Category: United States

TRACK | Angel Olsen – My Last Date (With You)

5/5 golden merles

This was my first exposure to Angel Olsen and I’m glad at least one track is easily available on bandcamp to still preview. The talent and emotive power was early and obvious.

The EP is a list of covers (Skeeter Davis, here) and not one of them is done poorly. Straight to mic, a handful of layers laid over the top, it is immediately compelling and convincing material.

I’ve been calling this the “Our” Lady of the Water Park EP for the last decade and am surprised to see it has none of the religious connotations to it I’ve ignorantly applied. Woops. The experience itself is still a bit akin to it, I think, but ours no more. and not for a long time. and also never.

TRACK | Wombo – One of These

5/5 golden merles

There is within One of These inventive melodic structure that has made an effort to stand apart from the standard expansion of consonants and vowels within rhyming schemes and octave shifts.

False dichotomies are rife and ravaging all areas of our existence. Pepsi or Royale Crown Cola. Chevron or Texaco. Rule of 3’s or rule of 4’s. Politically, their names aren’t worth mentioning, but let’s just call them ghouls or goblins.

Choosing one hell or the other is presented to you as though they are the solution to anything. And in fact the only available options: A ready-made shortcut to a superficial sacrifice that will show Real Results or at least delay the inevitable while we wait and collect more data in order to reassess and circle back on our way into the tomb.

But mercifully you still have an actual choice. Choosing to be ‘none’ is always an option. Opting out of these irrelevant debates/choices is very often the only way to win in any meaningful sense, in so many aspects.

I don’t know what this song is about but the melody is good.

TRACK | Julia Shapiro – Wrong Time

5/5 golden merles

Some are buoyed by commiseration, while others feel expressions of despondency, however melodic and articulate, an anchor on their otherwise relatively elevated existence. Down to the ‘biggest lie’ tribute, you probably already know which way you feel by now.

I am in the former camp described above and appreciate the well-crafted confessional. There are what seem like eons in which my own attempts at articulation can only occupy the space of “musings and broodings on why it is I can’t create.”

And that contradiction at least keeps things moving or maintains “the act of telling”/creating in some semblance of practiced form.

And this is a superb track that seems to fall into that field of vision. It’s a very good track and I’ll give the album more time when there is more time.


TRACK | Wombo – Dreamsickle

5/5 golden merles

It is unusual to see musicians take from their own influences internal mechanics and pull from them with purpose, to see them take components retooled into new structures as though they are transmittable. Wombo does this.

Whereas, outside of general stylings and instruments, most bands attempt to replicate the feeling, a solipsistic slant drilling at a common reservoir. And I am one of them. I have misunderstood my influences, from an engineering perspective.

It is hard to remember, but you must play the game as it is, not as it appears to be.

Here are bands I love that Wombo reminds me of: The Strokes, Ought, Broadcast, Lower Dens, The Mallard, Television, and so on… That should be enough good things.

Here is a quote from Annie Dillard, promising alternate cores or reservoirs and the mechanisms to get there:

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”

TRACK | Wombo – Sad World

5/5 golden merles

Wombo’s Blossomlooksdownuponus is end-to-end the best full length I’ve heard in awhile. No doubt some variation of the recent singles, EPs and LPs will find their way onto the next few mixes I spam unsolicited at my friends and family. And, again, I owe it to the folks at various small flames. Go there, it’s better than this place.

There are extreme levels of grace on this thing. What a talented team of folks, threading the needle of perception, of content and form, of what is tolerable and what is memorable.

As the old saying goes, a camel has a greater chance of passing through the eye of a needle than an art rock band has of creating a convincing hook.

There is here a form of post-punk that aspires for much more than novelty or style, that backs aesthetic with songcraft and substance, using the energy in either to propel the other forward. Sometimes one or the other is sufficient, but it needn’t be.

I can’t help feeling like my merely mentioning it degrades it’s quality slightly, which is maybe why I haven’t heard of the thing to this point. But there is too much to admire within.

I have blundered slightly in purchasing the WOMBO COMBO, denying me unlimited streaming rights to the LP. However, it may genuinely be worth purchasing twice.


