Category: post-punk

TRACK | Aloha Units – Mate’s Machine

5/5 golden merles

From Sydney at some point in the last decade, Aloha Units “Mates Machine” is off a 4 track tape of the same name. It is post-punk/diy/lo-fi, and a bit of all the things that are nice according to my subjective yammering and murmuring.

It would be hard to find a better example of a phrase I use as a mantra for both the making and assessing: control achieved through a willing proximity to its loss. Guitars scritch in heaping variables of concerted noise and two drum lanes pace the undertone. The squashy sprawl of the track is composed of a gentle thundering.

If you’re acclimated or accustomed to it, there’s a great deal of nuance to the edifice and its architectonics. It’s one a hell of a Hans Sprungfeld of a tune. And what I want to say, what I’m telling you now, is that Jebediah is really great.

In the petty amount of google searching I did for this post I was very excited to find Finley’s more recent work in anti-folk form as VIPP and, alternatively, synthwave focused with Sex Tourists. And really look forward to diving in when there is a moment to breath or look.

TRACK | Natural Causes – Like It Should

5/5 golden merles

“Like It Should” is contemplative but also contains a fair amount of the threatening. Not ‘fair’ in the sense of ‘significant’ or ‘considerable.’ But ‘fair’ in the moral sense, it contains the right amount of the ominous and the foreboding.

There is here an equitable offset of the well-reasoned to the kinetic. It has a the sense of the analytic in concert with the rapturous and the enraged, to the refined degree that you get from the Fugazis, the Protomartyrs, and the Oughts of the earth; the ilk who balance the conscientious along with a call to action.

The old man says “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” But why not some fairer balance? There can be a great and good register of the lashing and the misgiving in equal measure. And we can instead unite in that searching, more certain and assured after, with all the conviction that commiseration allows.

TRACK | Bad Deals – Paint

5/5 golden merles

Recalling the careening melodies and cutting guitar riffs of Women at their best, “Paint” is a stunning track from Boston’s Bad Deals.

The vocal layers agreeably proffer through and alongside the rampant lead guitar, hectic and harboring great detail. In the unfolding events it is clear that there was great care put into the balance of the soundscape.

That I am the incalculable dullard writing about this good work, presently more fixated on personal creation than curation, seems undeniably cruel.

“Paint” is one of those bandcamp gems that is another in the series of deeply concerning by it’s so-far limited fanfare. That something this well realized and refined lacks an audience is very frightening. It seems a logical step from greatly loved traditions. The algorithm at play hasn’t figured out yet how to read these things properly and deliver them to those who would immediately appreciate them.

TRACK | Protomartyr – How He Lived After He Died

5/5 golden merles

With “How He Lived After He Died” we have another finely tuned and balanced appreciation for content and form. Protomartyr have done it enough that at this point it does not appear to be a mistake. There’s clearly premeditation.

The ironically named All passion no technique is yet another (and the original) entry in which Protomartyr manages to properly render human expression in a compelling and expert manner.

“How He Lived After He Died” is another rendition that does justice to their own source material, a debt that always seems to perpetually reemerge with each rendering.

Apparently 21 songs were recorded in four hours and this was one of them. A fact that is at least as frustrating as it is impressive.

Being the 10th track of 17 feels buried, but in a good way. That is a confident placement for something this great.

TRACK | Real Numbers – Only Two Can Play

5/5 golden merles

Find a way / to get away

With a tambourine of broken glass and a guitar hook like a beacon of light, we are graciously called to appreciate this post-punk pop tune. Reverb, cooing backing vocals, a moderately dread-filled recollection: nothing not to like.

Master rang / be back today
Busy yourself or be put on the shelf

There is a kind of artificial simplicity and directness involved in the testament, casual in its conveyances.

But it playfully strikes at the core of ones existence with its fidelity to the archival fermenting, the building and/or glacial erosion of the heart.

It is a catalog of the repetitions as opposed to the punctuations and the extremities, those are the aberrations. Logged here are the days in between that more accurately represent the whole.

TRACK | DRAGGS – HEARSE

5/5 golden merles

DRAGGS makes reliably filthy lo-fi garage punk from the Australian Gold Coast. In writing about this now I have realized there was a 5th record released in 2019 on Slime Street, surely full of muck that I’m very happy to dive into.

HEARSE is a bludgeoning. It is regularly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerable to most fans of the broader genre. But it is always returning, beat from beat, to it’s foundation, a finely honed structure underneath the apparent liberties taken with form.

TRACK | King Tears Mortuary – Crash Report

5/5 golden merles

From King Tears Mortuary’s 2012 Safe Sex 7″, Crash Report is a track on that very fine EP.

There is a somewhat broadly shared Australian sentiment around lo-fi garage and bedroom rock that I find very agreeable. Or did, of a certain era, maybe it has passed. The internet makes all this seem eternal.

But from a population of 25m (15m less than California) there is a pervasive consensus about what guitar-music should prioritize closer to my own predilections. And the quality dispensed by this culture seems disproportionate in the extreme.

Maybe we are both just defective/mutated in a similar manner.

KTM here deliver some undeniably pointed melodic hooks and fun/inventive lyrically playful phrasing such as “light of my life goes on and off.”

TRACK | The Mallard – A Form of Mercy

5/5 golden merles

One of the 24 albums I own is The Mallard’s Yes on Blood. But this might be my favorite track that they put out, and it is from the second Castleface Records album Finding meaning in Deference.

In A Form of Mercy there is a good kind of haunted harmony that has been fused together in fuzz. It rides a balance of coherence that endearingly draws one in. It is just decipherable enough to know that you have been warned.

It is a shame they don’t make music anymore but maybe they do under another name I don’t know, or maybe they’re happy in their undoing or otherwise agreeably tasked. We are fortunate to have these two sets.

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.”