Tag: 2022

TRACK | FLASH – Nazkauta Nitxiok

5/5 golden merles

From the Spanish Gipuzkoan coast, FLASH fabricate rabid and relentless noise/punk rock. Careening into a controlled burn of synths and axes, it will get your blood moving forward. It has an enduring wrath and commits to the conundrum, frantically yowling in Basque a mantra of renunciation.

The style is warped and gently deteriorated but maintains its melody, so it rests at the only available precipice to us. Which is to say it is found on the periphery of both major pits (pure indulgence/abstraction or commercial solicitation).

Regardless, the balance is truck. The zeitgeist is favorable to it. The sound squirms from the hand of capital, repelling like a magnet from its grasp, while still affording a refined articulation and immediately resonating. The ground will shift and it will fall toward one side or the other, and down we will go with it.

But for now it’s fun and good. I am looking forward to hearing the remainder of the tracks. The vinyl for the album is black & blue and releases September 2nd from La Vida Es Un Mus Discos.

TRACK | DADGAD – Control

5/5 golden merles

“Control” is pulsing and moderately remorseless post-egg-punk from Rome. There’s great calibration to the balanced assemblage of digi drums, weighted to within an inch of collapse, and that guitar/synth melody cloaking the percussive tremor.

There’s lots of good and uncanny foreboding to it despite the relaxed pacing and inflection. The vocals are crisp, burnt up nice, presiding from postern, behind the delicate horde amassed up front. The EP carries on like this, considered and detailed throughout, and it’s all a great relief, frankly.

There is a run of 47 tapes out from Detroit’s stellar Painters Tapes for $5 USD. You can still get it at the time of posting.

TRACK | Fili – Tommy

5/5 golden merles

Job For a Cowboy is more tempered fang runoff from Mexico’s Fili, slightly more refined and solemn than Volcom but well within the same anarchic universe of eggpunk and ruthless hooks.

Pleading from a punctured lung, the kind of good ooze you might find emanating among the likes of GEE TEE, Prison Planet, Checkpoint, et al. Look it up if you’ve gladly consumed this discharge, I don’t think your gut biome will reject it.

It’s the brilliant kind of bilge that alienates the right sort, keeping melody in the pocket and pathos near enough to be called upon as needed. Cowboy is a 2022 release that’s definitely competing for the glory and prestige of this humble blogs year end list, cloudy and combustible stuff.

TRACK | Mustard – Sentirsi inutile

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi Rock from Rome, extracted partially dissolved, partially preserved in formaldehyde and resurrected one day before retirement. A refreshing mastery of tone on this one, rising to meet the moment of a lot of ongoing dialogs in garage and noise as we attempt to make the preceding epochs palatable without discarding them entirely.

That is the negotiation and dialog on offer here, if you are attuned to it or sympathetic to this. It is a love letter that may alienate some of its recipients but will land well with those of similar predilections. Utilizing a few old flourishes and forms, teasing apart the tropes, using the crutch as a cudgel, breaking and building. It is to me very compelling and a lot of fun.

Out on cassette from Spya Sola in Cologne, Germany, and Face Melter. Spya Sola also putting tapes out in the region from Rude Television and Beta Maximo. New but with an already stellar track record — follow their shit if these align.

I was thinking I was going to write about something he’d love half an hour before Groschi/onetwoxu.de, but then there is his smiling face on the Mustard February EP. If you like this style, follow that blog. He has his finger not so much on the pulse of it but one plugged in the aorta.

TRACK | Akusmi – Divine Moments of Truth

5/5 golden merles

An inspired enmeshing of momentum, electronica curtailed to contain only the essential. Of a stunningly metered jazz/experimental set, “Divine Moments of Truth” stands out to me as a pinnacle of those forms.

The relative minimalism of what transpires builds into a great escape, evenly, cleanly out of its abstraction. It feels as though there is something at stake and yet remains “as simple as possible but not one bit simpler,” the energy is convincingly condensed in such a way as to warp your perception of relative space time. A credible spell, intuitively assembled, or the result of finely tuned music theory, I don’t know. But the kind of wonder and admiration I feel for its accumulated reserves is like the saying that any technology produced by a significantly advanced civilizations is indistinguishable from magic.

Arriving last week into the world, there’s ~30 clear vinyl remaining from a set of 300. Not a bad return on anything in the common era, much less a finely rendered crop of electronic jazz concoctions.

TRACK | Sterile Cuckoo – The Ghost of Saint Claire

5/5 golden merles

“The Ghost of Saint Claire” has a composition that incorporates more creative tools than most songwriters employ and with more conviction. I’m very fond of these configurations, their sequencing — from field, to shoegaze, to ambient drone — is always dreamy, always threatening to break into bloom. It is mesmeric, captivating material.

Three things primarily pique my interest among its graces: First, the cohesion of its assembled genre influences. Second is the structural invention and pacing. And third is the collaborative element. Each of these involve their own degree of risk and reward.

