Category: Rock

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – City of Electric Light

5/5 golden merles

In 2008 I was working for Democratic Party as a field organizer on a couple of campaigns for congress and governor, but also in support of one particular presidential candidate that purported to offer hope and/or change.

I had free housing and ~$300 a week in exchange for my labor of 16 hours a day. This comes out to somewhere in the region of $3/hour before taxes. Once I tried to buy one of the regional organizers a beer and he said, “Don’t be insane, I know how much you make.” I was 22 and looked 16, but for an awful, awful beard. I was a terrible public speaker.

Soft Airplane was my reliable soundtrack for driving down from the volunteer-housing mountain-hill every morning, winding off to our shared office in downtown Madison, Indiana. The songs are deeply tied to this moment of relative youth and although I love them they are a little painful to revisit.

We were clearly on the side of good and decency, it seemed to me. The moment appeared full of potential. The technically anti-war, pro-healthcare candidate was about to win a landslide national election.

This was before the military surges, the corporate bailouts, the drone assassinations, the heritage foundation healthcare plan, the squandered supermajority, the absolved Iraq war criminals, and all the other weak-willed incrementalism that damned us and continues to provide momentum for the ongoing backlash.

I didn’t know then what Adolph Reed had accurately assessed in 1996, over a decade prior:

“…a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future… We have to do better.”

I am both somewhat nostalgic for this sense of purpose and opportunity in youth to fulfill it and ashamed of it, the actual legacy and faith in a couple of morally compromised figureheads. I am also ashamed that I made a lot of good friends that I immediately lost contact with after the election. I will hope to do better going forward and continue to relish the capacity for change.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

5/5 golden merles

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | Alex Bleeker and the Freaks – Animal Tracks

5/5 golden merles

Within this track wailing guitar and scenic songwriting establish a qualitatively good mood. It’s a good track for fleeing, for a post-reckoning scenario in which a new beginning seems to form just around the bend or maybe on a bridge that feels-to-form underneath you from thin air.

It makes me feel ways about things and nostalgic for a past I didn’t live.

I cleaned out a lot of books from the office today and wedged them into an already overburdened bookshelf instead. But one I kept in here was Ernest Becker’s posthumous Escape from Evil. In this section on page 64 he begins by quoting Rank:

“‘Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over… immortality,’ If anyone doubts this, let them try to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History then can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for death. Or, more momentously, all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life.”

So, it is good work then when you can transport this through a song, or a piece of it, the afternoon or the imagined afternoon.

TRACK | The Cowboys – Hands of Love (Around My Throat)

5/5 golden merles

As I write this there we’re just shy of half a million confirmed daily cases of the virus known as “Covid-19.” Yes, that was technically several days ago, maybe that number has subsided or doubled by now, easily either. This Blog is prepared beforehand though it doesn’t seem like it.

Point is, given the holiday, that’s a lot of loving hands around a lot of throats.

To make this review more about me, I’ve started to collect low-dollar records that I love/find online. Trying to buy them directly from the artist or label is the way to go, 100%.

But sometimes you miss a release by a hundred or so years and everyone related to it are dead. In this case, you must go to discogs and pay several pennies to have your media mail chucked into the holiday delivery truck and driven across the plague ravaged nation to your door.

The Cowboys are from Bloomington, IN, the home of both midwestern crap rock and my alma mater. Hands of Love, Take me back, Prized Pig, Negativity Scene, Like a Man, Say Hello to the Sun (For Me)… there’s no shortage of quality here. It’s easily one of the best records of whatever year it came out, 2017 I guess.

TRACK | Julia Shapiro – Wrong Time

5/5 golden merles

Some are buoyed by commiseration, while others feel expressions of despondency, however melodic and articulate, an anchor on their otherwise relatively elevated existence. Down to the ‘biggest lie’ tribute, you probably already know which way you feel by now.

I am in the former camp described above and appreciate the well-crafted confessional. There are what seem like eons in which my own attempts at articulation can only occupy the space of “musings and broodings on why it is I can’t create.”

