Category: United States

TRACK | Gracie Gray – Morphine

5/5 golden merles

Gracie Gray’s Morphine would fit in seamlessly with Because I Was in Love era Sharon Van Etten. Or maybe just after, think Heart in the Ground.

There is a similar concordant maneuvering between the octaves and in moving from strength to strength as they transition through the various melodic passages.

The track effortlessly stretches the liminal space between confessional singer-songwriter and the quasi-choral, maintaining the organ/synth accompaniment that well suits either.

Also, my parents have a cat named Gracie Gray and she sometimes plays the piano. A fortuitous coincidence.

TRACK | Madison County Senior Citizen Center – Wasn’t That A Mystery

5/5 golden merles

This incredible track was recorded April 19, 1983, by Nancy Nusz as part of the documentation for the Florida Folklife Program. The chorus is composed of residents of the Madison County Senior Citizen Center, in Madison, Florida.

It is important that it was produced in the reign of President Bedtime for Bonzo. And it is a great relief presently to revisit it as something richer, collaborative and kind, and altogether more glorious, to contrast it to that morally delipidated, regressive political period that hangs heavily over us still. And still some more than others.

The choral progression builds, refined through collaboration and the variations of repetition. The choir behind the lead singer phases in and out, supporting and expanding the melody. One percussive clap accompanies the movement, through the emotional peak at the line “I never have seen my mother’s face,” and finally into the lovely field recorded context of a bit of laughter and banter at the outro.

TRACK | Twain – Nature Song

5/5 golden merles

“Look at those vultures fly, black against the sky, if they eat me I’ll learn how to fly.”

There must be a general reassessing.

the future is begging us to forfeit the values of tradition in the sake of the good, every day and at all times. To serve good and not habit, to form new rituals that reinforce behavior around decency and dignity.

There is embedded in this track a very faint accompanying backing vocals, chiming in at 5-10% and just adding a bit of nuance to the direct-to-handheld recorder operation. It is slightly staggered and suits the unfolding.

It feels like the future, approaching, slightly after and rising. “Go get ’em, little ones.”

TRACK | Video Age – Throwing Knives

5/5 golden merles

One song that I never skip when it appears in the shuffle is Throwing Knives by Video Age. It is so admirably wrought, not overly so, but like iron. I find it hard to get away from, it is undeniably inspired material.

Each melody builds off the last, including the hearty bridge and “It’s all in my head” refrain. The song is an admirable force of nature that covers a lot of ground by the tenable three minute mark; a great and luxurious thing, maybe as elaborate as lo-fi will allow without some sacrifice to coherence.

TRACK | White Poppy – I Had a Dream

5/5 golden merles

White Poppy’s I had a dream is one of the finest closers to an album I have heard. Over the mild hiss and drum, one line is repeated like a mantra:

I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it

The tape was put out in 2012 on Not Not Fun records, an extremely reliably excellent CA label over the last couple of decades.

About a year after this release in 2013 Britt from NNF wrote me a very kind and thoughtful rejection email regarding some poorly recorded demos I had sent them. I proudly showed this note of pleasant renunciation to my friends at the time as though it proved something or other, something beyond their patience and goodness.

TRACK | The Mallard – A Form of Mercy

5/5 golden merles

One of the 24 albums I own is The Mallard’s Yes on Blood. But this might be my favorite track that they put out, and it is from the second Castleface Records album Finding meaning in Deference.

In A Form of Mercy there is a good kind of haunted harmony that has been fused together in fuzz. It rides a balance of coherence that endearingly draws one in. It is just decipherable enough to know that you have been warned.

It is a shame they don’t make music anymore but maybe they do under another name I don’t know, or maybe they’re happy in their undoing or otherwise agreeably tasked. We are fortunate to have these two sets.

TRACK | Young Prisms – Honeydew

5/5 golden merles

Ever since Jon at VariousSmallFlames reviewed Wombo this has become a fire talk records appreciation blog.

In their assessing and surveying I’m not sure they can do wrong? But I am afraid to investigate further. Why ruin a good thing? Let’s all ignore them going forward, maybe cut our gains for once.

Instead, Young Prisms grants us some shoegaze that hits like an icepick to the heart before melting conveniently away.

This is also very good. It is in that style of but also adding to the genre’s goods and greats like MBV, Lush, Wild Nothing, et al. And at their best, in the balance of the content and the form, quite close to the ones you already love.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

5/5 golden merles

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | Myers Rooney – I Hope It Is Only A Room

5/5 golden merles

The latter significance of things is sometimes not clear upon the initial impressions or even after years of insistent exposure.

Years later some sense memory has attained a monumental symbolic personal value, or someone says something offhand that sparks an unrelated but crushing recollection or onrush of nostalgia.

Once I had a friend who had a Facebook page. And upon that page I inadvertently saw that one of her other friends wrote about a longing for a shared period of time, for when they lived collectively in a dormitory.

They wrote that often they’ll see something funny or good online and get so excited to run across the hallway and show it directly, to experience the thing together. But that period has passed… a sequence of shared moments that approximated happiness.

And now they can text it over. And get a response in a minute, or an hour, or a day. But it isn’t the same, they wrote, the hallway that leads out of the room doesn’t lead directly to my friend and her laugh.

TRACK | Mayge – Fried

5/5 golden merles

The literal description of what is happening here is that there are three simple interweaving melodies of synth, guitar and vocals, centering around a minimal drum track, and later accompanied by an additional guitar lead.

But what’s really occurring within this instance of high-grade post-wave sludge pop is a lot more difficult to describe.

It has been intuitively discovered and teased out from a feeling, and yet it remains mostly that, maintaining the richness and texture of that experience, reorganized but largely unadulterated from it’s incipient form. It is itself some kind of dissection of the fractal, framed.

And this experienced can be purchased digitally from the artist at a price of your choosing or bought on tape from Gravity Hill Records.