Category: Rock

ALBUM | Pangea – Living Dummy

5/5 golden merles

Together Pangea’s Living Dummy (2011) is a classic garage rock album. Though they’ve had many fine singles since then, for my tastes, nothing is quite as dense with ideas or as relentlessly resourceful with its inspiration.

Maybe there is something wrong with my brain that this album remains more or less evergreen in its spinning. The variance and hooks, its balance of bile and sentiment, add up to such a lovely document. Think of how much better off we’d all be if this was what passed for a more mainstream branch of pop-punk. It has inspired many, but you know what I mean: household/pop culture level of mind-meme infestation.

It sits with Dead Ghosts, The Cowboys, and The Babies, in my memory of the era which is only (somehow, I don’t know) fairly recently being pulled apart from the present. One of my sister’s earlier memories is my mother pulling off to the side of the road to weep after The Eagles were played on the classic rock radio station. Luckily, I don’t own a car. So there will be no further self reflection on mortality and impending death.

On Living Dummy there is great value in the band’s pushing and perverting of garage rock with idiosyncrasy and heart, infusing life into the curdled maxims and anachronisms of person-with-guitar rock. As F. Scott F. put it, “It takes a genius to whine appealingly.” And that is essentially what is happening here.

Pangea are currently on tour with two California dates remaining at the Observatory and the Regent theater, then they’re off to Europe for a few months. The record is $7 digitally on bandcamp. Or you can stream it elsewhere, I assume, for $0.0014 per play, as rendered accessible by your favored cartel of thugs’ server farm.

TRACK | the lentils – dark days

5/5 golden merles

“Dark days” has a rich interweaving of language and imagery, with much invention and insight to it. Some passages unfold like a series of pronouncements related only in the context of the authors life, but there’s much to relate to within the common era as described.

Illustrative and confessional, the primary preoccupation of the author seems to be achieving a greater capacity for kindness and to apply self-criticism where it is found lacking; to summon and to wonder.

they’re looking to buy the rain
but their hands are too small
let the gods that are still left alive
obscure the fly balls

Recontextualizing these myths while drawing on the poetic history is a valuable and entertaining dialog to construct, for me. I love a good line humanizing gods in their mundane pursuits. It reminds me of another from Amy Annelle’s “Forever in-between“: your gods are tired of you following them around.

Pinter writes, “But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.”

So why not many, an array of them within the work, same song, line by line? The narrator is reliable enough, time itself is faulty. They refuse to be bound within the boring, linear structures, subverting them as another means of addressing their limitations, stretching the codified uses of language. The good balance is struck, a fun and frightful dichotomy. $5, here.

TRACK | Fievel is Glauque – Bring Me to Silence

5/5 golden merles

Gods Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess is a devastatingly catchy 2021 jazz/rock/pop album soon to be reissued on vinyl through Kit Records. There is revealed within great creative invention and problem solving, keeping each moment imaginative and alive. It’s coalescing on a variety of levels and by each player, in the language/phrasing and all across the individual contributions from the accompanying instrumentation.

What’s the use of blowing flutes / at a mad hyena on attack?

For example, lines like this are landing particularly effectively here after this week of craven madness, in which evangelical regressives attempt to drag our localized civilization back into a pit we’ve only very recently scaled. But there are many like it throughout: scathing, soothing, thermal, the echo of something that was extant at the time of recording.

And without a doubt part of the goodness of what has been captured is the live energy of the room: the resonance of the moment, the throat clearing, an ambiance of the instrumentation played by humans and within an inhabited space. The document is direct. There is a record of the proximity of its performers, their audible range on an orb rotating in orbit at 460 meters per second, and the device engineered to faithfully replicate it.

An uneasy international coalition of postal service’s willing, I will at some point in the not too distant future be one of the 300 owners of this limited run vinyl ring in which the album is imprinted. Purchase through Kit or the bandcamp.

