Category: United States

TRACK | No Lonesome – Good Hurt

5/5 golden merles

No Lonesome’s “Good Hurt” offers a nice, vibrant stain derived from the guttural undercurrent-slurry of Americana, freak-folk and anti-folk. There’s a rich hybridization fermented in its depths, at least a bit of alt country, psych and pop rock in there as well. The tune provides so much joy and triumphant careening for something seemingly repelled and defined by its antitheses.

But as well it should be. “The ultimate hidden truth of the world,” as Graeber wrote, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

It is again the care in the compiling that appeals to me most. There’s a lot to admire in the accumulated decision making, investing the piece with details, small phases arranged and melding the rougher edges: the spoken background chatter around the one and two minute marks, the gently mangled vocoder chorus of backing vocals rising in support, its plumed horns and alternating drum lanes that reinforce from differing angular plots upon the soundscape. It all invests the structure with greater meaning and acts in the service of the feeling which is evoked.

“This time / it’s a good hurt… / I’ll love you all I can.”

Friends of Goon / Women / Nerve City / Casual Technicians will likely find some camaraderie in its viscid texture, winding melodic sensibilities, and earnest, heartache-hemorrhaged proclamations.

The four track digital album “Am I What I’m Not?” is available now for $5 on the bandcamp.

TRACK | The Kerosene Hours – Who’s That In My Room

5/5 golden merles

The perfect slice of alt rock paranoia, The Kerosene Hours’ “Who’s That in my Room” explores an inordinately compelling post-punk impostor self-diagnosis. The hooks are immense. The intensity of the lead drives forward the reckoning, while archival samples introduce a series of eerie phantasmal pedagogues emerging as deficient and outmoded council. It all combines to convincingly attest that the observed double life is worth leading.

Octave shifts and echo in the choral arrangements probably foremost, the tune’s construction is extremely carefully designed. Silverstein’s wailing, its range and melodic fervor, is simply gorgeous. The negative space employed and the phasing of discrete components throughout the soundscape is something to really appreciate in headphones.

During the push into the final chorus the modulated synth pulses apply a counterweighted melody after the field loop, adding a welcome variance to the crescendo, escalating the final advance, and precisely taking its own advice (“try to modify the stimulus”).

It’s a great repeater, hard to exhaust on successive listens. Pay what you will at the bandcamp, it is available at the price that you determine. For complimenting media, maybe also check out Bastie, Dehghani, Nkondo et al’s criminally underrated Gobelins short “Lonely Dogs.”

TRACK | jack petrone – pavement

5/5 golden merles

jack petrone’s track “pavement” does a lot with deceptively a little. The two chords pendular migration of the verse spans the width of the world, though its description could be of any given city or town. With the immense quality of the fine inky texture of overlapping noise you may lose a little coherence within that resonant hum, but only in the best possible shoegaze/alt manner of seeping and flooding. It’s a nice place to be, this gently discordant soundscape.

What appeals to me most is the near constant elaborations and punctuations of choral noise, guitar, and synth which offer carefully designated counterweights to the warmth and steady haze. These attributes reify the song as place, concretize the foundations, populate the landscape with monuments and working ruins.

trash is everywhere / dog shit on the ground /… thousand pounds of dirt and glass / falls in unison

Like any good visitation the stopover is abbreviated. There’s still plenty of time before the mires novelty diminishes and envelopes under less agreeable terms; somewhere safely situated around the two minute mark in this case.

The distinction of that melodic and tonal enchantment in contrast to the stark grit of the imagery makes it a rich and compelling piece. Investigate further and/or pay what you will on the bandcamp. Compare and contrast with Delaby, Takhedmit, & Giboury’s strange and excellent micro-short “Clavel Gris.”


TRACK | Goon – Death Spells

5/5 golden merles

With “Death Spells,” Kenny Becker and Goon have again (and again) produced some of the most engaging melodic psych folk around. In the elaborately warped structure you are agreeably consumed, intricacies compiling and enveloping, comfortably saturating the self without obliterating it. Some trick.

“Death spells are coming down / don’t go outside.” That’s how it begins. It really seems to me like some small banner held aloft in attempt to redeem the medium from utter ruin. Its composition and manner of maneuvering stands out like a healthy thumb amidst the swollen hand and arm and body and world at large.