TRACK | Stephen J. Denning – Out of My Depth

5/5 golden merles

On bandcamp Denning describes this as “fuzzy, midwestern surf rock.” And that it is.

Well, I don’t know if he’s midwestern. I have no way of knowing where Stephen J. Denning is at any given moment nor even any reliable means of adequately tracking him to within a region of several miles. And I’ll testify to that in court.

But listen here you assembled invalids, you timeless quant of dullards, you lil’, diminutive shits: there are more agreeable tones in this tiny tomb than all the Muppet mass graves of our youths combined.

There’s no easy way to say this. But I don’t think words themselves can do the track justice, I’m sorry. You’ll just have to listen to it, there’s no way around it.

TRACK | Surface to Air Missive – Time Being

5/5 golden merles

Surface to Air Missive is another excellent band that I am about 3-4 releases behind on. There is an overwhelming amount of potential sitting there, waiting for me to sift through its promises… and to then provide more relevant text to the common era, and more relevant promotion for people who exist in the here and now.

But, nevertheless, one track I am already deeply familiarized with is Time Being.

And I can confidently say, without reservation or hesitation, that here the arrow of time has been captured, honed and crafted into a hook.

I suggest you go in expecting something too good to be true. I doubt that it will matter much. I think you’ll probably come out satisfied despite these impossible aims. I am confident that you’ll be privately impressed enough and happy losing track of these arbitrary designations in the hazy field of positive experience.

TRACK | Peter Johnston RVA – Chaste Heart, Pagan Land

5/5 golden merles

Let us end the year here upon this arbitrary list with an entry that features a mite less dread and, instead, a bit of optimism and indeed rejoicing.

Despite the marching, somewhat ominous build on the drummed intro, there is soon unveiled within a great compulsion to do and be well.

Rarely do songs capture this drive. It is a rarity to maintain the dramatic sense of the sweeping within this sort of explicitly declarative phrasing. And it is genuinely endearing to contain a chorus of “Underneath it all, I’m having so much fun.”

A great dichotomy there. You can see a semblance stylistically – but also in regard to content – with the kindred spirits of Stuart Murdoch and Jens Lekman. And it seems to me as though Peter is a more religious cousin of these indie rock luminaries, nevertheless politely kicking ass.

TRACK | Purple Mountains – Nights that Won’t Happen

5/5 golden merles

The bittersweet hyper articulation of this track is a confluence of it’s melody and meaning. But not only the melody, some sweetness is derived from the clarity, it’s own kind of joy.

Ghosts are just old houses dreaming people in the night / Have no doubt about it, hon’, the dead will do alright / Go contemplate the evidence, I guarantee you’ll find / the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind

From David Berman’s Actual Air:

From Cantos for James Michener: Part II
CI.

The jets move slowly through the sky like they’ll never
reach Denver or wherever they’re going,

and I have the feeling that people are high-fiving nearby,

spontaneously, like a saloon brawl where everyone
suddenly starts fighting as if each man has
a preconscious knowledge of which side he’s on
when he enters a crowded room.

And this fight starts with a Polish joke that a man
at the bar begins to tell, but it’s not funny
as it concerns a stillborn child and an alcoholic
slain by the last European wolf, and even after
three hours there is no punchline in sight.

When he reaches the part where a Polish scientist
who has been navigating through millimeters of wilderness
discovers sub-atomic temples in a rust sample,
none of the men are listening,

they are thinking about their own childhoods

about the deep embarrassment of scoring on your own team

and the view from falling behind.

TRACK | Casey Wells – Archive

5/5 golden merles

Songs can suffer from overworking and mismanagement of resources. This is the opposite of that. There’s so much subtle detailing throughout outfitted to the 63 second run time that it probably punches at least 64lbs above its weight. Welterweights beware.

The cultural conditioning around genres (that I also am awash and dissolving within) here is present but the attention to the construction is orchestral and there is a rich/great breadth to the soundscape.

I am am a sucker for a bit of texture and field recording phasing in to the pop-core, and after revolving about the track, which helps to ground it in a place and time, and provides a context to err out of or embrace. but either way a nice stage to move on.