TRACK | Dinero Romero – Laser Beam of Consciousness

5/5 golden merles

“Laser Beam of Consciousness” from Louisville’s Dinero Romero was a central piece of the last mix. With much warmth and warbling, the track is a kind of psych rock which evolves like a placid fever dream, methodical and yet genial in its delirium.

The song in no way begins to address the question of whether it’s performers are… “either people dressed in regalia to look like spirits, or they are spirits.” It’s anybody’s guess. But they are employed, with heads filled with fog and in a stupor on the trip home. A nice, dreamy track concerning how you spend your time and to what do you devote the few brief moments of coherent focus.

It can be bought for an increasingly devalued buck.

TRACK | Stereolab – John Cage Bubblegum

5/5 golden merles

I found “John Cage Bubblegum” through Carolyn Hawkins’ (School Damage, Parsnip, Chook Race) Sight of Sound Society Radio Mixcloud feature. It appears on the remastered Stereolab singles and rarities collection Refried Ectoplasm Vol. 2, first issued in 1995 and collected/reissued in 2018.

Drenched in reverb and surrounded, it leans heavily on a few formidable vocal melodies. There are a handful of phrases, breathlessly repeated in French, It’s the most beautiful / and it’s the saddest / it’s the most beautiful / landscape in the world.

As at least partially confirmed by the experimental composure and artist’s name in the title, there is an unreviewed post from Genius.com claiming the track is made in reference to one of Cage’s most famous pieces, 4’33”. In this piece a performer intentionally plays nothing, allowing the audience/ambient noise to become the song.

True or not, there is a fun dialog in the play between these two ideas: lo-fi and no-fi. One is the direct embrace of the erstwhile void and the absence of all else other than that which is usually considered undesirable or an extraneous defect. The other a form that balances leaning into a celebration of melody and tone but also in a lo-fi, human manner, incorporating the place and performers, containing breaths between phrasing and elements of performance that likewise embrace these, to some, imperfections.

The former is the absolute extreme of this idea, but for my tastes, the latter, in contrast to the dehumanized/decontextualized refinement of the last few decades of modern pop, is not too dissimilar either.

TRACK | The Lentils – some people sure can leave a mark

5/5 golden merles

I am a fan of The Lentils and think Luke Csehak is one of the best songwriters working in the cesspool of innovation that is our common era. “Some people sure can leave a mark” is a track of great ambivalence, ruminating and rejoicing in the navigation of interpersonal alternate timelines, and of acceptance for the one we find ourselves enduring.

I would settle for being kind to myself / and just once deny the idol of my regrets

The track balances the interlocking plucking and melodic spirals well with the focused yet expansive subject matter. And the depths of the topic are sufficiently plumbed: the outsized influences of some brief instances and acquaintances, influential hinge points of inflection at which dramatic alternate directions might have been taken. There’s extensive scrutiny in the musings and the introspection is finely honed.

TRACK | Sam Stansfield – creeps are out

5/5 golden merles

Carefully constructed and richly arranged, Extreme Falcon is a proper album in a manner of speaking. It is also a good lesson on how to take your influences as seeds and how to use them to grow a hybrid vision of a new, compelling world.

There is a different quality to art you not only admire but wish you had made. The warmth of the world-building within the storytelling and the crystalline structures of favorably overlapping tones, it all come across as a place well observed and conceptually rendered. Minimal elements merge together, often subdued or absent of drums but never seeming to lack a solid foundation or structure, legibly blurred and blossoming.

To put it in a kind of context that roughly approximates lineage, there are somewhat similar guts and graces to projects like Guided by Voices, The Microphones/Mount Eerie, and Julie Doiron. My favorite sequence runs tracks 7 through 9, “creeps are out,” “lazer tang,” and “company car.” The arrangement feels not unlike the honor of being forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. The luckiest of all resolutions.

