Category: United States

TRACK | Cool Ghouls – Gord’s Horse

5/5 golden merles

I am overcommitted to tasks and have not yet listened to 2021’s At George’s Zoo. But one thing I do know is that 2017’s tour tape from Cool Ghouls, Gord’s Horse, is strong stuff, wistful and warped.

Pleasing and affably askance, the title track ambles forward in a timeless sort of tread. There is a parity and tension present in the unfolding, part Americana in its pacing and instrumentation and part freak-folk in its poetic insinuations.

There is created here a well-worn path that somehow remains renewably enthralling due to the gently obscurantist phrasing and the overall loveliness of the wave-like, enveloping backing vocals. It’s an enduring and dreamy track.

TRACK | The Archaeas – Absent Mind

5/5 golden merles

The Archaeas “Absent Mind” is a dose of fiery garage-punk imported from Louisville, Kentucky. Recent P&P favorites Wombo are also from the neighborhood. But the ultimate embodiment of human evil Mitch McConnell also resides there, lest you think it strictly heavenly indie rock turf.

The track has all the peculiarities of elegantly controlled chaos and strikes a marked balance between its upfront, surgical pop characteristics and the smoldering, ruptured punk elements.

In the series of humiliations and degradations known as ‘the world,’ this can be a difficult balance to strike, what with all the distractions and immiserations afoot. But, considered or intuited, it has been achieved; the whole s/t album is great. With respect to Style vs Substance, Content vs Form, Design vs Function, Et Cetera vs Etc, there is enough tasteful thrash and tarnish around the imminently coherent core for you to invest your credulity in.

As the empire collapses, turns its exported brutality inward, and quality of life decline for us all, we’ll surely turn on one another instead of our shared oppressors. But one thing I hope we can all agree upon is that Louisville is making some sick tunes and that we’re both proud of and thankful for them.

TRACK | Saralee – The Motion

5/5 golden merles

Saralee’s “The Motion” has some immediate, panoramic, and vivid language. It is for me instantly displacing of my own or transportive to its own universe.

The lo-fi demo-like quality of the seemingly live recorded accompaniment provides both urgency and credulity as the track leans into the gutsy performance. The variable ranges of emphasis on the lead vocals conduct well the underlying unrest.

A small memory or anecdote, well detailed, acts here as an entryway into a great expanse of wondering, empathy and the unknowable. It is immensely effective storytelling.

So much of pop music is a kind of shoddy mesmeric and definitive declaration, an unconvincingly detailed and performative edict of eternal truths: hollowness and posturing. So, instead, there is a striking and surpassing power in embracing doubt and continuing to operate from a position of uncertainty. I have a great admiration for songs that end in inconclusive proclamations.

TRACK | thanks for coming – a character you can relate to

5/5 golden merles

Making music allows for a dialogue with culture instead of simply being dictated to. I think that Rachel/thanks for coming is maybe working within some form of this intention. They create adroitly constructed narratives with cunning delineations. They seem to relish the precision of fully conveying a convincing lowdown.

That’s not nothin.

They can make you out to be some kind of evil / They will convince you when they show you your own demons

There’s a fundamentally gripping and illuminating character to these expressions. It is material full of musing and philosophical brooding which provide an imaginative advising on the more or less ineffable. It’s a highly recommended catalog if you like lo-fi pop music with a narrator’s palatial scope, inventive phrasing, and a lack of patronizing oversimplification.

TRACK | Happy Jawbone Family Band – fireflies make out of dust (take one)

5/5 golden merles

Sister project to Csehak’s The Lentils, Happy Jawbone Family Band is somehow differentiated, possibly meaningfully, possibly arbitrarily. There are some things man was not meant to know.

What is known is that it is good. What I like about this song is that it is immense, worrisomely so, and floating, but may have also been recorded anywhere that is partially submerged underwater.

