pop – Page 12 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | The Shifters – A Believer

“A Believer” is a bit more Australian garage rock excellence from Melbourne’s The Shifters. Gradual and gracious tones that creep about the periphery, blossoming and cleaving to the meditative frame. Soldered together with synths, an incise track largely devoid of excess.

You can forsake all your earthly possessions and embrace the void with a nice, transferrable digital purchase that still benefits the band in some miniscule but not immeasurable capacity. And it includes a 21 minute live set as well in addition to the original couplet. The second-hand market has the wax disk for about $50 big ones.

TRACK | Jessica Lea Mayfield – Standing in the Sun

I am occasionally susceptible to bouts of optimism. They afflict even the best of us from time to time. And within these moments I am vulnerable to the influence of works of art that seem to represent this rosier outlook… at least as long as the craft rises to meet the exposition and there is an undercurrent of tenable fallibility or impending collapse.

I would like to see you live / not survive but really live

My first exposure to this excellent album/track was during Mayfield’s 2014 Tiny Desk Concert. Brutal and succinct turns of phrases glide over the accomplished melodic core. Slight alterations or additions keep pace with and expand out from the traditional foundation. There are more than a few layers, the combined attributes of which are getting at something.

“Not survive but really live,” it bears repeating. What a sentiment and phrasing perfectly fit for modern America, in which the living reproach of daily life dehumanizes and deprives of dignity so thoroughly, framing every proposed alternative as by default worthy of consideration.

It almost begins to break you from that spell itself, and starts to expand the realm of the possible. To utter it, at least, is the first step. Both a positive gesture and an act to set us on the path of the gauntlet ahead.

The song embodies the personal struggle within the systemic. Our institutions mirror our infrastructure. At a certain point you stop rebuilding the same flawed, failed blueprints from the same rubble, take what components you can use, and attempt to build something better.

TRACK | The Cowboys – After Sunset

Bloomington Indiana’s masters of tone were on their A game for this one. “After Sunset” is a cultured rumination on the merits of the night, its highs (the moon) and lows (everything else).

There are many convincing details in these numerous doubts, many cleanly laid out facts that act as foundation for the anecdote: …lawn darts, losing one’s self, the casual alienation. It feels like any given evening. And it has plenty of nuance that humanize the narrator and almost makes you believe it was written by a person, a rounded character, bounding about the same damned earth that you inhabit.

I am made of fire today / and I’m trying to think of things to say to you / after sunset

For me, volume 3 and 4 were the sweet spot for these refined midwestern ghouls. But there are many years to come, probably, and perhaps the dreary flagging of their early efforts will return when the polish of clons/flowers wears, burns, or melts off a bit, whatever the case may be.

I haven’t listened to Lovers in Marble yet. I’m too far behind. If everyone could just agree on a truce for 4-5 years, a nice détente, I’ll catch up on these releases.

TRACK | Datenight – Gone Tomorrow

In the muck and bile of all that is, distractions can be a primary preoccupation for a preponderance of your existence. Good news then that Datenight is here to remind you, in stunning fashion, to just let it go.

Clearly recorded live / in the room, whichever one was available in Ben’s parent’s house, there’s much resonant synchronized thrashing and the band is tight. These coordinated exertions in the service of noise are criminally underrated. And I have not even yet arrived at their 2020 release, Is This Also It.

You fools, you feckless thugs, you can still purchase the thing off of Discogs, gently used for about $13 USD, assuming you live near enough to these superficially united states. When I get some more pennies in the piggy bank, I’ll do it myself. That is, however, a second hand purchase and doesn’t benefit the band. Buy the digital version that does.

TRACK | Dusty Mush – Faux Sabotage

“Faux Sabotage” is a collapsing edifice of a track. Only the barest ingredients and essence remain. Whatever came before has been ground down into a few remaining functional base components. The song is approximately 93 seconds of rooting about the rich tones of rubble.

If the tones can be this rich, I apparently can be temporarily endeared to the greater abstraction. There is a point at which style can overcome most minimal thresholds for substance, if it has at least some posturing towards coherency for a few lines, found here toward the meridian, and the track ultimately does not overstay its welcome.

There was a very limited run of lathe cut Pizza Dischi physical forms. Apparently etched on CDs using machines from the 50’s, these are then played on a turntable with individually unique lo-fi buzz. No one at the moment wants to exchange them for monetary reward at Discogs. But the digital form is well worth your converting into Euro for our French friends in Melun.

TRACK | Hand Habits – Flower Glass

“Flower Glass” is a work of not insignificant insight. The reliable and relatable lines pour out of the track, with inventive pacing and distinction, at the normal wartime speed of something under 20 kilometers an hour.

