TRACK | Milk Music – Twists & Turns & Headtrips

5/5 golden merles

Heartfelt and hanging on the knife-edge at all times, there is a fervor to the making that feels borderline heretical in “Twists & Turns & Headtrips.”

Much heart piercing sentiment and enough texture to make it seem real, this time. Formidable and fleeting passages that balance the content and form, momentum with purpose in contrast to so much other sound and fury lashing into the void.

The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, and the response to any social strife or environmental collapse is a further militarization of the police.

I was torn on a track to feature, mostly between “Headtrips” and subsequent song, “Who’s been in my dreams?” They’d sell the skin off your face / if the money was right / who’s been in my dream? With the tones and manic right-of-way approaching the likes of Television, The Violent Femmes, and The Cramps. If these are things you have and will again appreciate: go, conspire.

TRACK | The Padla Bear Outfit & Mak – Love

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi pop rock courtesy of our Russian friends The Padla Bear Outfit & Mak, “Love” is candid, carefree, and flickering track. Melodies carom about, concentric and determined to revel. The cover is well suited to this sentiment, featuring a Christmas tree built of drums, a soaring dragon in place of the angel.

Does Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public affairs at Colombia University, know she is featured in one of the summery-est songs ever to come out of Saint Petersburg? The odds are unlikely. But it should be an honor if unearthed.

While our two failed empires bicker at one another, expanding outward at great expense even as they collapse internally, the subjects of these respective oligarchies can appreciate the art produced and commiserate. We have brothers everywhere and they too are ruled by bastards.

TRACK | Household – Phases

5/5 golden merles

I am very happy to pay tribute to the minimalist post-punk of Household’s “Phases” every time the shuffling god demands it. In the rumbling and rancor, there is also a kind of courtesy in its blunted cutting.

this is no accident / it’s never yielding fate
rationalize my friend / but it is far too late

A small, honed document of some devastation, the designated point at which two trajectories were changed from alignment. Not ending in undue harm, but an extraction.

There is undoubtedly a bit buoyancy in the blood feud, the mutual respect to at least document the severance. To take its significance and repurpose it into a new beginning. And an explanation provided before the exodus; the point of a breach and breaking as an amelioration. I do love these tracks that in this processing can be seen demonstrably contorting the bad to good.

TRACK | Reading Rainbow – Stand Back and Take a Good Look (The Nerves)

5/5 golden merles

Off the superb Volar Records 2013 comp Under the Covers Vol. 2: A Tribute to Paul Collins, Peter Case, and Jack Lee (of the Nerves), Reading Rainbow’s version of “Stand Back and Take a Good Look” is more than a cover, structurally reengineering the track to great result.

It is a minimalist but dynamic adaptation: rolling hills of reverb careening and overlapping the dual vocal melodies, reciting the refrain as command. A bit of the coarseness has been refined formalistically, but partially reintroduced in the richness of guitar tone. It is a fitting tribute and feels like the hooks have only been honed over the elapsed decades.

The opening track, Grass Widow’s “Why are You Walking Out on Love,” also stands out as another especially constructive modification. A gateway to some great songwriting/songwriters, available for $7 from Volar.

TRACK | Women – Eyesore

5/5 golden merles

“Eyesore” is a clinic on texture and tone. The track is a How-to with respect to texturing a track so well that you don’t need a proper hook to emerge until 4 minutes in. Once it lands it can only be extracted surgically.

There is so much more room for experimentation in pop/rock that can venture into new territory and yet remain catchy and instantly resonate. Women were comfortable operating within this space. The album itself and the ST before it are legendary stuff, and so is the continued work by Flegel under Cindy Lee.

I’ve written on “Heavy Metal” here, as “pretty captivating, and contorts the space of any room into which it is freed.” A sentence I don’t remember writing but am very happy to find here, reminding me that sometimes articulation happens and it isn’t just incoherent rambling, desperately melting down thesauri and clumsily reconstituting them.

TRACK | Johnny Thunders – You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory

5/5 golden merles

He wrote some stunning tracks, Johnny. On “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” the guitar tone and strumming pattern come through the divide of the speaker enchanted, enveloping the perfectly pitched vocal core.

If all tracks had this much passion applied to nuance, I guess the relative goalposts would move. But it stands out like a thumb in which the rest of the hand, and arm, and body is badly sore.