I recently read that ~90% of Sumerian/cuneiform tablets have yet to be translated. Most appear to be related to basic business or home accounting, but many are journals, myths, histories… It would be nice if future archeologists surveying the muck of the geological record could favor such things that seem to easily contain within them relatable and self-contained multitudes. Black or Turquois vinyl available on Slick Rock Records.

TRACK | Crime of Passing – Vision Talk

5/5 golden merles

Geographically in the world as it has been mapped, Crime of Passing are from Ohio. In the empire of aesthetic this s/t album sits near the capital, wherever that happens to metaphorically lie… probably not far from John Carpenter’s prison island version of Manhattan.

Right out the gate there is apparent enough texture and melody to be a strong contender for the year-end lists.
“Tender Fixation” is the lead single and a great, hounding track. But “Vision Talk” is the easiest revolver for me. If you gave me a hundred years I couldn’t make a single track with this much clarity that is simultaneously as dense and textured.

The tome includes plenty of chrome plated and finely calibrated tracks. Post-punk often loses its edge and some of it’s precision in the prolonged mire of continuing to act despite an acknowledged futility for doing so. But Crime of Passing takes those tones/aesthetic and shocks them back to life, keeping the complexity of the characteristics and sense of impending doom but also maintaining a bit of fire lit underneath it.

Both phasing and finely focused, it regularly, impossibly, rides the line between both decimated and decipherable.

TRACK | The Mystery Lights – What Happens When You Turn The Devil Down

5/5 golden merles

Ambition and rock music are not two things that readily go hand in hand. If they do, it is usually in a gruesome and unnerving manner. If they do it is in a way that gets diverted into purely worshipping form and/or disgusting commercialization.

When it goes wrong in the direction of marketability, you get the generic. When it goes wrong in relation to form, it ends up as math-rock’s hounding idiosyncrasy, which often gets lost in the pattern of its own making, as ornamentation for the sake of overelaboration, and makes a game of the grandiose at the expense of all else.

Surely that can somehow highlight the humanity underneath the approximation of machinery, directing perception toward the margins. But what a lot of faffing about to get to something you can just render directly.

The Mystery Light’s have a different kind of ambition. They’re convinced of their own sensibilities, and when they manifest it is like steel folded over toward a purest form of redundancy. They find a way to pay homage and derive creative works from the primordial soup of classic garage rock somehow without that long simmering bile becoming stale.

There is invention and resourcefulness. There is a craft and creativity to the process so far removed from the infinite covers and karaoke repetitions within the genre. Yet, in an era paranoid of feeling and fueled on derivations, it is easy to see them confused for reenactors. That would be a mistake.

TRACK | Jessica Lea Mayfield – Standing in the Sun

5/5 golden merles

I am occasionally susceptible to bouts of optimism. They afflict even the best of us from time to time. And within these moments I am vulnerable to the influence of works of art that seem to represent this rosier outlook… at least as long as the craft rises to meet the exposition and there is an undercurrent of tenable fallibility or impending collapse.

I would like to see you live / not survive but really live

My first exposure to this excellent album/track was during Mayfield’s 2014 Tiny Desk Concert. Brutal and succinct turns of phrases glide over the accomplished melodic core. Slight alterations or additions keep pace with and expand out from the traditional foundation. There are more than a few layers, the combined attributes of which are getting at something.

“Not survive but really live,” it bears repeating. What a sentiment and phrasing perfectly fit for modern America, in which the living reproach of daily life dehumanizes and deprives of dignity so thoroughly, framing every proposed alternative as by default worthy of consideration.

It almost begins to break you from that spell itself, and starts to expand the realm of the possible. To utter it, at least, is the first step. Both a positive gesture and an act to set us on the path of the gauntlet ahead.

The song embodies the personal struggle within the systemic. Our institutions mirror our infrastructure. At a certain point you stop rebuilding the same flawed, failed blueprints from the same rubble, take what components you can use, and attempt to build something better.