Category: post-punk

TRACK | Peace De Résistance – Boston Dynamics

5/5 golden merles

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 | 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 | Perpetual Ritual – Perpetual Flood

5/5 golden merles

Seattle’s Perpetual Ritual have made a track of grinding gears and muted fireworks. A death rattle of a drumkit keeps the tempo for the mélange of blur and buzz.

Two rhythm guitars sit on either side of the channels and simulate the flood in all its perpetuity. The geographic configuration alters, leaving the deluge and a first-hand tale of adaptation for those that remain to hear and tell it.

The myths don’t do it justice; all the tired misinterpretations of nature’s intentions. It happened and here is the evidence, ready to be passed down and mangled and misread.

Temporarily, anyway. Until the Bandcamp servers rust or are willfully redacted. And the WordPress isn’t renewed for lack of funds. And the Wayback Machine shutters, and the google cache expires. And all the digital foundations that seemed fairly sturdy for a generation cruelly wash the thing away again.

But for a couple more minutes or years you can hear it on the Skrot Up page just over yonder.

TRACK | Andrew Jackson Jihad – Temple Grandin

5/5 golden merles

“Temple Grandin” is one of the finest lo-fi pop openers of the common era. The track combines a chorus-refrain of “find a nicer way to kill it” with a vibrant series of industrial-grade hooks.

Throughout the verses, individuals whose origins set them apart from the civilizations in which they find themselves (Stevie Wonder, Temple Grandin, Helen Keller) are celebrated for their efforts to overcome this apparent gulf.

Beyond that, each individual’s outsider perspective provided them with a greater appreciation for the hypocritical cultural and structural faults present within the larger in-group. And each acted heroically, with decency and moral courage in the face of possible further ostracization, in an effort to improve the conditions they observed.

There is no singular map, each persons route is different, but there are others who have demonstrably trekked great distances, decently, without forfeiting their humanity.

in the days before the damage
human beings were the ones
that did the chasing


TRACK | Pile – No Hands

5/5 golden merles

Pile makes a kind of post-punk rock that feels to me like pure commiseration. The work fruitfully balances the lyrically introspective with a to-life-scale ominous and sweeping dread, often riding a wave of mounting instrumentation. And, importantly, there always remains an untouchable, defiant core.

The chorus of “No Hands” is a melody applied to a somewhat recontextualized quote from Voltaire and a tremendous line in its own right:

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.

The line is critical and humorous in both its origin and repurposing. The song is picking up a dialogue that has been largely dormant or at best quietly admired for three hundred years. And it is done in a type of refined media that feels worthy of contributing to the earlier discussion, expounding on it, and, even in agreement, allowing “the musician” (even one immensely aware of the limitations of their medium) to reply in some format.

It places a sort of self-loathing in a broader historical context, contrasting it with nevertheless undeterred artistic ambition, and revels in these contradictions of self-expression. And in this work you get a piece that celebrates all the doubt and glory of ever doing anything. All that adds up to feeling quite a lot bigger than most songs of any given genre.

In my ignorance, I didn’t know how well beloved these folks were, as this track was my first exposure. But seeing the support on Bandcamp is comforting and reassuring. It’s an incredible closer.

TRACK | The Numerators – Dead

5/5 golden merles

“Dead” is Psych-Surf circa 2013. With a loping start that builds into a veritable gallop, the essential elements of the genre are soon assembled into a, to mix the metaphors, well-earned avalanche. Why didn’t I just say stampede, hm? No.

A little hard to place in the homestead: maybe equal parts garage and bedroom. It features a bit of the grit and pulp of either.

Full of texture and heart in a way that resonates with my cultural conditioning, the track reverberates in the manner only matter can seem to muster. By which, to add to the confusion, I mean energy condensed to a relatively slow vibration. But, fortunately, its output is one within the audible range of our lowly species, the decline of which the song itself laments and celebrates in equal measure.

When it pours from the speakers there is a comforting nuance to the noise, the distinction a product of tens of thousands of hours you and I have spent consuming similar external stimuli. And within all that experience, narrowing and selecting, “Dead” is plotted within the very narrow percentage of what I arbitrarily consider to be Good. Credulously, gullibly, naïvely I take it to be an earnest testament. And if it isn’t, so what?

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 | 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 | Sneers. – Black Earth Shining

5/5 golden merles

From Rome via Berlin, Sneers. “Black Earth Shining” is a track of woe and woah. What a terrible sentence! But nonetheless true. Nonetheless, accurate. It is morose and glowing.

The singular note and choral monosyllabic chant transubstantiate the early soundscape, teasing the tattered and triumphant. The minimal but staggering instrumentation is soon accompanied by a raw and irrefutable vocal delivery. Ossified and merciless it proceeds in a manner reminiscent of our dear friend Tom Waits at times, in form but also the play with melodic structure and of the appropriately designated repetitions within it.

This is some very keenly constructed hybrid of anti-folk partnered by the tone of doom-core. It is a rarity to find this level of clarity and simmering rage properly incorporated and articulated. It normally vents into another form or genre, and it is more than a little refreshing to find it refined in this manner. Grim, gnarly and a lot of fun.

TRACK | EULA – I Collapse

5/5 golden merles

Foreboding and uproarious, EULA’s “I Collapse” kicks. The oscillating vocals unnerve and taunt around a gloom-core structure of perpetual/grinding bass. In this internet dipshit’s humble opinion, it’s great.

Structurally the thing has more than a few asides which all conspire and compile credibly. The kinetic has been captured pretty well intact. It is always eroding and disintegrating but in a stable sample both capable and worthy of study.