Category: United States

TRACK | Honey Radar – Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast

5/5 golden merles

“Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast” is a rich and winding series of simple melodies, woven into a shelter, the bringing together of scraps providing a place to return to. Like almost anything good and well thought of after, at a minute in length it is almost over before it’s begun.

The rasp of a drum clacks like the sound made by the spokes on the moon lander, or the rattle of the ice machine at the in-house café of Cape Canaveral. The bass is the alternate shadow realm variation of the surface dwelling dueling melody provided by the staggered vocal and lead guitar.

I am a firm proponent of the “start small and build things of significance” model of songwriting and this is a prime example. It is drenched in style and feels like a semi-conscious novella, a dream derived from the nap.

TRACK | Youth Lagoon – July

5/5 golden merles

Posted by 73 sites that come up on the Hype Machine, maybe the most of any I’ve seen? A hit from the golden age of blogging, no doubt. But none since 2013 and it is a track very much worthy of revisiting at the very least once in a decade.

It is another rarity of the epic/anthemic bridge connecting unexpectedly from the bedroom genre. Sparse but tempered synth and compelling, refractive vocal performance build in a few huddled layers to make something really effecting and outsized.

And all of this is derived from a tale of the eliding of love or its estimated proximation, the idea of yourself as an unreliable narrator, that which is unquantifiable, and, even when it appears to be, the relative nature of all experience. Also a couple of mega-hooks that hurtles about disrupting the orbit of any nearby planets for the purposes of accumulating a few minutes audience.

TRACK | The Shivas – Beach Heads

5/5 golden merles

“Beach Heads” is a track both levitating in a vacuum and yet bound to the surf. The breadth of it’s soundscape is the width of radius between the earths crust and the outer exosphere.

With most tracks you’re lucky if you make it within a country mile of the mesosphere. Meanwhile this tune is demonstrably adrift, both pristine and coated in sand.

For the first minute exactly there is nothing but the ba’s. And they’re very fine ba’s at that, probably the finest since Ben Kweller fell through that very same aether packed envelope in the year 2000.

The views that are expressed thereafter appear to embrace uncertainty, a kind of doubt that is plotted on the horseshoe of future expectations somewhere between enlightenment and resignation. Time is rapidly expiring but panic won’t help. Calmly survey the expanse for some kind of clue as how to proceed.

TRACK | The Needy Visions – shitty magazine

5/5 golden merles

Nothing is sacred, please relax. The word ‘Zeppelin’ can be uttered, at least a few times, under ones breath now and then. Though it seems like something that can only be summoned indirectly.

The Needy Visions “Shitty Magazine” though does feel a bit like those early numbered albums: all guts and daggers, a kind of rock music that is honed from the homespun into something very special, the wavering grit and spiraled smoke emitting from a stage. Out of place but ideal.

Maybe in this telling the author is proximally more rural, and there’s more collaboration in the composition of the wailing. Maybe it is a little less otherworldly; maybe there’s some more cartilage in the coursing about it. Neither echo nor homage, but not entirely dissimilar: another kind of cathartic and good in its own right.

TRACK | Perpetual Ritual – Perpetual Flood

5/5 golden merles

Seattle’s Perpetual Ritual have made a track of grinding gears and muted fireworks. A death rattle of a drumkit keeps the tempo for the mélange of blur and buzz.

Two rhythm guitars sit on either side of the channels and simulate the flood in all its perpetuity. The geographic configuration alters, leaving the deluge and a first-hand tale of adaptation for those that remain to hear and tell it.

The myths don’t do it justice; all the tired misinterpretations of nature’s intentions. It happened and here is the evidence, ready to be passed down and mangled and misread.

Temporarily, anyway. Until the Bandcamp servers rust or are willfully redacted. And the WordPress isn’t renewed for lack of funds. And the Wayback Machine shutters, and the google cache expires. And all the digital foundations that seemed fairly sturdy for a generation cruelly wash the thing away again.

But for a couple more minutes or years you can hear it on the Skrot Up page just over yonder.

TRACK | dead katz – Acid Ocean

5/5 golden merles

dead katz “Acid Ocean” feels like the quiet rumbling of indentations bound for the indelible. We know, coming from an era of great greed that lacks any consequence, preventative care is always more effective than recuperative, or reliance on technologies yet invented, or the belated panic-trauma of a last ditch surgery.

But what of matters beyond the body, when the size and scope are systems beyond our individual or (apparently) collective addressing? –When you only have the knowledge of what’s coming with no capacity for redressing this grievance?

