted away from the piss-soaked half burnt out subway go to things that aren’t entirely worthless.

Christ knows that Big Thief don’t need any more press. They’re the one band written about on this blog so far that your mom knows. But rightfully so, qualitatively.

The five tracks capable of preview for Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You are all solid and inventive, both in melody, construction and the usage of language. It seems like Masterpiece and Capacity came out 6 months ago and I am surely already dead / time moves quickly.


TRACK | The Mystery Lights – Watching the News Gives Me the Blues

5/5 golden merles

This is the 57th post here, day by day, but the sentiment of this track applies to any given present day or any day in the foreseeable future for that matter. Our deranged, bloodthirsty and perpetually underfunded society will see to that.

We are incapable of wresting funds to properly address systemic fault from the hands of the gluttons that dominate and cripple our infrastructure and damn the general wellbeing.

Stylistically the mystery lights (mercifully) seem to have skipped a few decades of rock tropes and pull from a richer, older, but somehow fresher history, influences better preserved in their tombs than whatever has been recently left rotting in the sun.