Tag: 2023

TRACK | Sandy Pylos – La Modelo De Mis Fantasias

5/5 golden merles

Sandy Pylos is the psych/power pop project of Portland-based Paraguayan multi-instrumentalist Ana Belén. It is bedroom synthpop undeniably stacked with invention and melodic charm. Eschewing all manner of kitsch that plagues the genre, Belén allows wonder and devotion to manifest in a genuinely thoughtful and compelling account, all delivered to you inside a series of superb hooks. “La Modelo De Mis Fantasias” is the lead single off of the debut album, Notas de Voz. It is what pop music can sometimes be at it’s best: experimental, cunning & heartfelt.

There are aspects to the lyric and phrasing that are similar to the routes Dig Nitty or The Cowboys might take: language singularly formed, freshly dispatching the burden of invention, defiantly in search of the feeling but actively allergic to established routes. These turns and extrapolations tweak the universal and better reinforce the narrative, offering the listener the opportunity of discovering new paths between two points of familiar earth. The question is put to us by proxy: “Have you ever even been on a giant slide?”

In “La Modelo De Mis Fantasias” the chorus is given the right amount of time to wind its recursive variants: first as anthemic refrain, then reappearing within a field recorded rendition of writing or reciting, finally, later, among other elements, it emerges in a distinctly stripped-down acoustic version that ushers in the end. The duplication reaffirms the sentiment. Its inclusion seems to offer a glimpse of love expressed at other angles, the melody fluctuating with time and suiting evolving exterior circumstance. Arrangements morph, time passes, but the obsessive dedication nonetheless remains transfixed, an ever-present undercurrent and preoccupation. Witnessing that reification is as fun as it is compelling and enriching.

There’s plenty to admire in the works constituent parts, harmonizations and percussive fills. But simply dissecting the organs and putting them back together would miss the point. Whereas most creatives infatuated with 60s/psych rock might offer earnest but antiseptic covers and fine enough tributes, the great power and grace of this EP is reinterpreting particular methods in the pursuit of impact. It is assured and realized, utilizing what still works and subverting the rest. It is the difference between mimicry and mastery.

It is good when so very many things are not. Tapes are $8.00, mp3s/wav $5.

TRACK | Gob Psychic – Harnessed Energy

5/5 golden merles

In praise of unpolished polemics: there is a reasonable case to be made that half-articulated rage is the purest form. It’s straight from the source, cut with the contextual and peripheral distractions, before it is honed into a refined simulacra for mounting on the wall. “Harnessed Energy” by Aarhus Denmark’s Gob Psychic is a good approximation of that impulse, the documented split between archetype and the feeling, language grappling with emotion.

Of course the art is in the perpetual reimagining of the scene: the accumulation of experience cultivated into a written explanation of events, coupled to the genre of cultural conditioning. Then comes the collaborating on accompanying music, the practice to achieve a reproducible form, the live performances tailored by practical necessity, and finally the studio rendering that attempts to preserve or recreate the original sensation or at least some equally amusing derivative variation.

That process is impressively captured here. It’s a great credit to the band, production and mix (Sauna Studios with Neil R. Young, mixing by Jeppe Grønbæk Andersen). It doesn’t feel to me stale or stilted. When you deal in a perpetual stream of these materials, the gradient is apparent. It seems to have emerged into the world fully formed, revealed.

That obviously isn’t the case due to the nature of making things and releasing them globally. But convincing the cynical consumer/listener of this is the magic trick. There’s no wooden tongue clacking, no resentment at having to repeat ones self. “I’m not like those men / I hope I’m not like those men,” is screamed with a visceral quarter pound of conviction. The doubt remains present and compelling. Maybe it is in the room with you right now.