Why don’t more people do this, don’t even seem to desire it? Probably because it is difficult. For most songwriters, after a couple of bars the intention is lost or staggers. After a couple iterations the melody conforms to a bare, essential framework, the tendrils and impulses are shorn and hewn for functionality, reproducibility. While writing a song you have to remember it.

There’s a fair amount of bravery to desire this type of expansion. And it’s something the maker must consider during the making, from the outset, as desirable. The risk of either excess, mathematical purity or utterly indistinct irrelevance, begs for a balance. And the only scale is an intuitive understanding of form and the history of shared forms/symbols with the audience. Awareness and ability do not often go hand in hand.

It breaks my brain that the first reviews of Goon on this blog are now 3 years old for how fresh the tracks still sound, timeless I guess. The track is $2 on the bandcamp.

If you like it, see somewhat similar operators: memory card, Melaina Kol, Windowsill. This is the direction (anti)folk should move into and a good illustration of how to incorporate uncertainty into the model without losing the essence, a bridge that has been burned but remains traversable.

Short recommendation:
For a similar level of attention to detail and world building, see Georges Schwizgebel, “78 Tours.“

TRACK | Good Flying Birds – Wallace

5/5 golden merles

Indianapolis-based indie garage-poppers Good Flying Birds‘ have released the newly compiled talulah’s tape (21-24). Some sweet and intricate rock music, “Wallace” is my favorite of that set. Just when you thought the world’s desiccated husk couldn’t get any less appealing: whammo, some real fun and charming gas exits from an unknown reservoir. Arriving just in time for whatever horrors lurk just outside our temporal periphery, it’s a great relief to me personally.

A blended approximation of influence might include bits of Kevin Barnes, Alex Giannascoli, Lewis Allan Reed, and the three individuals within the great Grass Widow assemblage. Or just go see what they say for themselves. In either case take it from me, someone dumb and desperate enough to play the lottery: we’re lucky to have these songs.

Wondering through what’s left of the wasteland, it’s my favorite thing out of Indiana since at least The Cowboys. The sequences are arranged as though a human has carefully considered them and intricately compiled their subsections, culminating with delicate intention, maybe bordering on mathrock in some of its steeper niches. It’s careful, thoughtful work. I truly wish them well with whatever happens next after one emerges, budding gently out of the earth. I guess either promptly being stomped to death or maybe something good might happen.

There’s a run of 100 tapes on Rotten Apple, $8. They’ll be gone soon. Please also see the tracks on the Inscrutable Records comp with Answering Machines and Soup Activists.

TRACK | variety – Plover

5/5 golden merles

Variety’s “Plover” is Texan avantpop rock composed of compelling narrative subversion, sticky melody and tone. The hook is a compacted material derived from descriptions of naturalistic imagery, the conflict of the domesticated and undomesticated in comparison to the authors interpersonal dilemmas. It’s thoughtful and pretty dang fun.

I need my streams and mountains tempered by the grim specter of death. Gluck and Johnson, Bly and Ruefle. Some human fingerprints on the felled log, beach towels on the bog, a figure ever-present on the vista to trample and insist.

Whereas at the end of “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” Wright pulls it all back home, a new frame, fitted, variety’s entry point with “Plover” is immediate. But it functions in a similar way. The relationship is described then promptly the tangent turns away, meanders off skyward, the footnote consuming the page. And then another. Relative to the original focus, the elaborated metaphor informs the initial concern, compounding all the more weight.

Two of the greatest modern scouts of imaginative rock have already signed off on the making, Groschi and Doyle. If you’re not already following them, what are you doing here?

The singles are combining into an album to be released in November: bandcamp / name your price.

TRACK | Casual Technicians – Dark Matter Falling

5/5 golden merles

America’s heart is effectively vestigial, the body running on delusion alone. But every now and again it beats, startling and amusing us.

Folk rock, alt country, freak folk, anti-folk; whatever dendritic subgenre Casual Technician’s “Dark Matter Falling” roughly fits into beyond Rock, these are things that exist in a state of defiance to the grotesque bulk of another definition. Please remember that the heart is also an outlier in relation to the other organs and would be considered an outcast among them.

We don’t need to retread that in the general appraisal Folk lacks self awareness and Country‘s sick bravado and sweetness makes me want to peacefully disassociate into an eternal coma, god willing, at the expense of my demonic private insurers.