My first exposure to the album was walking into an ACLU/Planned Parenthood benefit mid-way through Hand Habit’s opening set, the crowd rapt in silence, as this track was played. Lots of good was seen that night from Van Etten, Beirut, Rossen, Morby, et al. But with distinction that moment is set apart in the gray matter.

Apparently there is a great breadth of material that has been written and recorded since this time. I have to catch up on Hand Habits releases from Sub Pop, Saddle Creek and a collaborative album featuring Angel Olsen composed of variations on the track “wildfire,” and donating the proceeds to the Amazon Conservation Association. There’s a lot I have missed and I am so far behind.

TRACK | Peace De Résistance – Boston Dynamics

Bits and Pieces is one of the best albums I’ve run into in a few months. There’s a good amount of majesty present in the makeup, marbled and purring in its forms. It is unfortunately unusual to see melody and lyric pushing one another forward with such driven conviction.

Rarely is such rich and dripping style as intricately tangled in such an explicit text. Generally the songwriter starts with one and gestures toward the other: the melody takes primacy or the lyrical contents do instead. But once one is established, some small concessions are made toward the other, coherence and style ending up in an uneasy truce for the sake of the song.

But throughout this superb Peace De Résistance album, melody and message are either manifested simultaneously into the world fully formed or have been spliced apart repeatedly and rearranged back together in a kind of exquisite corpse of composition, obstructing any easy tracing of the lineage. However it happens, the delivery and production combine for the tracks to feel like an organic force of nature, the collusion obscuring the craft and leaving only an elemental entity to admire.

There is little room for misinterpretation, the many thesis have been clearly nailed. There is much disillusionment and a great detailing of the current external perfidies. We are entering an era of ideologies after a prolonged period of holy-admiration for markets. And in this moment it is refreshing to see such disgust for false impressions appear alongside a great appreciation for style and texture, alchemic and melded.

TRACK | Thick Shakes – Friends Like These

“Friends Like These” finds psych and synth pop alive and well in the heart of 2012. Frenetic and full of venom, it’s composed of much good garage rock tones and texture. After the requisite feedback and count-off, the track promptly hurtles forward with conspicuously limited relent.

Fusing together in an abiogenesis of noise, the reverb becomes an instrument itself. A beachhead of melody is quickly established and familiarized through repetition. Nothing overstays. In the sub-2-minute run-time, most effort is spent building our amusements into monuments, decorating, and then deconstructing them.

The plate tectonics shift. A tidal wave rises from the sea to vanquish the invading army. The cassette remains buyable from Aurora7 records via the Bandcamp.

TRACK | Paper Lady – EVE

With much cool and cutting tone about its meteoric structure, “EVE” is a new dream pop / freak folk single from Allston Mass.’ Paper Lady. In it the tale of Eden and the subsequent expulsion is told from Eve’s perspective.

All these fables were pruned and bludgeoned a hundred times after their invention, in translation, misremembrance or intentional contortion, before later stagnating in the evidentiary locker of print and given the illusion of hallowed perpetuity.

The generally agreed upon narrative by authorities features an array of unjust hierarchies ripe for reassessing. The track provides one entry toward a well overdue investment of agency, and with enough style and conviction for a convincing telling. Deft and deliberate, its value is in the considered application of defiance, the stylistic glint and gale of the production, and the inherent virtue of unlearning the lie.

There is much great attention to detail in the production, piercing synth and strings along with carefully incorporated chirps of birdsong in the field recorded elements. An expertly phased and delivered vocal hard cap lands and the end of the verses like lightning and leaves you in an unanticipated sort of awe.

Its lineage is situated in the pantheon of rich parables and commiserations. In both the storytelling and tones the track is reminiscent of some greats within the folk rock genres like Diane Cluck, Townes Van Zandt, and Amy Annelle. There is the feeling of a prairie reframed through the grand metaphor, or a woodland cracked from the frame and wound around your finger.

There are available to us innumerable lies primed for decoding. If we’re going to continue living in these myths, the culture must be malleable. The track provides a good example of the ongoing negotiations resultant from our declining tolerance for the sheer brutality of the world and all its flagrant hypocrisy and pretense. It is a small but welcome offer of a course correction.

TRACK | Noun Verb Adjective – Skinsuit

“Skinsuit” is from Noun Verb Adjective’s Deluxe expanded edition of Boys in the Sand, entering the track list right where the prior record left off. A summery collapse of a track that appends the already dauntingly great EP.

It’s genre is foremost experimental lo-fi and noise pop. And while playfully constructed, it’s still subservient primarily to the strong, underlying melodies of the lead guitar and vocals.

Field recording elements adjust the scope to further break the medium and open new avenues of meaning. It is an intricate series of subsections, and there’s much auditory creative problem solving as a creative act. Indebted to and inspired by tradition but a bit bored of it also, the track is inventive and gently disorienting.

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