“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
I found Steph Green’s music through a feature on the very fine audioblog Various Small Flames.
Below is one of the singles, Next Place, off the upcoming release, Thanks for that.
A unique and earnest vocal delivery and phrasing texture the brightly-lit-but-through-a-fair-haze fundamentals.
Easily it is also for fans of Sharon Van Etten, Julie Doiron, Dig Nitty, Alex G, Katie Von Schliecher, Andy Shauf, and these sorts of good, melodic and contemplative things.
Thanks For That releases January 14th.
La Luz’s Shana Cleveland made a tremendously good solo album, Night of the Worm Moon. And the favored track here is Face of the Sun.
“you stumbled right / into the blinding light”
The mix layers well the live elements (the occasional pulse and shriek of a hand shifting on the guitar string) and combines them expertly within the subsequent layered tracks (waves of backing vocals, piling and pulling the chorus apart).
The tones are complex and complimentary. The melody is direct and absorbing. It adds up to something of significance worth logging and celebrating in the void.
Seeing In feels to me like a mid-tempo reconnoitering, alternately an outwardly peering: a bombastic survey of the night. It has within it all the hallmarks of an assessing, what we have to work with and the setting of terms for success or surrender.
“let this night pass away / mocking shadows one by one”
The moderate off-kilter imbalance of the strumming and drumming compliment the mood of this conjuring… the song rises and pivots with purpose, looking over it’s shoulder.
It is very, very good.
Plainly & Painfully 