Category: Singer-Songwriter

ALBUM | The Lentils – Brattleboro is Flooding

5/5 golden merles

Brattleboro is flooding is one of my favorite albums of the last decade.

Sweet Disease is one of the finest tracks of that admirable set. Although it feels like the dawn rising, it is the 2nd to last song on the album. Not a bad way to end: a beginning factored in, locked and loaded. Something to remember and maybe clumsily burglarize.

Csehak has written many rich and originative lines in his time occupying space on this earth and more than a few of them found their way into this album.

“You gotta hand it to the other side / at least they’re forgiven.”

Other standout tracks are I lost my favorite enemy, a theory of drowning, and brattleboro is flooding.

These fine young thugs have found their way onto most mixes I have made over the last few years. The Heart is a lonely Mangler (Botanical Castings) and The Loaves of Oblivion (11 new flavors of oblivion and why the shining ones don’t want you to know about them) will feature on this archive at some point soon, if I am to continue having these things appear daily.

TRACK | Lean Year – Come and See

5/5 golden merles

It is within our capacity to build better worlds.

This is a song that encourages this practice, implores a reassessment of unjust hierarchies, and seems to reference one of the greatest films ever made, Elem Klimov’s Come and See.

“Fuck off, the old world.”

With a rich and subtle arrangement, Lean Year provide a good base for reinvention. Like Adam Curtis in Can’t get you out of my head: This entry is not the vision but a request for one.

The song is a precursor to the vision, but nonetheless a necessity, a rebuff, and a necessary bridge to what is coming. A good prompt and great entreaty.

TRACK | The Baptist Generals – Going Back Song

5/5 golden merles

There are two excellent renditions of this song on No Silver / No Gold. The other is a better single, but the version included below from the end of the album is preferred.

“Has anybody seen my bag / it’s the one I put together for the leaving”

This is what folk/americana could be and should be known as: all the layers of grit, complexity, simplicity, and directness. A unique and passionate delivery, playful and apocalyptic.

And just the one long note on the organ, putting Iggy to shame; making him out to be an overachieving opportunist for all those additional percussive hammerings.

TRACK | Frankie Traandruppel – The Darkness (comes to town)

5/5 golden merles

A great, soundly built garage rock track, strumming and bashing about over the tapes sturdy hiss. When the organ arrives to accompany the chorus you know you’re in good hands for the remainder.

The vocal and audio peaking is skillfully used for intensity, never overstepping into painful or distracting but instead gracefully bracing itself off of this ceiling.

If I had five golden merles to give I would give it five golden merles.

TRACK | Cindy Lee – Heavy Metal

5/5 golden merles

Cindy Lee’s Heavy Metal is an exemplary track for conveying that lo-fi does not have to mean anti-lush or lacking in vibrancy.

There is great richness and subtle hooks everywhere here, built into the vocal melody and the winding bass. The drum fills and phasing between segments are pristine and luxurious set pieces.

It’s all pretty captivating and contorts the space of any room into which it is freed.

Find further spectral ache and alchemy at the bandcamp.

TRACK | Amy Annelle – Miss it more than you know how

5/5 golden merles

Amy Annelle is a national treasure, albeit a Texas-based one so it’s a bit of a gray area.

In the alternate timeline in which Bernard Sanders has become the president, I imagine she is universally well regarded and heaped+drowning in praise.

But here we are in this rendition. The good still draws to it the good, but with slightly less gravity.

Regardless, The Cimarron Banks is a great album. The opening title track, the hellhound’s address, wounded man, forever in-between, and Miss it more than you know how, here featured, are all noteworthy achievements in songwriting and performance.

Annelle offers first-rate lyrical content interwoven with enduring melodies and an extremely technically accomplished delivery that is not stripped of character and nuance but rather plastered in them. It is difficult to ask for more than this.

TRACK | Teenage Burritos – Kamikaze

5/5 golden merles

San Diego’s Teenage Burritos 2016 s/t has much good within it.

The standout tracks for me are Prom Song and the one rated here/posted below, Kamikaze. But the whole thing is so fluent in building convincing garage rock fragments that it appears effortless.

A real compelling alchemy of elements, dodging and compiling. I prefer this version featuring Andreas from Holograms to the other two listed on their bandcamp:

TRACK | Windowsill – Blue Sky

5/5 golden merles

Even given the perpetual deluge of quality bandcamp content that no one of us will ever be able to sort through, it is borderline criminal that Windowsill’s “Twolip” has 9 sales to date.

Recommended to me initially by my internet-pal Paolo Yumol (who makes fine music in his own right), this track is sheer wonder and sweetly confides in its listener in the most appealingly warped and ravaged manner.

The strings and refracted melodic variations and repetitions build to great effect. The detailing and textures are comprehensively plotted. Its greatness is readily apparent. ok?

TRACK | Katie Von Schleicher – Strangest Thing

5/5 golden merles

Katie Von Schleicher has released not one but two essential rock albums of our common era, 2020’s Consummation and 2017’s Shitty Hits.

This track is off the former, which is the latter, chronologically. I don’t have a copyeditor. This is a blog that only people who are getting ping-backs to their bandcamp pages are reading.

The point is that very few people are writing songs on the level of The Image and Strangest Thing. They’re full of majesty and momentum and calibrated to kill. In a kind way.

She’s also doing engineering/recording with Nate Mendelsohn for Shitty Hits Recording Co. If you’re in the NY area and need such services.

TRACK | Dig Nitty – Screen

5/5 golden merles

Dig Nitty, “Reverse of Mastery” was one of the best albums of 2020.

Screen is a bit more up-tempo than the majority of the album, but it all includes these inventive, careening vocal melodies drenched in the appropriate level of reverb. The drumming pattern in the chorus is expert and perfectly arranged.

Other standout tracks are the harpoon to the heart that is “Angel Calling,” and the highway hypnosis of “Palm Springs.” But it’s all very good.

Erin McGrath et al are writing excellent songs.

Please buy them.