Category: Rock

TRACK | Needle Exchange – Shut Up, Shut Down

5/5 golden merles

Berlin-based punk with melodic surf and garage elements, “Shut Up, Shut Down” pounds about, nimbly refractive, mutinous. The residual discontent is ingrained in the sturdy melody, collecting like soot between the abbreviated rotary of the verses.

Having grown accustomed through regular exposure to either the empty vessel or diatribes devoid of style, for my tastes the balance of muck/bile to harmonious refinement is well weighted.

I have been assuming the title has a reference to Nowak’s 2004 book and poetry collection of the same name concerning corporate greed. If that’s wrong I’ll gladly correct and update it with some other half formed idea. Some used versions of the vinyl run are scattered about Europe.

TRACK | The Funs – Don’t Let Go

5/5 golden merles

The Funs make exceptional experimental garage rock. The project is composed of two of the 321 people residing in New Douglas, Illinois, reminding you that goodness, though it is rare in overall instances, can come from anywhere and everywhere and at any time.

The minimal instrumentation is humming and ignites in the kindling of lo-fi tones. Despite some tempo and structural invention, the fuel burns out quite evenly over the track’s 4 minute runtime. Throughout the drums land spacious and torrid alongside the lead vocal until it extinguishes upon one final plea.

In its subtlety and delicate directness, particularly the way the concepts are married to their delivery, there is present a lot of empathy for the era. It is easier to dismiss or omit the devices that dominate our daily lives in anticipation of their antiquation or irrelevance. And with that, there is a temptation to also omit the accompanying alienation. It is harder and more honest to imbue them with great style that warrants attention and then proceed to process the implications. That honesty and directness is ultimately more enduring than getting lost in abstraction.

The Double LP can be got from the Manic Static webzone. Check out the new project, glow in the dark flowers. Digital is $12.

TRACK | Druggy Pizza – Radium Canyon

5/5 golden merles

More glint and relentless corrosion from our friends at Druggy Pizza, “Radium Canyon” spells doom for us all but in a good way. Garage and psych rock veiled in withering and decadent tones, I wager the rendering of which will please fans of good things and anger or confound most of those who aren’t.

The melody of the guitar lead roams freely around the bass’ substratum, prowling the chasmal expanse. The reverb is slathered across the channels and stings. A Fender quad is purring, graciously and expertly propelling the audible tones produced by the bending of metal at certain wavelengths.

The heat comes off it in radiant streaks, it bends the light around it. It’s a good approximation of a fruitful fever. It deserves to be wound into wax, if it wants. But for this digital 2020 set you can name your price.

TRACK | Jack Stauber – Dead Weight

5/5 golden merles

The strength of Dead Weight lays in it hemorrhaging melody and the lack of limitations embodied in the core of its chaotic good. An endless series of synths rotate in sequence of killer calibration, all the way to its frenetic, gargled conclusion.

A perpetual no-skip on the gauntlet rotation, Jack’s sense of detailing is remarkable across mediums (See: 2020’s musical-horror short Opal). Also for more tunes check his other musical projects/collaborations with Joose and Zaki.

He’s been away for a bit as far as I can tell after Opal/HiLo, so, in either case of hibernation or another project patiently building, I am greatly looking forward to whatever medium he favors in the coming years.

TRACK | Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways

5/5 golden merles

One of the strongest 2-song 7″ I’ve come across, a pair of my favorites from the buildup to Alien Sunset. “Like Going Down Sideways” is delicate and dreamy alt country. It is also an expert projection of layering a demo into a fully fledged lo-fi phenomenon.

There’s a lot of wonder to the piercing polarization of the complimentary layered vocal lanes, creeping in solemnly from the treetops of hell before the chorus raises. The track also features texturally many deliberate flourishes, like a couple of the briefest xylophone or glockenspiel cameos known to man; arriving to puncture amidst the plucking and contribute just a bit more of the percussive, glinting and gleaming.

The persistent room noise in this version is lovely. This one came out perfected and doesn’t need refining. You can still buy the split from Randy Records for all of $6.50 plus shipping.