But on the periphery and in the shadowy wasteland of upstate New York there exists at least one aggregated cabal of Portlanders intent on redeeming noise and structuring it in a manner that makes people feel whole and not diminished. If you’re familiar with Townes, Csehak, Von Schleicher, and Van Gaalen (North American, at least), it’s a bit like these things.

A large part of it’s glory is the celebration of real collaboration, unions of narration and melodic intentions merging. The contrasts and collisions are all of similar quality and keep it from congealing.

Otherwise it’s just experiment and invention informed by history but not beholden to it, offered up thoughtfully without conceding an opulent melodic core, conducted with utmost conviction and replete with distinct language. Maybe it seems easy when put like that, but it isn’t.

There are two super strong singles already up. Cassette via Repeating Cloud on 11/15/24. Digital on the bandcamp for $7.

TRACK | BLOUS3 – Goo Goo

5/5 golden merles

“Goo Goo” is Sacramento-based noise punk with cutting phrasing and instrumental hooks concerning the crimes of Johnson & Johnson. How can a culture appropriately reply to grievous wrongdoing committed that effectively goes unpunished? In spitting their own legalese and cowardice back at the bastards, BLOUS3 gives it a worthy attempt.

Conveying your contempt is a valuable and worthy endeavor in art as well as in life, especially in a land dominated by bribery and payoffs that are supposed to wondrously settle all grievance.

Instead of suggesting through abstraction, the naming of names is also important. The organizations and corporations that transgressed could have been alluded to here, and/or, possibly, spoken of in interviews that some fraction of the audience might have seen, having guilt implied or indirectly assigned.

But, mercifully/vengefully, it isn’t in this case. There’s a real great balance struck between the emotional crux and the testimonial. It’s neither sterile documentation nor an overwhelming howl. The excoriating is finely allotted, richly painted in tone, gracefully moving between contextual parallaxes and recrimination. It makes the wrath fun, compelling stuff.

Of course proper retribution is impossible. The dead are gone. The payout from the case is only a minor gesture, admission of fault (de facto, de jure is another matter), and some sad simulacra of compensation. If we are incapable of acquiring justice, at least let the villains be shamed and the martyrs be staunchly defended and honored. This is on both aesthetic and moral grounds a good and worthy effort.

Mixed into a really agreeable punk slurry by Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden. Arriving shortly on San Fran’s Cherub Dream Records. The track is $1 and the album is $7 on the bandcamp, fully releasing October 4th.

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 | Merce Lemon – Backyard Lover

5/5 golden merles

Sometimes the magic trick isn’t a slight of hand. Though often the case, it isn’t always derived from a dexterity of muscle memory achieved through practiced repetition coupled to a misdirection which makes it seem as though something incredible has happened. Sometimes a kind of magic is derived from slowing down. Or reexamining what is plainly visible but has been taken for granted. It is the exception to the rule but also remarkable. This is that second one.

Language is complex, small manipulations of its channels and ruts can have a cumulatively outsized effect.

In “Backyard Lovers” pauses are pulled apart, lines are staggered to warp or embolden them. It is a valuable offer for a free and safe means of disoriented coherency. The perspective shifts. The familiar is made a bit exceptional. It speaks in the language you speak, but it expands that language. It appears in a recognizable indie/folk rock arrangement, but it extends the possible combination of elements through some frankness and some creative problem solving otherwise known as invention.

Another way I find it to be good is that sometimes you can let a melody go and it comes back to you stronger. That takes some strong kind of confidence and it’s easy to lose in the process of making. In writing the song you’ve got to remember it; the more subtle its shifts and elaborations, the harder it is to keep the thread from tangling up and knotting here or there. There are many elements to this particular making that seem sheerly intuitive and others that seem deftly calculated.

For example, late on there’s an assemblage of attributes listed that don’t fit the earlier structure, compiled as an addendum between two instrumental passages. It’s placement is a little unusual, but it is adding significant, palpable depth and nuance to the portrayal of the world as it has been uttered into being. Instead of binding back into the chorus at the end and the edge of the track, the bridge leads out of the world, back to this one or another, whatever you prefer.

This song was found through the tireless and obscene scouting of Various Small Flames and you should go read that blog. Vinyls and Tapes from Darling Records, and preorder the files on the bandcamp; arriving on Sept. 27th.