Category: UK

TRACK | Eel Men – Exeter Exit

5/5 golden merles

Great, calloused post-punk-pop from London’s Eel Men, “Exeter Exit” also has enough hooks to easily impale the slipperiest bastards among you.

With lines like, “I don’t care, she’s a friend of mine / lies / we’ve all heard that before,” the narrative form is constructed from varied bits of gently alternating parallax, consistent in tone and neatly accumulating. Characters and corpses alternate momentarily in the spotlight, the storytelling driving at a feeling the author brought back from this place.

I wrote about Intro / Ode To Mr Hudson back in 2022, the new material finds Eel Men exploring familiar forms. The knives are sharpened here a bit, the ethereal congealing, filed down into a point. There’s still enough grime around the edges; the same sense of decaying elaboration, artifacts pulled from the earth with the dirt still on. And the fervor remains well intact.

The immense and catching chorus is granted only twice, the authors have enough self respect to limit these applications, when surely seven or more times could be gotten away with. The gentle incongruity of strumming patterns stretching the breadth of the headset also demurs from the predictable. Both are impulses to be admired and ultimately extend the life of the thing by several hard won eons.

Preorder Stop It! Do Something. out March 7th, 2025, from No Front Teeth Records in the UK and Big Neck Records in the US.

TRACK | Alas de Liona – Violet

5/5 golden merles

Art more than anything I know allows for the contorting of bad fate to good. A negative occurrence, through studied observation and documentation, can be subverted from a collapsed, crushing roofbeam into a fundamental pillar of support, so long as you don’t give the last word to god or coincidence or whatever. The universe tends toward entropy, but we are the arbiter of whether or not it succeeds.

Alas de Liona’s excellent indie pop track “Violet” reminds me of this sardonic repartee regarding nightmares: “Don’t worry. You were just having a bad dream. Heavily influenced by your nightmarish life.”

The lyricism present is rigorously bound to the melody but doesn’t suffer from it: “Victorious,” “Curious” (in the sense of unusual/of interest), “lamplight,” and the dream-based staircase ascent all hold a kind of balance between minimalism and tactically elaborated grandeur.

The non-lexical ligatures/ligaments give binding and body to what would otherwise be more ephemeral, negative space. It can also act as a symbolic representation of the quasi-coherent language of the dream, if you like. In either case, it’s a really fine melodic and semi-percussive foundation for the work, and a rewarding, chimeric balance of design and function.

There are several points in the production in which an abrupt fade or swell emerges, synth & orchestral, and that variance is well designed to distinguish segments amidst the steady delivering of the melodic spell. That intermittent puncture adds depth to the form that might otherwise go unnoticed or implied but invisible. It is not employed enough in most other production in the name of uniformity, cohesion, or some such vile and compromised thinking.

Lu Xun wrote that “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.” The cataloging of the event makes a map and the map becomes a shared experience. The map makes walking in the woods a joy instead of certain death.

It’s a strong track of lofty hooks, offering commiseration and mapping out subconscious space you didn’t know you shared. I am morally obligated not to link to spotify, but please see the soundcloud above, youtube video, or follow on bandcamp for more.

TRACK | pH people – Film For Slugs

5/5 golden merles

pH people released a super demo in December 2022 I have belatedly become acquainted with. It maintains its form throughout, brute force submerged in a 12 meter tall wave of damp fuzz, a sort of struggle like torpor struck into motion. It is a kind of lurching hazard or volatile demystification, but still a sort of salve. Direct and effective, the EP is faithful to its own internal logic and a relief in contrast to overly elaborate rock artifices that lack conviction.

Explaining this particular kind of music is a kind of sickness that doesn’t need doing. The consistent balance of the impulsive and incoherent makes what might otherwise seem a mess into its own sort of ameliorating force, reliably adhering to principles and rules that reinforce and corroborate between the tracks.

It sounds like you’re already deaf, hearing it. Or taking a joy ride in your friend’s dad’s hearse, listening from inside the coffin through the division, the curtain, the speakers obstructing. This is the experiment: devolving to a form that remains recognizable and appreciable, a couple stages before alienation. In my beleaguered state of obligations and unease it feels pretty perfectly balance with personal failings, pairs well.

From Urticaria Records, Nantes, seventy were made in the 5 EUR set of cassettes.

TRACK | Total Luck – Ramble

5/5 golden merles

“Ramble” is rampant Birmingham-based (UK) post-punk offering a coming to terms with degrading conditions and offering some expression of our common terror. Through its intricate phases we receive a fair extrapolation of the nascent era, our present spent staggering out from a stupor in search of a few reliable harbingers.

The track is appropriately naming names, resilient in conviction, a good preface to our collectively entering another period of overdue righteous fury. There is a good sense of how things will progress, whose mistakes are forgiven and which ones are kept on the mantle as a centerpiece or conversation starter. Much pointed instrumentation and detailing throughout accompanies the excellent vocal phrasing, bleeding the blisters where appropriate.

As the regressives mourn their genocidal aristocrats and strip rights from half the population with respect to their own bodily autonomy, there is significance in creating ideologically sound tracks with that sort of anthemic prestige. Many individual’s hearts are in the right place, but they lack the aesthetic. Many others still get lost in theory and form, while either lacking courage or capacity for a clarity of language. It’s nice when there’s a balance to this weighting and each quality is strong in both respects. It can be obtained for the cost of naming your own price on bandcamp.

