Tag: 2021

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 | Fievel is Glauque – Bring Me to Silence

5/5 golden merles

Gods Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess is a devastatingly catchy 2021 jazz/rock/pop album soon to be reissued on vinyl through Kit Records. There is revealed within great creative invention and problem solving, keeping each moment imaginative and alive. It’s coalescing on a variety of levels and by each player, in the language/phrasing and all across the individual contributions from the accompanying instrumentation.

What’s the use of blowing flutes / at a mad hyena on attack?

For example, lines like this are landing particularly effectively here after this week of craven madness, in which evangelical regressives attempt to drag our localized civilization back into a pit we’ve only very recently scaled. But there are many like it throughout: scathing, soothing, thermal, the echo of something that was extant at the time of recording.

And without a doubt part of the goodness of what has been captured is the live energy of the room: the resonance of the moment, the throat clearing, an ambiance of the instrumentation played by humans and within an inhabited space. The document is direct. There is a record of the proximity of its performers, their audible range on an orb rotating in orbit at 460 meters per second, and the device engineered to faithfully replicate it.

An uneasy international coalition of postal service’s willing, I will at some point in the not too distant future be one of the 300 owners of this limited run vinyl ring in which the album is imprinted. Purchase through Kit or the bandcamp.

TRACK | Dinero Romero – Laser Beam of Consciousness

5/5 golden merles

“Laser Beam of Consciousness” from Louisville’s Dinero Romero was a central piece of the last mix. With much warmth and warbling, the track is a kind of psych rock which evolves like a placid fever dream, methodical and yet genial in its delirium.

The song in no way begins to address the question of whether it’s performers are… “either people dressed in regalia to look like spirits, or they are spirits.” It’s anybody’s guess. But they are employed, with heads filled with fog and in a stupor on the trip home. A nice, dreamy track concerning how you spend your time and to what do you devote the few brief moments of coherent focus.

It can be bought for an increasingly devalued buck.

TRACK | Daughter Bat and the Lip Stings – chrissy dins

5/5 golden merles

More Love Songs was released on New Years Eve, maybe to spite the compulsive year-end-listers, maybe not. I think it’ll still make its way onto my 2022 set because it is deserving of praise. And, though it may try, the Gregorian calendar alone doesn’t dictate when or what we listen to.

Lots of formidable flux here, and it’s a little unnerving in it’s unfaltering shimmer.

Melody and tone are of paramount importance. But also up there in import is the character of the tones themselves, vocally and the instrumental accompaniment, which envelop a delirious kind of defiance, defiant but grotesque.

You can have it both ways, transformative between each line, the grave seriousness and the severed irreverence. It’s more fun that way, in fact, and richer. There’s a lot of value in taking either of these divergent impulses and honing them into a few heightened hooks which share a purpose. In that stylistic choice is a brighter/weirder future that maintains its sense of humor throughout the collapse.