In somewhat keeping with the aside, this is an instrumental track on an album that otherwise features exceptional vocal production and performances.
And within that context, after the also superb track Burned Body, Gentle Movement toward Sensual Liberation lands with the most wobbled grace and poise.
An enclave of singing synths deliver a kind of orchestral chamber pop, built around two well textured, extra-strength melodies.
Noun Verb Adjective has some wonderfully crafted lo-fi bedroom pop rock.
If you would believe it, Boys in the Sand does have some Beach Boys stylistic parallels. The hooks and layers of vocals carom over one another and the tambourine/snare provides a warm and welcoming hive to orbit.
A superb owl on the cover guides you home. It’s a good, small marvel.
Sickly strummed guitars and cooing, warbled vocals are good. This song has both. It also has the most minimalistic drum track you may have ever heard in which one remains technically present.
The sum of it’s parts are quietly a spectacle that is worth taking in.
It has all the energy and promise of that first demo draft of a melody and rough lyric, a stab taken on tape, to play back later to build upon, before the verses are nailed down and the chorus repeats, burdensomely, to warrant having taught it to the band in the first place.
At 74 seconds, It’s a non-invasive surgery. What do you have to lose.
Amy Annelle is a national treasure, albeit a Texas-based one so it’s a bit of a gray area.
In the alternate timeline in which Bernard Sanders has become the president, I imagine she is universally well regarded and heaped+drowning in praise.
But here we are in this rendition. The good still draws to it the good, but with slightly less gravity.
Regardless, The Cimarron Banks is a great album. The opening title track, the hellhound’s address, wounded man, forever in-between, and Miss it more than you know how, here featured, are all noteworthy achievements in songwriting and performance.
Annelle offers first-rate lyrical content interwoven with enduring melodies and an extremely technically accomplished delivery that is not stripped of character and nuance but rather plastered in them. It is difficult to ask for more than this.
San Diego’s Teenage Burritos 2016 s/t has much good within it.
The standout tracks for me are Prom Song and the one rated here/posted below, Kamikaze. But the whole thing is so fluent in building convincing garage rock fragments that it appears effortless.
A real compelling alchemy of elements, dodging and compiling. I prefer this version featuring Andreas from Holograms to the other two listed on their bandcamp:
Even given the perpetual deluge of quality bandcamp content that no one of us will ever be able to sort through, it is borderline criminal that Windowsill’s “Twolip” has 9 sales to date.
Recommended to me initially by my internet-pal Paolo Yumol (who makes fine music in his own right), this track is sheer wonder and sweetly confides in its listener in the most appealingly warped and ravaged manner.
The strings and refracted melodic variations and repetitions build to great effect. The detailing and textures are comprehensively plotted. Its greatness is readily apparent. ok?
Katie Von Schleicher has released not one but two essential rock albums of our common era, 2020’s Consummation and 2017’s Shitty Hits.
This track is off the former, which is the latter, chronologically. I don’t have a copyeditor. This is a blog that only people who are getting ping-backs to their bandcamp pages are reading.
The point is that very few people are writing songs on the level of The Image and Strangest Thing. They’re full of majesty and momentum and calibrated to kill. In a kind way.
She’s also doing engineering/recording with Nate Mendelsohn for Shitty Hits Recording Co. If you’re in the NY area and need such services.
Dig Nitty, “Reverse of Mastery” was one of the best albums of 2020.
Screen is a bit more up-tempo than the majority of the album, but it all includes these inventive, careening vocal melodies drenched in the appropriate level of reverb. The drumming pattern in the chorus is expert and perfectly arranged.
Other standout tracks are the harpoon to the heart that is “Angel Calling,” and the highway hypnosis of “Palm Springs.” But it’s all very good.
Erin McGrath et al are writing excellent songs.
Please buy them.
“One more time with feeling… billions and billions of people have already died. You too will die. Sing along with us, won’t you?”
I love everything about this performance: The participating audience, their nervous laughter, Daniel’s death monologue.
Before the plague at a new year’s gathering I tried to toast the recently dead: David Berman, Daniel Johnston, and Denis Johnson… but ended up drunkenly saying Daniel twice instead of Denis, to mild amusement.
Here is a third, small tribute. We love you, Daniel.
Plainly & Painfully 