United States – Page 12 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | TJ Cabot – SD Action (Revisited)

TJ Cabot’s “SD Action” (Revisited) is Canadian DIY punk at its finest. Frying and frayed vocals push the needle into the good kind of overloading, while drums rattle in time like the gavel of a mad judge.

Is there anything left other than SD/spite driven action at this point? How else to summon the energy to awaken each morning, much less go about vanquishing your eternal enemies?

I found this track on tr0tsky’s punk and rock Mixcloud series “Pretend You Like It.” Ogle it for more fine scouting &/or commiserate in our collective, aimless anguish by buying the EP for $4 CAD.

ALBUM | Pangea – Living Dummy

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

“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

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 | Graffiti Welfare – Just Follow

“Just Follow” is a track derived from five years of work, culminating in the experimental electronic pop album Revolving Shores. The song acts as a recollection that is demonstrative, a lesson or how-to on keeping pace with altered states; it is drenched in synths, wringing dry the experience.

The song is described by its author, Denver’s Graffiti Welfare, as documenting a “moment of post-anxiety clarity regarding the path ahead.” In the coiled nest of tincture and texture, there is established this great sense of the amalgamated emotional space and the varied pathways from which to emerge.

Vaporous and contracting, the instrumentation rappels about the vocal core, vividly revealing an accessible point of egress. Just follow the stream / floating away.

There is an element of proactive panic to the track, even as it proffers a guide for next time. It is a spectacle of the traditionally unsung, something normally weathered and, once cleared, neglected. But here we have some aureate instruction. In the aftermath of the duress, there is a managed focus on the reprieve ahead: a welcome reassurance that this too shall pass.

TRACK | Dinero Romero – Laser Beam of Consciousness

“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 | Amy Annelle – Buckskin Stallion Blues (Townes Van Zandt)

It is with rare exception that a cover is featured here. And usually only if it takes things in a strange and inventive direction, or I hadn’t ever heard the original.

Despite being a fan of Townes and very much loving classics like “Waiting Around To Die” and “Pancho and Lefty,” somehow managed to evade this track prior to hearing the Amy Annelle rendition.

I have written about Annelle previously, and her criminally underrated 2010 album The Cimarron Banks. Here that voice and method is combined with Townes songwriting in a era-spanning idyllic Americana partnership.

There may be plenty of Greenland sharks older than this nation, roughly 250-500 years in age. But within our nascent eons, and just either side of what appears to be the pinnacle of whatever it was supposed to be, this must be one of the finest collaborations to take place across the empire.

The Great Unveiling also features covers from other greats like Ray Davies, Billie Holiday, and Neil Young, and is only modestly requesting a $7.00 increment from wherever you store the digital representation of your wealth.

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

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

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

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.

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