Category: pop

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

5/5 golden merles

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

5/5 golden merles

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | The Cowboys – Hands of Love (Around My Throat)

5/5 golden merles

As I write this there we’re just shy of half a million confirmed daily cases of the virus known as “Covid-19.” Yes, that was technically several days ago, maybe that number has subsided or doubled by now, easily either. This Blog is prepared beforehand though it doesn’t seem like it.

Point is, given the holiday, that’s a lot of loving hands around a lot of throats.

To make this review more about me, I’ve started to collect low-dollar records that I love/find online. Trying to buy them directly from the artist or label is the way to go, 100%.

But sometimes you miss a release by a hundred or so years and everyone related to it are dead. In this case, you must go to discogs and pay several pennies to have your media mail chucked into the holiday delivery truck and driven across the plague ravaged nation to your door.

The Cowboys are from Bloomington, IN, the home of both midwestern crap rock and my alma mater. Hands of Love, Take me back, Prized Pig, Negativity Scene, Like a Man, Say Hello to the Sun (For Me)… there’s no shortage of quality here. It’s easily one of the best records of whatever year it came out, 2017 I guess.

TRACK | Angel Olsen – My Last Date (With You)

5/5 golden merles

This was my first exposure to Angel Olsen and I’m glad at least one track is easily available on bandcamp to still preview. The talent and emotive power was early and obvious.

The EP is a list of covers (Skeeter Davis, here) and not one of them is done poorly. Straight to mic, a handful of layers laid over the top, it is immediately compelling and convincing material.

I’ve been calling this the “Our” Lady of the Water Park EP for the last decade and am surprised to see it has none of the religious connotations to it I’ve ignorantly applied. Woops. The experience itself is still a bit akin to it, I think, but ours no more. and not for a long time. and also never.

TRACK | Wombo – One of These

5/5 golden merles

There is within One of These inventive melodic structure that has made an effort to stand apart from the standard expansion of consonants and vowels within rhyming schemes and octave shifts.

False dichotomies are rife and ravaging all areas of our existence. Pepsi or Royale Crown Cola. Chevron or Texaco. Rule of 3’s or rule of 4’s. Politically, their names aren’t worth mentioning, but let’s just call them ghouls or goblins.

Choosing one hell or the other is presented to you as though they are the solution to anything. And in fact the only available options: A ready-made shortcut to a superficial sacrifice that will show Real Results or at least delay the inevitable while we wait and collect more data in order to reassess and circle back on our way into the tomb.

But mercifully you still have an actual choice. Choosing to be ‘none’ is always an option. Opting out of these irrelevant debates/choices is very often the only way to win in any meaningful sense, in so many aspects.

I don’t know what this song is about but the melody is good.

TRACK | Wombo – Dreamsickle

5/5 golden merles

It is unusual to see musicians take from their own influences internal mechanics and pull from them with purpose, to see them take components retooled into new structures as though they are transmittable. Wombo does this.

Whereas, outside of general stylings and instruments, most bands attempt to replicate the feeling, a solipsistic slant drilling at a common reservoir. And I am one of them. I have misunderstood my influences, from an engineering perspective.

It is hard to remember, but you must play the game as it is, not as it appears to be.

Here are bands I love that Wombo reminds me of: The Strokes, Ought, Broadcast, Lower Dens, The Mallard, Television, and so on… That should be enough good things.

Here is a quote from Annie Dillard, promising alternate cores or reservoirs and the mechanisms to get there:

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”

TRACK | Wombo – Sad World

5/5 golden merles

Wombo’s Blossomlooksdownuponus is end-to-end the best full length I’ve heard in awhile. No doubt some variation of the recent singles, EPs and LPs will find their way onto the next few mixes I spam unsolicited at my friends and family. And, again, I owe it to the folks at various small flames. Go there, it’s better than this place.

There are extreme levels of grace on this thing. What a talented team of folks, threading the needle of perception, of content and form, of what is tolerable and what is memorable.

As the old saying goes, a camel has a greater chance of passing through the eye of a needle than an art rock band has of creating a convincing hook.

There is here a form of post-punk that aspires for much more than novelty or style, that backs aesthetic with songcraft and substance, using the energy in either to propel the other forward. Sometimes one or the other is sufficient, but it needn’t be.

I can’t help feeling like my merely mentioning it degrades it’s quality slightly, which is maybe why I haven’t heard of the thing to this point. But there is too much to admire within.

I have blundered slightly in purchasing the WOMBO COMBO, denying me unlimited streaming rights to the LP. However, it may genuinely be worth purchasing twice.


TRACK | Stephen J. Denning – Out of My Depth

5/5 golden merles

On bandcamp Denning describes this as “fuzzy, midwestern surf rock.” And that it is.

Well, I don’t know if he’s midwestern. I have no way of knowing where Stephen J. Denning is at any given moment nor even any reliable means of adequately tracking him to within a region of several miles. And I’ll testify to that in court.

But listen here you assembled invalids, you timeless quant of dullards, you lil’, diminutive shits: there are more agreeable tones in this tiny tomb than all the Muppet mass graves of our youths combined.

There’s no easy way to say this. But I don’t think words themselves can do the track justice, I’m sorry. You’ll just have to listen to it, there’s no way around it.

TRACK | cupid and the stupids – Love and Liquor

5/5 golden merles

The controlled chaos on display in Love and Liquor is a great gift. Both the lead and backing vocals are tremendously good. I am desperately indebted to the crescendo of “Breaking my Heart,” the primary melody and it’s various subsystems; it’s carried me through a couple days at least.

A recurring theme here in my myriad appreciations are the pulling together of lo-fi pieces into a coherent and anthemic whole, unabashedly taking the stripped down, dollar-bin components of quasi-functional home recording devices and software and elevating them to an effect most major studios can’t accomplish.

That’s a fundamental part of the glory of the ineffable.

It is more likely found in the efforts of those determined to uncover it through the dedicated pursuit of creative problem solving, passionately preoccupied with honoring truth and the capture of a feeling.

And every time it succeeds another gear-head reinvests in a piece of technology that is the solution to almost certainly nothing, certain that this time it will be different. Alas… that is not what is lacking.

If you’re turned off by the production, I’d beg you to listen to it 3-4 times and push through it. The greatness is there. It’s not even particularly obscured.

TRACK | Dana Gavanski – Catch

5/5 golden merles

Sometimes the world can be pushed forward a millimeter at a time and other times a yard. And it is not always possible to tell which we are engaged in while the action is taken or underway. Further, we are lucky if at any given moment we are able to tell which direction is forward.

But at least in this instance it is clear to me that this is a fine and good gesture toward something worthwhile.

And, similarly, it is both necessary and good to proceed in a manner which leaves a bridge for those we’ve left behind.

Gavanski’s “Yesterday is Gone” contains a lot of bridges forward. Catch, One by One, and Good Instead of Bad all have featured on a variety of mixes, and I am very much also looking forward to her output [[[going forward]]].