The track has a metaphorical appreciation for waves and regard for the intention of other waves, spilling forward, falling backward. Somewhere in the ebbing and flowing, quite quickly you’re bound to lose track, there is always a rushing and the cause is not known. If we can’t take care of one another, what chance does the collective species have. It reminds me of the introduction written by Czelaw Milosz for Kudelka’s Exiles:

“Rhythm is at the core of human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and diastoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.“

“…An old anecdote about a refugee in a travel agency has not lost its bite: a refugee from war-torn Europe, undecided as to what continent and what state would be far off enough and safe enough, for a while was pensively turning a globe with his finger, then asked, ‘don’t you have something else?'”

TRACK | The Whines – Take Care of Yourself

5/5 golden merles

From Portland and off The Whines/Burning Yellows split of 2013, “Take Care of Yourself” is a haze of poignant concerns, fretful hooks and rock conveyed in a state of half combustion.

The song contains the kind of nuance and knowing one throws at another only indirectly, say in a song, for example. It is full of fundamentals, calculated decay and proactive ambivalence; much nuance and much heart.

The beseeching or bereaved refrain is a hook itself, among many. Balanced and imploring, the track is a tined and canny document. We’ve all been hit with worse.

TRACK | Andrew Jackson Jihad – Temple Grandin

5/5 golden merles

“Temple Grandin” is one of the finest lo-fi pop openers of the common era. The track combines a chorus-refrain of “find a nicer way to kill it” with a vibrant series of industrial-grade hooks.

Throughout the verses, individuals whose origins set them apart from the civilizations in which they find themselves (Stevie Wonder, Temple Grandin, Helen Keller) are celebrated for their efforts to overcome this apparent gulf.

Beyond that, each individual’s outsider perspective provided them with a greater appreciation for the hypocritical cultural and structural faults present within the larger in-group. And each acted heroically, with decency and moral courage in the face of possible further ostracization, in an effort to improve the conditions they observed.

There is no singular map, each persons route is different, but there are others who have demonstrably trekked great distances, decently, without forfeiting their humanity.

in the days before the damage
human beings were the ones
that did the chasing


TRACK | FLOWERTOWN – RCP

5/5 golden merles

After hearing some of my own particularly subdued songs a friend of mine once told me that music “was allowed” to have melodrama.

And while that is true and a good, generally speaking I still feel that subtlety is underrated. Or that its intentional utilization opens up avenues for other elements to be exposed or focused upon.

The understated can enhance the periphery, operating as its own aesthetic that presents but does not undercut or distract from a greater text or subtext. In this way the work is allowed to fold back on itself, and, in that muted intentional consistency, acts in elevating the emotional impact further.

The works of Yorgos Lanthimos in film work in this way. All characters assume a subdued, detached delivery and the resonance elaborates from small fluctuations within this new scale of framing. Small vibrations in feeling and action take on monumental significance. The contrast unveils and heightens that which would otherwise be at least partially obscured or overshadowed.

Subtraction is sometimes addition where perception is concerned. FLOWERTOWN’s “RCP” is working in a similar way. The idiosyncratic phrasing, creeping and cooing, in either variant of the spectral dual vocals, favors the subterranean, glacial structure of the track. The focus is shifted in an illuminating manner. It’s done with great craft all throughout the Theresa Street EP.

TRACK | Jacob Beck – Norwegia

5/5 golden merles

Jacob Beck’s “Norwegia” includes a rich and immense pallet of lo-fi tones. The grit of these tones is derived from but are not limited to: sand, ash, swarf and sediment. Lacking proper facilities, I don’t know what else it’s cut with. But the landscape painted by this constitution feels truly immense, originating only from a modest handful of well-textured elements.

Sun and surf drenched vocals couple with rattling instrumentation, alchemically sprouting complimentary crystalline percussive structures. It is a neatly crafted and coarse set of molecules.

Everything wraps and warps in the subsequent reverberations, disintegrating almost as quickly as it was formed. Gliding and careening, all coherent pop forms are quickly and agreeably broken into smithereens, the detritus of which produce a fine metallic mist. After a brisk 2 minutes and 46 seconds, should everything go to plan, the form evaporates before your very eyes.

With lead guitar-strings like filament for refracted light, load up the track with your woes rattling around your head and shortly thereafter you’ll have them promptly sorted; less by way of a wash and more a sort of grind and polish. Well forged, “Norwegia” is a real fine track that brings Beck’s First Collection to a close.