There is some risk in breaking free from the yoke of strictly enforced genre limitations, attempting to create the more refined/unique niche, and the prospective audience readily available to receive it. Another risk is in leaning into the expanse, allowing the void to patiently fill itself with subtle field and noise cues, breaking the form but maintaining a series of footholds. Yet another risk is in collaboration with others to contribute toward the fundamental ideas and ambiance (orion lake & Antonio Svisa).

But, truly, they’ve all paid off tremendously well here. And, from the outside, that act of crafting feels honest and refreshing, to have honed the influences or held a vision intact throughout. It’s realized to a point that probably none of it seems like risk at all to its progenitor, but rather the only way to properly render the material and synthesize the influences. Listening to it feels a little bit like taking part in that conviction and it is a joyful event. There is much to admire in its grandiose and ephemeral lo-fi textures, and the deteriorating and rising of its well designed phases and fractals.

TRACK | cool sorcery – Sea Dream

5/5 golden merles

Bedroom-based Brazilian garage rock, striking and resourceful in its conceits and reimagining. There’s plenty of genre blurring in the service of tone, punk and dream pop, and all culminating in much good from where I’m sat. One of the best produced lo-fi albums I’ve heard in ages.

“Sea Dream” caps off the album and brings the set to a close with a little bit of the venom tapped, but the whole set is filled with pointed and momentous hooks. Smoggy, snarling and slick, it’s a bit melted and mystifying, with much fine attention to detail including the field recording to place the epitaph.

The weighted mix of live and drum machine is an emphatic and impressive simulacra instructing you how to build out from the skeleton to craft a convincing body of work; how to reinforce and animate the heart without inhibiting credulity. It’s $5 USD on the bandcamp page.

TRACK | checkpoint – gravedigger

5/5 golden merles

Kicking and combustible punk from Melbourne, “gravedigger” is structurally inventive and paced in variable pulses that keep the ballistic style and texture fresh. Rewardingly unyielding and pleasantly vile.

The digi drum metronome acts as a petri dish that the crust of a culture grows rapidly out of. Ruthless and rejoicing, what lyrics crack through the veil of muck beyond the title concern epistemology, the nature of knowledge. What is known before the graves are dug, what can and can’t be passed on.

An attitude so churlish it would be to the surprise of no one if they were to have dinner with Groucho tonight. On the Bandcamp they threaten an upcoming LP that we look forward to.

TRACK | Long Neck – Gardener

5/5 golden merles

“Gardener” is a track which dwells upon dichotomy, the contrasting duality of both the sheer wonder and staggering fatigue of being. This is a report from the doldrums accompanied by a concerted reaching for the will and hope to continue. Not only that but to move one step further, to inspire the self and others, and to reassure among great doubts.

Music is a tool that can serve many purposes. I’ve used the term “commiseration” a good amount recently, but it is well suited and applicable here. I’ve listened to this track probably 100 times over the last couple of days. I need and appreciate the commiserating. The twist toward the track’s conclusion, after the recounting, to rally in concerted effort at contorting fate to good, is comforting.

The song is not solely a faithful account, which has value in itself and the act of ‘making’ is an implicit means of acknowledging this. But the lyric pushes further, and conscious of the subsequent self, appreciates explicitly its own agency and capacity for altering or influence. The strings help elaborate upon this ascending. There is a breadth of backing vocals, their intermittent choral convalescing the community referenced within.

There is some cutting humor and much truth in the contrast of lines like: “mornings are unbearable,” I said to no one / and they responded, “but won’t you miss it when it’s gone? And it reminds you of the old joke, “The food here is terrible.” / “Yes, and such small portions.”

In any case, I found it from Jon Doyle’s beautiful writing about it at VariousSmallFlames.co.uk, and you should read that assessment.

TRACK | Maggie Carson – From Here To Anywhere

5/5 golden merles

Second single off the up-coming The Dark Was Aglow (June 24th, Open Ocean), “From Here To Anywhere” is Americana full of vibrant twang and vengeance. A fanged and full-throated track which demonstrates that anguish is the engine of revival.

How do I leave / if the road’s just a halo?

There is a remarkable rising to it. With much might and lightly mangled, a strong and rousing performance has been captured. There’s great range and effect as the vocal rises to meet the instrumentation, the swelling synth and glittering banjo elevating alongside. It’s part commiseration, part rallying cry.

Having toured and performed with acts like Sharon Jones, Dr. Dog, and Nana Grizol, there seems to be a quality and breadth of first-hand and collaborative influences to pull from. It is a small spectacle, drawing on some subtle genre fusions while at heart remaining in the folk-traditional realm.

Open Ocean is not-for-profit record label with a donation and gift contribution model of acquiring both the vinyl and digital editions, suggested at $30/$10 respectively. I have seen plenty of pay-what-you-want digi releases, but none yet in the physical form, so please consider supporting these Rockaway Beach based operators.