Category: Rock

TRACK | Quasi – In The First Place

5/5 golden merles

Quasi’s “In The First Place” is a harried track about the shifting of perceptions, time’s capacity for altering values and melting dreams into mud. It is plainly spoken and pursuant to the mounting dread.

The rocksichord and strings loiters about craning their necks at the existential crash. The drums shatter and shrapnel about the air. I like the way it all feels, and admire all that undergirds the summoning and conveyance of this doubt. It’s a great and hearty disillusionment, a compassionate ache.

In the lyricism we find that the novelty of any given thing fatigues rapidly, each goal is met with either a prompt dismissal of significance or the unraveling of imposter syndrome. If one set is achieved, the next must be focused upon. Even after a series of unqualified successes, there is always the proving, temporally, that you haven’t lost it, that you can still do what was previously accomplished. I don’t know of a practical solution for this, but its lovely commiserating.

TRACK | Nick Normal – Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)

5/5 golden merles

Dense and quietly devastating garage pop from Portland, Nick Normal’s “Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)” opens with a David Lynch cameo and proceeds to bludgeon you with an inventive dredging of the interpersonal.

Lie to yourself / But please don’t ever lie to me

There’s a lot of rich, orthogonal storytelling put to work compiling an era, moving with assurance through the sequential reminiscences. Parsing the pastiche, it covers more ground than seems intuitively possible. The zonal telling is clobbered by some masterfully metered lo-fi tones.

TRACK | Guided by Voices – You’re Not an Airplane

5/5 golden merles

Dayton rockers GBV even further stripped down here, just Pollard and piano on this lovely quasi-lament. The pathos is insurmountable, coming in waves from the fluctuations of the tape deck, and early and then late in the noise, some squeaking that might be crickets or a rotary winding.

It’s very effective. At 33 seconds in length, a formidable track to cap off the album. It feels like an ode to the rust belt (At this point, maybe not then / maybe even then), and there is an immense hollowness to the claim that “the race is yet to come.” It hurts. But also there’s some hope in it; not in the short or the medium term, but maybe metaphorically, or at least that time is long and ours is not the only telling.

TRACK | Maggie Carson – From Here To Anywhere

5/5 golden merles

Second single off the up-coming The Dark Was Aglow (June 24th, Open Ocean), “From Here To Anywhere” is Americana full of vibrant twang and vengeance. A fanged and full-throated track which demonstrates that anguish is the engine of revival.

How do I leave / if the road’s just a halo?

There is a remarkable rising to it. With much might and lightly mangled, a strong and rousing performance has been captured. There’s great range and effect as the vocal rises to meet the instrumentation, the swelling synth and glittering banjo elevating alongside. It’s part commiseration, part rallying cry.

Having toured and performed with acts like Sharon Jones, Dr. Dog, and Nana Grizol, there seems to be a quality and breadth of first-hand and collaborative influences to pull from. It is a small spectacle, drawing on some subtle genre fusions while at heart remaining in the folk-traditional realm.

Open Ocean is not-for-profit record label with a donation and gift contribution model of acquiring both the vinyl and digital editions, suggested at $30/$10 respectively. I have seen plenty of pay-what-you-want digi releases, but none yet in the physical form, so please consider supporting these Rockaway Beach based operators.

TRACK | Tamaryn – Love Fade

5/5 golden merles

A nested blaze of shoegaze tones from San Francisco, it caroms about absorbing and addressing the void at scale. We’re about a decade out from release but the reverberations are fortunately just this side of eternal.

Echoing, cavernous instrumentation propels forward in concordant jangle. The lyrics speak of a reassessment in the harsh light of day.

Elemental, arching momentum builds a resonant, sonic wave, thermal and synergistic. Anyway, you know what shoegaze is: sonorous crashing, dissipating entropy that is also somehow continually regenerative. This is that kind of goodness.