It has various properties of shock and shiver in the guitar tones bounding off the snare. The dual vocals overlay and waver, and make a serrated cut for ease of accessing the heart of the track. That all comes together in a great and wondrous haze of waxy and metallic tones. Bigger than it has any right to be.

TRACK | OK Cool – Self-Sow

5/5 golden merles

Chicago’s OK Cool are making ruminative and well crafted hooks, angular and blazing within a shoegaze/bubblegrunge genus.

While lyrically pensive and introspective material, the instrumentation is sheer revelry and admirably honed to a point of exacting precision. There is great density within its melodic ornamentation, and seemingly always another generous layer or accent driving the tracks metering forward.

Sonically rich, there is considerable attention put into the pacing of all the accompanying forms. The vocal effects are an early ghostly clarion, but equally laudable are the vaporous, sophisticated guitar tones phasing in and out of the mix. It is a joyous thing to behold in the headphones.

TRACK | Cupid and the Stupids – Burn the Mattress

5/5 golden merles

Having featured these gentle giants on a previous mix and once earlier on this eternal tomb, I was excited to see the new album, 99 ways to fix a broken heart, appear in the Tremendo Garaje feed.

It’s a joyous and raucous set, tactile in that lo-fi measure that puts you in the room. 99 ways is 36 minutes of the fervent and the gushing. Recorded over three days, it really feels like it, or maybe even more like one afternoon of unsupervised pyrotechnics.

Mostly incandescent, its poignant haranguing is a lot of fun. Antithetical to most music that is built to bracket advertisements, it is built with a different purpose. And this almost seems like a mistake or misdirection within the current structures that determine what has value and why.

But, knowing the dominant alternative, it is a great relief to have access to this sentiment and viscera… particularly on this day of all days. I am of course referring to the fact that it is exactly 74 days until Arbor Day. Good luck out there, my friends.

TRACK | Goon – Fruiting Body

5/5 golden merles

With Goon’s Fruiting Body, I haven’t heard such a fine widening gyre of a track in a fortnight or forty.

There is something to the incantations, the “blood red” mantra metering our absorption into the grand stream, a kind of cozy induction, in league with the frothing pool.

Gentle and elegant under the melted mix of lo-fi fixtures, it’s in the vein of Andy Shauf and Hovvdy. But also ends up stretching a bit more with the undercurrents into the psychedelic/experimental sort.

found some pink glass / buried under the deep end /
…say something untrue and kind

It is difficult to imagine fans of the genre not getting hooked on that guitar-lead harmony accompanied with this level of smoggy and vibrant utterance. Looking forward to the remainder of the release from the EP appearing February 25.

TRACK | moodlighting – Ahead of myself

5/5 golden merles

There is room on this ledger for indie-pop and twee-type rock, particularly when it’s this well arranged and strikes such a balance of buoyancy and dread.

It is difficult to form this combination of melody and malaise, at least so far as I’ve seen in my searching. And the group seems uniquely thoughtful in a timely way that updates the genre into the demonstrably forsaken but sometimes pretty pleasant common era.

Lyrically the track is uncertain yet defiant (come change my mind for me), eager within the context of melancholy, and creates a lovely space in which to brood.

For fans possibly of the Pants Yell!’s instrumentation variety and storytelling, a Pastels gleaming murmur, and in the vocal range and register of Broadway Hush/Page France, if these are things you’re eager to explore the neighborhoods of.

TRACK | Hovvdy – Easy

5/5 golden merles

The melody sprouts from the structure in Easy like a seedling through the roof of an abandoned weigh station. There is an ease and levity to the vocals amidst the weight of concrete piano and drum instrumentation. The collaboration of these elements across the soundscape provides us with an admirable expanse.

The spiraled knots in the melodic structure keep it familiar even as it extends to otherwise untenable lengths.

There is some very interesting techniques of pacing that might otherwise go unnoticed. That it is the work of two drummers seems to make a lot of sense. There are many kinds of ways to build a melody and embed it in memory and this one is both unique and lovely.