TRACK | CRASH THE SUPERYACHT – Sitting on the stairs

5/5 golden merles

Timeless lo-fi bedroom punk sounds from CRASH THE SUPERYACHT, maybe avoid this one if you’ve made a happy habit of spurning the uncommonly good or fixating on the dawning of doomsday. There’s a rich vein of diy charm and pop cunning to the set. I put to the forefront the closer, “Sitting on the stairs,” fortified with hooks and familiar tone, easily believably extracted from an indie 80s alt history timeline.

Wading through the windows, you’re first met with those resonant sentiments about part-time pals, the ones you can always sync up with, wavelengths and bullshit tolerances amenably aligned no matter the interim eons. I’ve never seen EastEnders or any soap opera outside of by accident and in a laundromat. But if it inspires this quality of rock-ooze, let them rip. Similarly bring on lockdown 4 or 5 or whatever, let’s recreate these ideal conditions and spawn another tape: £3GBP for digital files or £7 for the cassette + zine.

TRACK | Freak Genes – Strange Charm

5/5 golden merles

“Strange Charm” arrives in a set of consistently plumbed concepts and a larger narrative fixated on the veil, particularly in a Bostrom/Boltzmann sense. And there should be more of this in the world as we know it, simulation or other, because it’s just so damn much fun. The track is composed of sheer keys and guts, synth punk with fervor as the foundation, maniacally forecasting the intricacies of an artificial future.

In the manufacturing of a new and immediate heaven there will be gradients of adaptation and those left behind, some willingly. “Energy bars low above your head,” a beach devoid of touch: the details are effectively populated.

There is within these elements a great deal of world building done (–about world building), new classifications and clearances, presaging emerging rifts that we only have the slightest direct precedents for, despite very familiar themes. It’s full of playful prescience and with enough hooks to convince you to gladly remain and be absorbed within the futurist subject matter.

It arrived today and is fully streamable: there are vinyl variations in limited runs for $20-22 from the esteemed Feel It Records; suitably the digital version is name your own price.

TRACK | BRIAN DISEASE – no regret

5/5 golden merles

UK lo-fi punk that “hate(s) music… and will make you also hate music.” The work is offering similar sentiments to Csehak singing, “I don’t want to kill The Killers anymore / … now I know that music itself is wrong.” BRIAN DISEASE are found here raiding a zeitgeist which frankly deserves whatever pillaging and plundering comes its way.

If somewhere in the region of 99% of a medium seems to offer no value to you, to be wallowing in tradition, without invention, built of tropes and cloyingly posturing, what else would the proper response be? “The good” is well within the margin of error, the exception to the rule.

Still, on BRIAN DISEASE, there is provided an example that there remains a bridge out of the thing, the structure is largely intact, approachable and traversable. Here we’re shown that there’s much to be salvaged from the culture, even in profound disillusionment.

In the coursing and the clatter, there’s a resplendent, breathtaking bile here and proof of what can still be extracted from the old genres. There are nourishing guts in it but loose in a slurry, the kind of stuff you reluctantly feed your cat, for now. It can be reconfigured compellingly together and we can subsist upon it. Casettes out on Just Step Sideways Records.

TRACK | EEL MEN – Intro / Ode To Mr Hudson

5/5 golden merles

Garage rock goods from London, EEL MEN’s “Intro / Ode To Mr Hudson” is the very best track about a stolen credit card you’ll hear this week. The guitars radiate stunning, excess tones and the drums sculpt the structure. Everything metered and scaling, solidly worked into a nice, smiting tune.

The narrative scope and melodic shifts are perfected for the genre, it seems clearly made by folks living and breathing the medium. Thriving in the carport habitat, it’s clear across the altogether effective set and the record a joy to sift through. £3 for the digital files or £5 tapes out through London’s Just Step Sideways Records.

TRACK | Mirry – Anthem

5/5 golden merles

From the bin rescued personal recordings of Mirabel Lomer, the great aunt of Tom Fraser who found and — with the help of musicians Simon Tong, Antonia Pagulatos, and Michael Smith — collaboratively arranged and reworked the pieces. Her original tape recorded piano tracks are accompanied here by cellos, keyboards, saxophones and synths, interworked patiently and earnestly in an accumulate flood of heartfelt aspiration.

The result is ambient and experimental, delicate and expansive, a lovely tribute that is immediately imbued with implicit meaning through the nature of the finality and tenuousness of its discovering. A context we should all have with respect to all work made by other humans but are deprived of through the mundanity of our manner of existing, the illusion of the banality of daily living as it slips quietly away.

But beyond the affirming story of its origins, the work is remarkably detailed and composed, the swells and pitches elevating and conspiring beautifully across the decades. The original renditions have also thoughtfully been uploaded in their initial scope and design.

If looking for more quality in the rediscovered, see Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green, or maybe Darnielle’s Songs for Pierre Chuvin, for more inspired collaborations with the late and great.

TRACK | Akusmi – Divine Moments of Truth

5/5 golden merles

An inspired enmeshing of momentum, electronica curtailed to contain only the essential. Of a stunningly metered jazz/experimental set, “Divine Moments of Truth” stands out to me as a pinnacle of those forms.

The relative minimalism of what transpires builds into a great escape, evenly, cleanly out of its abstraction. It feels as though there is something at stake and yet remains “as simple as possible but not one bit simpler,” the energy is convincingly condensed in such a way as to warp your perception of relative space time. A credible spell, intuitively assembled, or the result of finely tuned music theory, I don’t know. But the kind of wonder and admiration I feel for its accumulated reserves is like the saying that any technology produced by a significantly advanced civilizations is indistinguishable from magic.

Arriving last week into the world, there’s ~30 clear vinyl remaining from a set of 300. Not a bad return on anything in the common era, much less a finely rendered crop of electronic jazz concoctions.