If it resonates, perhaps also look at Cathedrale’s Houses are Built the Same, Black Bug’s s/t, and Egg Idiot’s Meltdown. Vinyls on Le Cèpe Records (Paris) and name-your-price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | The Toads – Ex-KGB

5/5 golden merles

The Toads include members of The Shifters, The Living Eyes and Parsnip, each has featured here or in past mixes. In The Wilderness is for me one of the early contenders on the short list for album of the year. Underneath the immaculate cover art there’s a lot of amorphous and sometimes languorous melodic hooks, both grim and rejoicing. All the sonic lanes utilized to converse are corrupted and bleeding together as one sort of agreeably dysfunctional organism.

There’s a consistent sense of dread and foreboding expressed in conversational tones and language, never deprived of humor or fully paralyzed by withdrawal. It’s a nice record, almost akin to being alive. This is something I find some alignment with (“I have a love for what is mine / but it’s slowly disappearing / …wave after wave”).

Reading concurrent to processing the album, I find the tone and grade similar to some work from Louise Glück. These lines seems appropriate by way of comparison (following a bleakly-comedic sequence on forgetting the word for ‘chair’ in old age – just go read it):

“To raise the veil.
To see what you’re saying goodbye to.“

The melodic shift that accompanies the chorus late on is a valuable motion, increasing the scope and adding nuance, growing the world of the thing. There’s plenty of this care manifesting throughout, like the slight variations on the roving bass scale, the abiding horns and the backing vocal thrust bracketing many of the lines. There’s plenty of subtle sophistication that doesn’t reek of lacquer and polish; plenty of humor and a bit of misery in the fabric of it. I’m happy to hear it and to be in alignment with this bleak and pleasant thing.

Vinyl from Upset the Rhythm (UK) and Anti Fade Records (AU), $7.90 for the transmittable files.

TRACK | Mantarochen – Porzellan

5/5 golden merles

“Porzellan” is formidable synth wave/post-punk from the overflowing chalice of Leipzig. This is all about the multifaceted arrangement of melodic layers, interwoven and unfolding in a organic and fundamentally convincing manner. The immediate complexity doesn’t overwhelm the feeling of the thing while in pursuit of its own novelty. That’s a kind of magic trick, both rare and good to behold.

I’ve been in a rut with respect to consumption; everything I hear sounds captive to its influences instead of supported or branching out from them, mostly exhausted, redundant. But Mantarochen’s track here is a stark contrast, taking the general genre cues and with an outright devotion to melody breaking out of that pattern by some novel means.

With a handful of elements, symbolically rendered (Digi-drums braced between synths octaves and the bass beneath, the poised utterances), you too can recreate the world. Or at least an amusing and convincing representation of it.

Beast or man, I studied German at High Schools and Universities in the United States. This means I have acquired the vocabulary of a pigeon after filling out various pulp-smelling workbooks at ungodly hours of the morning. But what I can comprehend sounds agreeable and fits the mood established in the murk of its movements.

The price is whatever you want it to be on the bandcamp. It was found on side B of 12xu’s Verspannungskassette cassette #58.

TRACK | Being Dead – Muriel’s Big Day Off

5/5 golden merles

The Being Dead duo put out one of my very favorite albums of last year, Zero Percent APR’s Higher and Higher Forever. They consistently identify and deliver strange causes for celebration in a homogenized period of concentrated wealth and rights restrictions that desperately needs them. The whimsy and wrath is what is warranted, having fun in hell, and holding court on the ineffable indelible shit. Artpop can be good and have a big heart.

A couple of real go getters. Weird but with good cause. Good movements. Melodies as intricate and warbling as the sentiments, complexities that interlock amusingly but always cater first to the feeling of the thing. You, too, could be telling stories in content and form. Probably not this good, but you can do it as evidenced by this thing existing, it’s proof.

There’s plenty taken from convention, the shared language and lineage of pop and anti-folk that makes the work approachable. But every track is also subverted with such care and conviction, ensuring that each effort/song finds a path that leads somewhere new and rewarding. Please just read Szarkowski on the thicket for a brief and compelling summary of this manner of work:

“When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no play that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.”

