Category: pop

TRACK | Magic Potion – Deep Web

5/5 golden merles

From 2015’s Melt EP, “Deep Web” is composed of alt-pop and lo-fi form, all crust and quiet conviction. Effortlessly injected through the sluice of any standard issue headphones, the tremolo and echo phase about in their own time, kindly warping by its recollecting whatever it reverberates around.

After the Geiger counter count us off, the track is calmly plodding and delicately estranged. Without ornamentation it’s baldness quickly assuages any initial threat of alienation and welcomes you into this amicably mangled realm.

Sold out on the Bandcamp beyond the infinitely affordable digital form, the Beech Coma cassette tape can still be found on Discogs.

TRACK | Cousins – Secret Weapon

5/5 golden merles

From Halifax circa 2011, rumble and awe ground up in sequences of noise, Cousins’ “Secret Weapon” sounds like the lifting of a curse or at least one annulled by the reckoning.

Essentially it is rock music but for the sake of killing space and in line with the great and proud tradition of hair splitting, there are the evidentiary threads of lo-fi garage and grunge pop.

Returning to the old playlists, the track is a great relief after sorting through the protean forms of demo submissions and gauntlet of prospective tabs, navigating nascent piles mostly before they become fit for consumption. This is, in contrast, well rendered and sterling sludge.

It can be got in red vinyl physical form from the myriad vendors of discogs or check also 2014’s full length The Halls Of Wickwire ordered direct.

TRACK | Blasted Canyons – Holy Geometry

5/5 golden merles

“Holy Geometry” is an account of the formation of the sacred moon. Or, more accurately, it isn’t. But it sounds like it could be an audio rendering of some similar sort of giant-impact hypothesis, if not the colliding of Theia with the proto-earth.

After the impact, in the glut of crunch and craft, there is part an mending and part the ejection which formed the natural satellite, tilted the primary sphere and provided us the seasons. “This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

In the constant mire of all that is, it can be difficult to select what to frame. But Blasted Canyon’s have here configured a bookend of melted synth and texture, bracketing the track like a primordial swamp. Once escaped, and, if “Raised by Wolves” is accurate, soon enough to be returned to.

The vinyl can be purchased from Castle Face Records.


TRACK | Honey Radar – Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast

5/5 golden merles

“Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast” is a rich and winding series of simple melodies, woven into a shelter, the bringing together of scraps providing a place to return to. Like almost anything good and well thought of after, at a minute in length it is almost over before it’s begun.

The rasp of a drum clacks like the sound made by the spokes on the moon lander, or the rattle of the ice machine at the in-house café of Cape Canaveral. The bass is the alternate shadow realm variation of the surface dwelling dueling melody provided by the staggered vocal and lead guitar.

I am a firm proponent of the “start small and build things of significance” model of songwriting and this is a prime example. It is drenched in style and feels like a semi-conscious novella, a dream derived from the nap.

TRACK | Chook Race – Pop Song

5/5 golden merles

There’s a rotating cast of 4-5 people in 30 Australian garage rock bands and they’re all good. It’s like any crime drama show you’ve ever seen on the BBC: 4 guys and 4 gals in a rotating cast of who gets to play the detective.

The influence is both disproportionate and good, at least as far as this subject of another tendril of the empire is concerned. “Pop Song” features what guts would jangle like if they were made of metal and could reverberate audibly.

Much like the US of America, Australia has had a succession of mediocre crackpots at the helm. Nevertheless, within the music scene and across the last decade there has been a similar set of assumptions about harnessing the heart, about how and when… And the technologies available to record… And the styles aimed at through them… And the influences accumulated plus or minus the current trends, which are adopted and which abandoned… And possibly some similar sort of water table contaminated neurotoxins consumed.

Whatever the case may be, there’s some not insignificant overlap in these regards and a hundred others that output after all the variables something deemed ideal.

I suggest a reputable publisher offer me a $50k advance to sort this all out… or some vastly more qualified Australian I guess.

