Category: United States

TRACK | The Mountain Goats – The Water Song

5/5 golden merles

John Darnielle has carved out a place in the world for himself through an exhaustive output of decades worth catchy and insightful pop music.

It is seemingly self-sustaining and I admire him a great deal for this achievement. As the gears about us churn and crush everyone else, John has managed not to be ground into a fine paste.

That is not at all to say that he didn’t have his fair share of hard times, from what I understand, those due all sentient beasts. But that he continued to create throughout them and continues to make interesting media. At some point most people stop.

This song is gleefully dire. There are some field recording elements for texture, subtle but sticky backing vocals in the chorus, and the bareness of John’s grating/glorious voice.

I am most familiar with this song in the context of a mix in which it feeds directly into Jeans Wilder’s Sparkler. And that will be posted next. Due to the way chronology works in archiving posts, it will be in order but now perceived out of order. The trick is that it doesn’t matter.

TRACK | Son of Salami – Baby Mayo

5/5 golden merles

Baby Mayo is a blast from the not so distant past of 2012.

It was a simpler time. Instagram gave a generation of not-yet-middle-aged millennials a reason to live. One neoliberal oligarchy apologist was our symbolic figurehead instead of another. And the domestication of the dog continued unabated.

Looking back over it now it is a real triumph of lo-fi bedroom rock. Both melodically interesting, lyrically playful, strange but also truly pretty.

I am all for representations of abrupt and seemingly arbitrary deterioration, having experienced them personally as a bipedal multicellular biological organism, like when the track hits a disintegration loop or two.

There is a lot of craft and detail going into this track which may be lost on some less familiar with the genre. Mostly because it sounds like an ice cream truck falling apart upon reentry. but it is there.


TRACK | Grass Widow – Disappearing Industries

5/5 golden merles

The mind is pretty easily fooled into seeing miracles wherever someone has put in a small amount of effort. Some well-honed slight of hand or a few rehearsals later, we spectators are ready to see the divine. It is evident.

In Disappearing Industries keenly crafted melodies careen about the finely tuned structure. To me, it seems like a kind of magic.

It is, at least, a minor engineering marvel, like the innerworkings of a clock, gears interlocking, determined to determine. The albums title is appropriate, few songs have as compelling an internal logic.


TRACK | Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Tom Justice, The Choir Boy Robber, Apprehended at Ace Hardware in Libertyville, IL

5/5 golden merles

“26 without a shot / that’s more than Bonnie and Clyde got”

Never one to shy away from a lengthy title no matter whose blog title section it will disrupt, CFTPA/Owen Ashworth writes songs plenty good enough to overlook this flaw.

It starts with twinkling starlight keys affixed to a broad void of bass drum, just listen to the song. It is all beginning. Synthetic clapping, you should listen for that. And there’s a tremendous organ solo that plays Tom off. You can just listen to it.


TRACK | Total Revenge – Jeep Cherokee

5/5 golden merles

There’s a few great tracks on Total Revenge’s S/T, but Jeep Cherokee is my favorite of the set.

Drums that register somewhere between trashcan and streetlight corral a blown out but triumphant melody, bleeding out graciously into the verse. All of this builds pretty quickly to some kind of boil before dissipating in feedback to close out the record.

“I do all the things that I should / For once in my life I feel good”

Check out also The Fair for similar sludgery that reaches comparable heights of wonder.

TRACK | Girl Racers – Rubber

5/5 golden merles

In Rubber, Girl Racers have created a single worthy of your great fondness.

Direct but also bound up in much playful production and a glut of buoyant layers, the fine vocal irreverence is attenuated by a steady, unflinching instrumentation.

Hearing it makes me miss being in a proper band, whiling away in the basement preparing heaps of markedly hopeless material. But it was fun. And this captures that sense of joy.

You, there, boy, what day is this?

This is good. This is inventive and more than a bit volatile. Check out the other offerings from Three Door Records as well.

TRACK | Noah Renaissance – Beauty Sleep

5/5 golden merles

Beauty Sleep is utterly great dreamy, spectral synth pop. A small triumph of pacing, texture and enveloping synthesizers.

“fell asleep in the garden / the flowers are starting to take root in my brain”

The immensely carefully constructed unfolding is something we can all learn a lesson or two from.

There is a lot to admire in the crafting, the phasing of layers, and the levels and positioning at which field recording elements are place peripherally, never pulling too much focus from the ear-worm chorus and verses.

It is good. Check out other sounds he’s made at the soundcloud.

ALBUM | Katie Von Schleicher – Shitty Hits

5/5 golden merles

Shitty Hits is one of the best albums of the last decade. It is endlessly impressive and inspiring material, awash in fervent commiseration, fearsome eulogizing, and in this way it is difficult to choose one track to feature.

Knowing how good the subsequent offerings are, starting with track one makes sense.

There are no fewer than several dozen instances in which effortlessness combines seamlessly with the elaborate. Like in Going Down when it almost sounds like it’s all about to fall apart, stalling just after the field recording, then careening back into the chorus, outdoing the previous effort’s loop. Or essentially all of The Image, or Life’s a lie... or Isolator, or Hold…

There is a great quote that is applicable here from an article reviewing Denis Johnson’s Lament of the Sea Maiden by Geoff Dyer, “Control is achieved through willing proximity to its loss.”

And that is anything with content and form, style and substance, design and function. But rarely is it metered so consistently with such exactitude and genius.

With great rarity does the lo-fi indie bedroom-rock world produce things that are both believably personal and properly anthemic. Generally speaking, for most working within this subset, the ambition doesn’t stretch much farther than the size of the room it was crafted in.

Exceptions include the occasional track by Joanna, Spencer and that immensely talented okie who wrote Funeral. But they are everywhere here. If you play it you too will become pleasantly impaled on one of the very many hooks.

Katie Von Schleicher has written two remarkable albums in the last few years and I doubt either of you vulgarians own them yet. You can still buy Shitty Hits on vinyl at the bandcamp.

Also follow on Instagram for quality bird-centric social media content second only to Marianne Williamson.

TRACK | Unity – Big Dreams #2

5/5 golden merles

“Big Dreams, don’t know where to put them / up on the shelf”

Big Dreams is a sandcastle made of sugar.

It is 25ft tall and even when the water comes in as a tide that afternoon it takes 8 days to dissolve, fully one day more than it took some lord to create the world and it’s peripheral, irrelevant universe (as it is alleged).

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying about science, probably, “It should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” And that is also a pretty good way to think about pop music.

A distillation and honing of hooks into their purest form. Unity have made here a good example of that phenomenon.

I prefer the demo version posted here to the one that later appears on the subsequent S/T LP. Fortunately the world is big enough for both.

TRACK | Nerve City – Sleepwalker

5/5 golden merles

Sleepwalker is an outsized, large thing built of small glories and grace.

The skeletal structure of the percussion never falters as the track progresses down the spine of the behemoth, notch by notch, clacking beyond each reliably subsequent disc.

Somehow all of this is divined by nearly clean guitar tones, a bit of tremolo and the faithful tambourine.

Before the curvature shifts, the song ends. We’re only able to recover a fragment of the fossil that was pulled from the earth.

The rest is left for us to imagine. Scales or feathers, take your pick.

Jason Boyer has exciting materials of various mediums on the big cartel and some highly promising upcoming collaborations. Also check out the full Sleepwalker EP on bandcamp.