Slack is anticipated, and the line is cut before it tangles or tied into a bow. Examples are the emphatic lull in phrasing, setting up the spelling of Muriel with a long pause that adds additional equivocating “like this:” or the ‘TV Time’ bridge that reads like a medley-merger and the verses recounting of an immediate return to the shoe store.

All of this can be coopted and killed. And will be, but for now it isn’t and that is good. Discs, tapes, records, digital, all available here, and releasing the 14th of July.

TRACK | REIZ – Kauschiene

5/5 golden merles

Another sprouting from the top-tier Leipzig scene, REIZ are relentless in their kinetic thresh. There’s a good pallet of blotchy bloodied tones and a proudly pop sentimentality to it. The care in detailing is always elevating it slightly beyond your ability to anticipate, appreciably above the good-enough imitators and pretenders. You’ll probably find enough fine warp to feel familiar if for some god forsaken reason you consume this text and curation regularly. It didn’t arrive in the summer but the summer suits it.

The set is fun and funny but not defanged. Playful and approachable without the kitsch that salts the soil and kills everything else around it. It features rotating vocalists and distinct instrumentation across a terribly well calibrated soundscape. You’re at home in the dusk and the wind is coming kindly through the windows. Nothing is set in stone. There is music playing on the periphery that does not alienate you.

For some recent brethren in melodic bleat and genially scourging impulse, maybe you’re already in favor of its spiritual brethren like Jeanines, Jesuslefilles, and Liquids? Ok, that’s just about enough reductive blubbering to hit publish.

It’s €3.50 for the congealed three years of tunes selected. That’s only €1.16666666666667 euro per year. Check the math if you don’t believe me.

TRACK | Paul Bergmann – We Suffer, We Live Too Well

5/5 golden merles

No Masters in Paradise is an exquisite set of gothic rock lamentations for “a world which dies in the near distance.” The honey-drenched tones move in their own time, the invocations galvanized in a mercilessly compelling timbre. Their heralding is welcome. It feels like what a form of rock music might resemble in a declining empire coming to terms with degradation, a clearer assessment, which is to say dustier but less diluted, one by which its subjects might become better acquainted with themselves: grandiose and pensive, drifting and caroming over the graveyard.

It’s wholly against my type to select the longest track on an album as the feature. Six minutes is several lifetimes worth of material in which to stagnate and strangle, stumble into a dead end at any given moment. But instead it comes across as one of those rare instances when the town crier is just too damn good. Subsumed in the gently ravaged waves, lyrical alternations around the central chorus and the instrumental accompaniment keep the melody vitalized, always partially submerged, branching out alive in well saturated soil.

Hardly is anything ever this thrilling that moves in such deliberate slow motion, nor do tracks often proffer this balance of lumbering and lively. It’s a different kind of beast, class and character. It seems to be pulling from another source, a discarded set of components from the lineage of rock that is ever-present and instantly familiar but hardly ever chosen to fixate upon. Unrepentantly anthemic without the inane or orthodox excesses, you should probably study its habits.

Probably well received by admirers of Wish You Were Here era Pink Floyd, or, of the more common era, Phosphorescent/Matthew Hauk, the last few Cut Worms efforts, and Peace de Resistance’s recent Boston Dynamics.

It feels to me like there’s a zero percent chance this doesn’t end up on vinyl at some point. But for the god forsaken time being, there are 50 very fine looking cassettes up for $7, and it’s the same for the digital album transaction.

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – CLOWNING

5/5 golden merles

Writing on Busted Head Racket in December I accused them of crafting “delightful and difficult to kill earworms.” The new work is just as infested and likewise just as rabid and relentless, a prized commotion carved in synths and the probable simulacra of a slide whistle. Or is it the real deal? I would ask you to decide. Asundered with intention and contented in collected the notions, it’s rattling along with conviction and guts.

It finally, mercifully, drove out an alternate jingle from my mind. Lyrics are something to do with everything, or faced with the daily phases of self-reported observations, vacillating in the performance of personhood, bounding between enchantment and disenchantment, mockery and conviction. Coherently capturing ambivalence is sometimes later more akin to the feeling at the moment, and a better document for it. The world will grind you into dust but, if you’re lucky, there’s a stage of becoming a fine paste prior to dehydration. A nice soothing balm.