And that contradiction at least keeps things moving or maintains “the act of telling”/creating in some semblance of practiced form.

And this is a superb track that seems to fall into that field of vision. It’s a very good track and I’ll give the album more time when there is more time.


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.”

TRACK | Wombo – Sad World

5/5 golden merles

Wombo’s Blossomlooksdownuponus is end-to-end the best full length I’ve heard in awhile. No doubt some variation of the recent singles, EPs and LPs will find their way onto the next few mixes I spam unsolicited at my friends and family. And, again, I owe it to the folks at various small flames. Go there, it’s better than this place.

There are extreme levels of grace on this thing. What a talented team of folks, threading the needle of perception, of content and form, of what is tolerable and what is memorable.

As the old saying goes, a camel has a greater chance of passing through the eye of a needle than an art rock band has of creating a convincing hook.

There is here a form of post-punk that aspires for much more than novelty or style, that backs aesthetic with songcraft and substance, using the energy in either to propel the other forward. Sometimes one or the other is sufficient, but it needn’t be.

I can’t help feeling like my merely mentioning it degrades it’s quality slightly, which is maybe why I haven’t heard of the thing to this point. But there is too much to admire within.

I have blundered slightly in purchasing the WOMBO COMBO, denying me unlimited streaming rights to the LP. However, it may genuinely be worth purchasing twice.


TRACK | cupid and the stupids – Love and Liquor

5/5 golden merles

The controlled chaos on display in Love and Liquor is a great gift. Both the lead and backing vocals are tremendously good. I am desperately indebted to the crescendo of “Breaking my Heart,” the primary melody and it’s various subsystems; it’s carried me through a couple days at least.

A recurring theme here in my myriad appreciations are the pulling together of lo-fi pieces into a coherent and anthemic whole, unabashedly taking the stripped down, dollar-bin components of quasi-functional home recording devices and software and elevating them to an effect most major studios can’t accomplish.

That’s a fundamental part of the glory of the ineffable.

It is more likely found in the efforts of those determined to uncover it through the dedicated pursuit of creative problem solving, passionately preoccupied with honoring truth and the capture of a feeling.

And every time it succeeds another gear-head reinvests in a piece of technology that is the solution to almost certainly nothing, certain that this time it will be different. Alas… that is not what is lacking.

If you’re turned off by the production, I’d beg you to listen to it 3-4 times and push through it. The greatness is there. It’s not even particularly obscured.

TRACK | Surface to Air Missive – Time Being

5/5 golden merles

Surface to Air Missive is another excellent band that I am about 3-4 releases behind on. There is an overwhelming amount of potential sitting there, waiting for me to sift through its promises… and to then provide more relevant text to the common era, and more relevant promotion for people who exist in the here and now.

But, nevertheless, one track I am already deeply familiarized with is Time Being.

And I can confidently say, without reservation or hesitation, that here the arrow of time has been captured, honed and crafted into a hook.

I suggest you go in expecting something too good to be true. I doubt that it will matter much. I think you’ll probably come out satisfied despite these impossible aims. I am confident that you’ll be privately impressed enough and happy losing track of these arbitrary designations in the hazy field of positive experience.

TRACK | Peter Johnston RVA – Chaste Heart, Pagan Land

5/5 golden merles

Let us end the year here upon this arbitrary list with an entry that features a mite less dread and, instead, a bit of optimism and indeed rejoicing.

Despite the marching, somewhat ominous build on the drummed intro, there is soon unveiled within a great compulsion to do and be well.

Rarely do songs capture this drive. It is a rarity to maintain the dramatic sense of the sweeping within this sort of explicitly declarative phrasing. And it is genuinely endearing to contain a chorus of “Underneath it all, I’m having so much fun.”

A great dichotomy there. You can see a semblance stylistically – but also in regard to content – with the kindred spirits of Stuart Murdoch and Jens Lekman. And it seems to me as though Peter is a more religious cousin of these indie rock luminaries, nevertheless politely kicking ass.