It doesn’t pay to try / all the smart boys know why / doesn’t mean I didn’t try / I just never know why

I recently heard another version and find this performance/recording far, far superior. I’d like to link to one of the two version on bandcamp (with the discordant percussive acoustic guitar and wayward instrumentation) or the bit rusty and rare full band take, so that it would appear in the Hype Machine feed. The craft and killer instincts are still there, but this embedded version above seems to harness the heart of it a bit more securely and cut out the crap while keeping clean the conveying.

TRACK | Toe Ring – This is the End

5/5 golden merles

In 2021 Philadelphia-based Toe Ring posted two strong No Wave/ Post-Punk / Lo-Fi / EPs, Collapsed Mine // This is the End and II. Shimmering and sculpted into a small dense wonderous specters, there are four well arranged and illuminated noise pop tracks found here.

I condone this behavior. A few months later there was a tape of these combined sets put out on Spared Flesh (Also recently released C.A.T.S. 99 Ways To Fix a Broken Heart). Technically the tape was released 2022, January, so scratch a line off that rough draft of a year-end list.

But these landfillable artifacts are sold out, their forced scarcity a luxury you literally can no longer afford. How about purchasing the digital version, transferring it to your own tape deck, and printing out the cover instead? That would be a nice little project for you.

TRACK | Mount Eerie – Voice in Headphones

5/5 golden merles

Julie Doiron (Eric’s Trip) and Phil Elverum (The Microphones) collaborate in this nocturnal, potable mantra of a track. The harmonies here are special and good. The content balanced across that form (“It’s not meant to be a struggle, up hill”), recurrent and reaffirming, is about as close to some therapeutic advising you’ll get in America without a silver spoon to exchange.

I saw Phil Elverum (as Mount Eerie) play in a high school gym somewhere I think in southern Indiana. I don’t remember when, but it was during or shortly after college, maybe 2005-8. Nobody I knew wanted to go but I was hopelessly invested in The Glow Pt. 2. He sat on a metal folding chair or stood in the middle of the basketball court and played a lot of songs I didn’t know. But they were good, kind, inspiring things.

I am most familiar with Julie Doiron from 2009’s tremendously heartfelt and forged I Can Wonder What You Did with Your Day. I’ll write about that later, at least one of the tracks. To my not immodest discredit, I haven’t listened to much Eric’s Trip, but look forward to doing so.

TRACK | TJ Cabot – SD Action (Revisited)

5/5 golden merles

TJ Cabot’s “SD Action” (Revisited) is Canadian DIY punk at its finest. Frying and frayed vocals push the needle into the good kind of overloading, while drums rattle in time like the gavel of a mad judge.

Is there anything left other than SD/spite driven action at this point? How else to summon the energy to awaken each morning, much less go about vanquishing your eternal enemies?

I found this track on tr0tsky’s punk and rock Mixcloud series “Pretend You Like It.” Ogle it for more fine scouting &/or commiserate in our collective, aimless anguish by buying the EP for $4 CAD.

ALBUM | Pangea – Living Dummy

5/5 golden merles

Together Pangea’s Living Dummy (2011) is a classic garage rock album. Though they’ve had many fine singles since then, for my tastes, nothing is quite as dense with ideas or as relentlessly resourceful with its inspiration.

Maybe there is something wrong with my brain that this album remains more or less evergreen in its spinning. The variance and hooks, its balance of bile and sentiment, add up to such a lovely document. Think of how much better off we’d all be if this was what passed for a more mainstream branch of pop-punk. It has inspired many, but you know what I mean: household/pop culture level of mind-meme infestation.

It sits with Dead Ghosts, The Cowboys, and The Babies, in my memory of the era which is only (somehow, I don’t know) fairly recently being pulled apart from the present. One of my sister’s earlier memories is my mother pulling off to the side of the road to weep after The Eagles were played on the classic rock radio station. Luckily, I don’t own a car. So there will be no further self reflection on mortality and impending death.

On Living Dummy there is great value in the band’s pushing and perverting of garage rock with idiosyncrasy and heart, infusing life into the curdled maxims and anachronisms of person-with-guitar rock. As F. Scott F. put it, “It takes a genius to whine appealingly.” And that is essentially what is happening here.

Pangea are currently on tour with two California dates remaining at the Observatory and the Regent theater, then they’re off to Europe for a few months. The record is $7 digitally on bandcamp. Or you can stream it elsewhere, I assume, for $0.0014 per play, as rendered accessible by your favored cartel of thugs’ server farm.