Category: United States

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.

TRACK | Ricky Eat Acid – HYPOTHESIS

5/5 golden merles

Finally a cover that looks like it was intended for the digitally ornate frame it has received (at least, I mean to say, classically/traditionally, in some outdated sense that seems reasonable to the outsider…).

When my grandfather was expiring in the hospice we took with him an illuminated painting of the sea. Originally it was displayed in the basement of their old house for a few decades. Then it spent another couple of years more prominently displayed in his bedroom at the condominium.

Maybe it is of the forest not the sea, I can’t find the image of it on my phone. The picture is semi-translucent and a couple of electric blubs light it from behind. I know it is in one of the 20 different family text threads that arbitrarily add or exclude one or two individuals and seem to be used interchangeably.

In any case, I remember it as a representation of the sea. And it followed him around for years, idly glowing. And it resembles this cover image, probably. Ricky Eat Acid makes art with great attention to detail, metering and a deep empathy for the individual listener. That he excels at the projection of their consumption is a matter of public record.

TRACK | Alex Bleeker and the Freaks – Animal Tracks

5/5 golden merles

Within this track wailing guitar and scenic songwriting establish a qualitatively good mood. It’s a good track for fleeing, for a post-reckoning scenario in which a new beginning seems to form just around the bend or maybe on a bridge that feels-to-form underneath you from thin air.

It makes me feel ways about things and nostalgic for a past I didn’t live.

I cleaned out a lot of books from the office today and wedged them into an already overburdened bookshelf instead. But one I kept in here was Ernest Becker’s posthumous Escape from Evil. In this section on page 64 he begins by quoting Rank:

“‘Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over… immortality,’ If anyone doubts this, let them try to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History then can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for death. Or, more momentously, all cultural forms are in essence sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the individual life.”

So, it is good work then when you can transport this through a song, or a piece of it, the afternoon or the imagined afternoon.

TRACK | The Cowboys – Hands of Love (Around My Throat)

5/5 golden merles

As I write this there we’re just shy of half a million confirmed daily cases of the virus known as “Covid-19.” Yes, that was technically several days ago, maybe that number has subsided or doubled by now, easily either. This Blog is prepared beforehand though it doesn’t seem like it.

Point is, given the holiday, that’s a lot of loving hands around a lot of throats.

To make this review more about me, I’ve started to collect low-dollar records that I love/find online. Trying to buy them directly from the artist or label is the way to go, 100%.

But sometimes you miss a release by a hundred or so years and everyone related to it are dead. In this case, you must go to discogs and pay several pennies to have your media mail chucked into the holiday delivery truck and driven across the plague ravaged nation to your door.

The Cowboys are from Bloomington, IN, the home of both midwestern crap rock and my alma mater. Hands of Love, Take me back, Prized Pig, Negativity Scene, Like a Man, Say Hello to the Sun (For Me)… there’s no shortage of quality here. It’s easily one of the best records of whatever year it came out, 2017 I guess.