TRACK | Rouge – Aversion

5/5 golden merles

Delivered by Phantom Records on either the day of fools or the day of fooling fools, April 1st, Rouge’s self-titled is a record full of refined rage, defiant sludge and radiant sulk. At just under 14 minutes, the EP is extremely consistent and well crafted work.

It’s a very solid punk/synth EP. Its primary concerns are those of social and bodily autonomy and the confrontation of unjust hierarchies. I like this style and share these worries. If these are concerns you share and a style of music you appreciate, the odds are very much in favor of you liking it, too. Ok?

There are within the set lots of influences piled together from punk, synth-punk, post-punk and surf & garage rock. It is both irreverent to predecessors but reverent to form itself. The primary constant behind the curated veil are the hooks that lend themselves readily to easy piercing.

Surprised to see this only show up so far on the great 12xu and Tremendo Garaje, it’s an extremely easy sell; and the digital album is also listed at “Name your own price.” The least you can do is nothing, but it is also quite easy to do a little bit more.

TRACK | Youth Lagoon – July

5/5 golden merles

Posted by 73 sites that come up on the Hype Machine, maybe the most of any I’ve seen? A hit from the golden age of blogging, no doubt. But none since 2013 and it is a track very much worthy of revisiting at the very least once in a decade.

It is another rarity of the epic/anthemic bridge connecting unexpectedly from the bedroom genre. Sparse but tempered synth and compelling, refractive vocal performance build in a few huddled layers to make something really effecting and outsized.

And all of this is derived from a tale of the eliding of love or its estimated proximation, the idea of yourself as an unreliable narrator, that which is unquantifiable, and, even when it appears to be, the relative nature of all experience. Also a couple of mega-hooks that hurtles about disrupting the orbit of any nearby planets for the purposes of accumulating a few minutes audience.

TRACK | The Shivas – Beach Heads

5/5 golden merles

“Beach Heads” is a track both levitating in a vacuum and yet bound to the surf. The breadth of it’s soundscape is the width of radius between the earths crust and the outer exosphere.

With most tracks you’re lucky if you make it within a country mile of the mesosphere. Meanwhile this tune is demonstrably adrift, both pristine and coated in sand.

For the first minute exactly there is nothing but the ba’s. And they’re very fine ba’s at that, probably the finest since Ben Kweller fell through that very same aether packed envelope in the year 2000.

The views that are expressed thereafter appear to embrace uncertainty, a kind of doubt that is plotted on the horseshoe of future expectations somewhere between enlightenment and resignation. Time is rapidly expiring but panic won’t help. Calmly survey the expanse for some kind of clue as how to proceed.

TRACK | The Limiñanas – I’m Dead

5/5 golden merles

A decade out but nonetheless fondly remembered, “I’m Dead” reverberates off the void in a manner that implies it isn’t entirely empty.

The track is a little bit more gold from the Hozac archives, whose brethren among which I have found many good things throughout the common era.

Declarative and disembodied pronouncements are set against the steady jangle & murmur of the instrumentation. The mood is summoned from minimal ingredients, the soundscape swells with well placed tambourine & timbre.

It contains within it some infinite but oddly numbered multitudes and is, to the touch, a little cooler than the inside of a coffin. Very fun/good French pop-rock. Check out the 2021 release as well, De Película.

TRACK | The Needy Visions – shitty magazine

5/5 golden merles

Nothing is sacred, please relax. The word ‘Zeppelin’ can be uttered, at least a few times, under ones breath now and then. Though it seems like something that can only be summoned indirectly.

The Needy Visions “Shitty Magazine” though does feel a bit like those early numbered albums: all guts and daggers, a kind of rock music that is honed from the homespun into something very special, the wavering grit and spiraled smoke emitting from a stage. Out of place but ideal.

Maybe in this telling the author is proximally more rural, and there’s more collaboration in the composition of the wailing. Maybe it is a little less otherworldly; maybe there’s some more cartilage in the coursing about it. Neither echo nor homage, but not entirely dissimilar: another kind of cathartic and good in its own right.