Category: pop

TRACK | Grayson Hamm – Wasted Days

5/5 golden merles

Some nights I dream too loud.

“Wasted Days” is a particularly dreamy track concerning how one goes about parsing and processing time which is considered carelessly or poorly spent.

The production summons a form of much delicate weaving and luster. Concurrent piano and guitar drawl in subdued elaboration, insulating the reverie. Intricately overlaid, wending the way forward, each instrument aligns sequentially and percussively without tangling.

The central thesis of the song concerns the totality of experience: taking the good with the bad and recognizing them as two pieces of a greater, inextricable whole. That all happenings accumulate, the exact origins of influence are not known, and our choice of actions after the cumulative events can always contort fate to good.

It’s a lovely track full of treble and tremble, bearing much quiet resolve and confirmation of agency.

TRACK | battle ave. – i saw the egg

5/5 golden merles

It’s with some conviction I say that battle ave.’s “I SAW THE EGG” is a great relief. It is a rarity within the indie/lo-fi rock genre to produce works of properly grandiose anthemic builds. And to achieve this within a 2 minute framework is even more impressive.

The underlying characteristics feel rightly justified in their ascent: beyond the layered textures there exists a vibrant language. The scenic phrasing introduces a compelling, strange, and a fine utilization of symbols, conveying some ancient accusations, seemingly derived in part from reconnoitering and part the recollection of a vision.

Each well introduced element –Vocalization, then organ, then a hook laden synth-scale, then digi drum and backing vocals– emerges in a sequence that consecutively raises the stakes without being overcome by doubt and retreating before the next tier. The song commits to this scaling, never finding an agreeable plateau and settling in, rather always pushing just a bit further into the approaching empyrean.

Full of precarity and becoming, it is a good and small wonder. The additional 4 tracks available in preview are very much worth a look and promising as well. A valuable document, the album releases April 1st.

TRACK | Baston – Maybe I’m Dead

5/5 golden merles

Baston’s “Maybe I’m Dead” is more great French garage-pop, this time from Rennes. The lyrics are speaking to a need for escape, both from the world through reading/consumption of media and in deviating personally from the tired, daily routines that arbitrarily determine every interaction.

Profuse, enchanting hooks are built within the melodic structures of familiar guitar-bass lines, which are in this case utilized to convey much discontent. While the contents themselves address a desire to escape, the style is genial and possibly celebratory.

The primary concern is structures and norms that have had their value hollowed out and appear to remain only fixtures in our daily lives due to the cultural habit known as tradition. The song is just one more means of attempted escape: unable to escape the world, an additional media is constructed specifically so that this style/aesthetic may also be hollowed out and tunneled through.

And this contradiction is an interesting dichotomy, the taking of pieces/forms from the past in an attempt to build in the present a future worth having. There’s ultimately no escape but accompanying the author on the route itself provides some nice commiseration.

TRACK | Special Friend – High Tide

5/5 golden merles

“High Tide” is built of sterling garage-pop components and moves assuredly from strength-to-strength, no sequence a weakened, broken, or missing link.

Across the soundscape the fuzz’d bass and rhythm guitar are largely reading as one united instrument, beams of the lead guitar’s higher note hooks punctuating the greater haze. The complimentary backing vocals arise harmonious, steadily elevating the chorus and bridge. The drums guide everything toward its assured, abrupt conclusion.

The song is doing well what it intends to do. If you still maintain the capacity to hear things and earnestly assess them, evenly, I don’t think you can fault its form. There is craft, well realize, and in it some sense of purpose.

TRACK | Lower Dens – Truss Me

5/5 golden merles

“Truss me” is an striking track from the recently disbanded Lower Dens; Contemplative and conspiring, a couple minimalistic elements combine to be nonetheless eruptive and properly expansive in their crushing scope.

With an optimal blend of inevitability, desire and consternation, there remains a quiet confidence to the work, blurring the line between promise and threat; or maybe it is made of either in equal measure.

This is another in the series of elevated lyrical nuance within a more traditional pop-structure, raising the stakes of the genre and embracing contradiction. There is much doubt and deference paid to a richness of experience that often seems absent from more absolutist testaments within the medium. There is within it the hope that we can attempt to properly incorporate uncertainty into our model, acknowledge both its potential and liability, but continue to engage with the world.

I also have a kinship with Lower Dens as they are one of the few artists/media figures explicitly paying homage to the wonderful/relevant works of Ernest Becker (“Escape from Evil“).

TRACK | Keel Her – Deadly Nightshade

5/5 golden merles

Keeler-Schaffeler makes often lo-fi, always a bit experimental rock and keyboard pop music. Keel Her’s tracks are dreamlike, gauzy forces and a recurring presence on mixes I’ve slung at friends over the last decade.

Previously I’d intended to feature the “Almost Finished (My Life)” demo variant but it had vanished from the readily linkable archives. Nevertheless, there is much other good in the prolific demo-ing and reimagining at the project’s bandcamp.

The “Deadly Nightshade” version listed above is again the demo or at least earlier, nascent form of the track. The track is composed of a grainy recitation of instruction over hazy layers of synth and folded tones, much luster, much refracting, and what seems an approximation of an ambulance. There exists another variation on a later album which is also strong, and which ads a bit of coherency to the vocalizations.

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 | 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.