TRACK | Druggy Pizza – Like Pigs In A Slot

5/5 golden merles

Featuring members of Dusty Mush, Cédric Bottacchi/Druggy Pizza’s “Like Pigs In A Slot” convenes the crunching and crushing of waves in a not dissimilar manner. Unrest and deliberate deconstruction, it’s surf rock on a sea of molten gloom and Midas detritus.

The blistering, proximal bass synth continues grinding in perpetuity, as the focus shifts from the background grind to the central figures portrait, breaking the established mold a few times in a matter of minutes. The whole EP/split’s worth spending some time with.

If you, like me, hold its contortions in high esteem, look also into the 2020 set and checkout the handful of vinyl from the Peace And Love Barbershop Muhammad Ali split.

TRACK | That Ghost – Moon And The Almighty

5/5 golden merles

Previously I’ve written on Ryan Thomas Schmale melancholic and gorgeous work under Myers Rooney, I Hope It Is Only a Room. “Moon And The Almighty” is an earlier, coarser garage rock track. It was provided to a defunct compilations project made by a defunct label that was funding largely defunct DIY venues.

A marching eulogy of a track, it burns and it is glowing. The vocals and instrumentation collude in a fine mist of metallic static. The unraveling is a spectacle, with vocalizations cruising along it’s descent, Death is coming / To take me soon. Transitioning, the passage moves to favoring yowling at the point of disintegration, embers still alight.

In contrast to the Myers Rooney To Bleed album, this conveys Schmale’s great range of evocation; there a drifting and gilding the expanse, here a measured writhing and smiting. A strong working songwriter that deserves a bit of your support if you are able.

There’s a new 2022 split with mr submissive also to check out.

TRACK | cool sorcery – Sea Dream

5/5 golden merles

Bedroom-based Brazilian garage rock, striking and resourceful in its conceits and reimagining. There’s plenty of genre blurring in the service of tone, punk and dream pop, and all culminating in much good from where I’m sat. One of the best produced lo-fi albums I’ve heard in ages.

“Sea Dream” caps off the album and brings the set to a close with a little bit of the venom tapped, but the whole set is filled with pointed and momentous hooks. Smoggy, snarling and slick, it’s a bit melted and mystifying, with much fine attention to detail including the field recording to place the epitaph.

The weighted mix of live and drum machine is an emphatic and impressive simulacra instructing you how to build out from the skeleton to craft a convincing body of work; how to reinforce and animate the heart without inhibiting credulity. It’s $5 USD on the bandcamp page.

TRACK | TV Priest – Lifesize

5/5 golden merles

Beneath the bluster and bruised flesh it has a great heart to the thing. The drilling of those two synths into the skull, it’s something to be admired. There’s a clarity to the production that works its way into the gray matter without destroying anything essential in the process. A good balance to strike.

This is in the vein of Christian Fitness, Protomartyr, Idles, and Ought, if you like that kind; all the revelry of an adjunct professor shouting at you, and about a subject they don’t specialize in, and for your own good. At least they seem to think so. It’s nice in small doses, for a few years at a time, maybe there’s an accreditation granted at the end of it all.

It’s a vengeance pastiche, the elaborately fractured usage of language as a cudgel to get at something deeper than our collective descent. It’s an attempt to get ahead of the thing. Purposefully disoriented and in synopsis, it’s a poem. The language is essential and central and the language is sturdy. I don’t know how it holds up in a decade but I recognize its assessment of this brazen, dilapidated zeitgeist.

66 degrees and a haze today, and Subpop has delivered something I admire. Haven’t gotten to the ’22 full length, but excited to spend a minute with it.

TRACK | Wand – Flying Golem

5/5 golden merles

Psychedelic rock from LA, “Flying Golem” convincingly summons something strange and special from the inanimate. The instrumentation approximates something graceful, aloft and massive. Driving melodic guitars grind and latch to the steadfast percussion, synths delicately sprout from the structure.

I have very limited patience for guitar solos in general but this one is adequately shattering and incorporates the discordant with deliberate experimentation. Through its winding and dissolution it manages to say something new and complimentary within the context of the demolition.

Sadly the bandcamp has one selectively available track, so the YouTube link won’t show up in the hype machine. But also check out the beautiful video on youtube directed and animated by Meghan Tryon & Garrett M Davis. $9 for the digital, abridged in its preview. The vinyl’s relatively rare but can be located for the right price.