TRACK | Peluquería Canina – Hilda Zaude

5/5 golden merles

“Hilda Zaude” is solid psych-punk rock from Madrid, Spain. It’s contains overlapping guitar phrasing echoing and bounding in a kind of pop-sludge anthem.

The lyrics translated from the Basque speak of death and mourning. It surrounds you / chills your whole body / you are dead / I don’t understand anything.

This is complimented by the menacing, at times reverb-shrieking lead guitar tones, ominous bass, and purposefully dreary scale. The chorus is direct, composed of a solitary scream of “¡ahhh!”

It’s a foreboding track that also has an element of the festive or ceremonial to it, a good mix of garage and ghastly.

TRACK | Prison Affair – Nice Guys

5/5 golden merles

Spanish lo-fi texture god-ghouls, Prison Affair return with Demo III, a slick and bountiful repeater. Top tier sludge and melody worship, it is both sickly and perpetually fun.

The aesthetic sense is something akin to reliably nailing Jell-O/jelly/ectoplasm to the wall; take your pick. Hard to quantify and deceptively simple, spatially ingenious, modestly amuck stuff.

The excited and concurrent release among the lo dash fi pipeline was impressive, dropping last month across Tremendo Garaje, Harakiri Diat, and tagoschlucam, among others, to much outpouring of love. They are highly consistent and rightfully flourishing, short and detailed tracks hyper focused on quality over quantity yet regularly uploading great sets of EPs/demos.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – Summer with Phil

5/5 golden merles

One of my favorite garage-surf records, Can’t Get No has a wealth of hooks and much nuanced noise in the murkiest depths of it’s of lo-fi production.

What stands out most is the labor involved in honing these complimentary tones and the stunning results from this joy of invention.

“Summer with Phil” is quietly ornate, teasing out melodies, amorphously coagulating and decaying. The passages are faithfully and formatively statured throughout, with consistency rising from the formidable 2010 s/t.

I have not spent enough time with 2020’s Automatic Changer, but will rectify this in the near-term. Can’t Get No has a few colored vinyl on the second hand market.

TRACK | Times New Viking – Half Day In Hell

5/5 golden merles

With the proper balance of muck and bile, “Half Day In Hell” conspires to deliver noise pop rock with great wrath and fission. In this base of static hum, no melody is sacrificed to the texture but heightened by it.

Not exactly discordant, it is raised to extremes of saturation with very modest deterioration to melodic intent. Elliott and Murphy trade vocals in the haze, refining the wavelengths. It’s the best produced thing I have listened to (revisited) in ages.

After the last week of inconsequential societal response into a myriad horrors, lines like “we will stay forever for a week,” “we have done all that we can do,” “and don’t agree on what to do just to kill time,” and “we couldn’t come together even if we tried,” land a little bit differently, arbitrarily recontextualized to the present in the constant mire of all that is. But these statements remain vaguely stated enough to interpretively address any given scope of social incongruity.

It is modestly miraculous, full of fine trepidation, not reliant on habits and precedent but reaching in its forms to match the emotion and intention. It feels refined but natural and that is a bit freeing. Often when this path is followed it leads into greater abstraction that discounts melody and a greater loss of coherence. Which is fine, but needn’t be the case. Finding that balance is powerful and admirable.

TRACK | Tawings – Listerine

5/5 golden merles

Post-punk/pop from Japan, Tawings sculpt tunes that blend various rock influences minimalistically but with much warble and precision. The instrumentation shakes and severs, fitful and concerted, to great, elaborated result.

With “Listerine” particularly the track is paced in a sophisticated lurch, with many flourishes punctuating the soundscape.

The internal logic of the tactful ornamentation locks decisively around the steady bass and drum foundation. The phrasing and lyricism is agile throughout, happy to fall apart, but prevailing in the act, composed and resolute.

Unique and fun, the vinyl is available for about ~$35 including the shipping from Japan on the bandcamp. There’s also a super cool looking partially clear/cutout case for the single version, but so far no availability on the Discogs.