Look at the video by throat.pasta over at Tremendo Garaje. According to TG, the EP will release around this rotten globe in cassette form from Painscale (AUS), Pogo Til You Puke (UK), Idiotape Records (FR), Spyasola Records(DE), Harry Records(NL), Blä Records (SE), SYF Records (PL) and Painters Tape Records (US). Name your own price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Mo Troper – For You To Sing

5/5 golden merles

Good and due praise has been delivered to Mo Troper’s new tune “For You To Sing.” The recent track is an inspired calibration of power pop instrumentation. The only slack is intentional and left to reverberate with complimentary tone, a pure slice of steel and nickel pluck and glimmer. Jealousy and rivalry ferment in syrupy crystalline tones that exceptionally accent the chronicler’s annoyed-anguish. It’s pretty much timeless as far as the run of our lifetimes is concerned and the embodiment of dancing in degraded states underneath an outsized heart.

Guitar leads and vocal melodies interweave in a manner in which each subsection is given room to breathe and compliment every subsequent element. There’s also a good lesson in here concerning how to captivate through storytelling within the medium. From the first ‘well, (pause)’ the narrative lines alter in subtle variations that elaborate on the stakes and intentions, cohesive and reliably unreliable.

It’s built so finely in these numerous elaborations, seeking and retaining rich texture and idiosyncratic lyrical twist that works to buffer it from the passage of time. There’s too much good and unique character to it, built up over eons of influence, reaching beyond the notes and lines at something larger, that any imitators would almost by definition fail to replicate.

Internally bleeding, I really loved MTV and had it among the best records of 2022. Really looking forward to the futures worthy concocting. $1 on the bandcamp for the single.

TRACK | Metal Guru – Manca l’aria

5/5 golden merles

All over this lousy with life lo-fi split by DADGAD and Metal Guru there is a simulacra of residue, a prime patina of appreciable filth. Synths and murky drums stain and stand to reason, in an approximate resemblance of the collision of debris into dirt. There’s the common clamor of degraded infrastructure and unease, but also the intermittent revelry within that context by those that dwell within it. The style is itself a metaphor, one that reflects the world back to itself. This one offers poise with poison in the veins, how to celebrate small victories within an appreciably degraded state or condition. It’s offering capital C commiseration. To be caked in filth and eat it, too. What good can be salvaged from the world and in what form? I don’t know, something like this.

Style allows for allegiance without explicit commitment. It is fashion. If a form must be assumed or the medium itself abandoned — and we’re all subject to a similar cultural conditioning and warping of language — then this type of constructed egg/post-punk feels accurate and for me moves toward a kind of consensus within the moment. We have been sentenced by similar gods to similar fates.

What components can be stripped from the 60s and the 80s before they were hollowed out and taxidermized, gleaming at you from a shelf? The rendering of that representation here feels accurate. It’s essentially pop music that isn’t quite compromised by capital. The intentions are slightly purer and more potent than the general slate. The locus of its power is personal and unrepentant. That’s all it takes. There’s enough field recording and melodic misdirection to keep the simple melodies as very welcome and worthy of embrace when they arrive. They burn and bleed out in real time, at least semi-self aware, and are currently still rooted prior to commodification.

There are two paths toward unity, illusion and ignorance or a form of tolerant acceptance. In a world of dramatically variably quality industrial production astride a framework of global distribution, my salad days were in fact pizza days. I can relate to it, I feel akin to it. I’ve wasted an hour of my life writing out what everybody already intuitively knows. The balance of style and substance, design and function, content and form, here, feels good to me and believable, whatever the percentages are on either side. I’m a compatible host for whatever this parasite is, and maybe you will be, too.

I am belated and the world is a crushing, crushing thing. But you can still acquire the tape and bandcamp streaming from Face Melter Records (Rome). Or, for instance, togoschlam PL curated yt list.