Tag: 2023

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.

TRACK | Eric Angelo Bessel – Kindly Rewind

5/5 golden merles

“Kindly Rewind” is the second single off Eric Angelo Bessel’s upcoming ambient and experimental Visitations LP. Within the first few iterative whorls you can feel its resonance and reach, replete with much wonder and otherworldly artifacts of interest. Make of it what you will, but there is good raw material collected and methodically ordered as though it is a gift. The melody and its deterioration reads as though conflicted, situated at the helm, wary but intrigued, gazing into a great abyss.

The track contains a worthy extent of daunting search charted across this route; you will accompany it, feeling out the loop through interlocking synths and the steady pull of movement in some direction. The rich texture and tone provide credulity, allowing the listener to indulge in the peculiar and startling act of remaining within the motion and moment. It is transportive and properly weighted. It lends itself to speculation, curiosity, and feels like a soundtrack for celestial expanse or the uncharted subterranean. It knows the act of careening results in eventual harmony and has the craters to prove it. I find it to be delicate and consequential noise.

If work is described as “cinematic” you can in fact add it to your own life and enhance whatever small intrigues you find yourself embroiled within, ok? Not everything must be subsumed and reframed through yet another vignette of media, narrowing the field of experience down into manageable units of another’s intention.

In any case, it stands on its own. I would be proud if I had made it. If we are primarily defining ourselves through consumption of various media, best to have at least a few pieces included that allow you to focus primarily on your own becoming. The piece seems to encourage considered action in this way, elegantly embodying a balanced sense of doubt and hope, and that is a rare and valuable quality.

Vinyl preorder is available on the bandcamp for $20 from Portland’s Lore City Records, or $8 for the digital album. It releases April 21st.

TRACK | Beta Maximo – Voy a salir a vengarme

5/5 golden merles

Úbeda, Spain-based egg punk, crammed to the gills with gatling gun digi drum and deliberate melodic delineations. If you find amusement or solace in one glancing, angular component of this, good news: the entirety is composed of similar muck. The visions clear and hitting what it’s aiming at. Only as crooked as it takes to fulfill the composition, there’s a lot of joy in this pop rock forming and sprouting outside of industrial confinement.

We’ve written on Beta maximo before, but the album has been disappeared. However the new stuff is just as good. As stated at the time, the band was described as “DIYARI (Do It Yourself And Release Immediately), this aesthetic remains intact and uncompromised.” In fact, there has been a new single in the subsequent weeks after this LP, released March 9th, “Hornos de ladrillo.” I am a million miles behind.

Since the 17th of February you could name your price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Punter – A Minute’s Silence

5/5 golden merles

Hardcore punk from Melbourne with great scope, focused on the vast rot. The vocals are appropriately raving in a perpetual alarm propelled by an undercurrent of backing hooks and lead guitar melodies that facilitate agreeable ingurgitation.

You’re not going to get a better opening line than “Chuck a piss-up on a grave site” for awhile. The primary concerns explicit in the text are privacy in an era of unbidden observation, militarized police forces, and the general degradation and abuses of the social contract. It’s also anthemic. And it’s also a lot of fun.

From what I can gleam as am imbecile and outsider, the son and dotard of many hungry ghosts, the angle is relatively anarchic, I hope, to the extent affiliations don’t damn you outright. There are expressed concerns with left disunity benefitting the bastards at the alternate extreme. Historical examples are cited as everyman martyrs who have been sacrificed for a world they would be ashamed to have been affiliated with.

Your revulsion will either be directed outward or eat you alive from the inside. As an agent within a system of organized degradation with a capacity for self reflection, exercising that capacity for critique is imperative if there is any hope of remediation. And (and) there’s a lot of good hooks in it, too. Revel, wallow, examine, admire the monolithic guillotine on the cover… come up against the limitations of the medium and maybe discover a door.

$6.91 USD on Bandcamp or vinyl from Drunken Sailor Records.

TRACK | Golden Hallway Music – Radiant Park Collage

5/5 golden merles

Golden Hallway Music revels in saturation and subtle intention. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 seems to understand that the purpose of the pulse is a side effect, and that there’s a heart beating somewhere other and the movement is the aftermath echoing throughout the body. There’s a lot of that subterranean engine documented here across a few concurrent sensors, claiming to be live and feeling like it. It has plenty of refraction and careening, but consistently and repeatedly with gentle variations within the coherent structure.

From my dullards point of view, abstraction tends to flatter authority. What is the difference between this and the other abstractions I find distasteful? Not Not Fun seems to know. And I think the work provides some intimation of allegiance. Titles, tones and influence, conspiring in the common era. Minimal but rich in its rawness, paced in a manner that is difficult to convert into something damning or damaging.

It was recorded by expansive mining of the melodies and then an extracting of excerpts. “Radiant Park Collage” works up and charts the sort of layers that have their own intimations of language or kinds of simple systems, deliberately but slowly compounding to give way to larger complexities. And the symbolic representation of that evolution seems valuable.

Redefining some single units of measure, it will be released April 7th.



TRACK | Liquids – My Best Friend (Stab Me In The Back Again)

5/5 golden merles

NW Indiana’s Liquids have returned with more proto garage feelings nailed onto the egg punk skeleton. Songs is more raw and seeping, less refined in production than Life is Pain Idiot. The rate at which these things degrade is variable. Less a crack in the foundation of the prior effort and more a rebuilding upon the rubble of the pile of limited releases. Half digested or about three quarters gestated, anyway, viable, and better out than in. New: now with more new.

There’s plenty of melodic invention within the parameters of the genres sterling decrepitude. And the murk it’s packed with keeps things fresh upon repeat listens. With respect to production, everything’s overheard through a wall in the next room. But there’s some preservative properties in the goo emitting from the gears into the end product; it leaves plenty of room for magic and misinterpretation.

The ‘punk’s dead’ discourse is a trope and the trope itself must die. Surely the answer is something akin to the perpetual cycle of rebirth and death much like the organisms that make it: Emerge, decline and diminish. Symbols corrupt and the language adjusts, later the symbols are replaced by something that better gets at the feeling while the old symbol rots back into the earth. There is a natural discordance of definitions in this process. Temporary end or intermittent beginning, either way it’s nice to have the document.



TRACK | Tee Vee Repairmann – Bus Stop

5/5 golden merles

From the C:/ of Ishka Edmeades, in the style of garage punk and powerful pop: some new, prolific and defiant portents for the year in death ahead. “Bus Stop” wouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination sound out of place in a Riptides/Numbers set, save maybe for its general state of tightness and refinement. A warmth of tube derived tones coincide with a lament for missed opportunities, experiments wide in the channel with the organ/lead pulsing.

For better or worse it’s a timeless track, at least for the last 50 or 60 years. That’s a lot of influence to synthesize, to reconstitute from constituent parts in some manner that again feels alive. Rest assured, he’ll keep rewiring the available woes into good hooks and relaying them over digital mainframes regardless of your support. But I for one think that it’s nice to have something this reliable that isn’t a bad thing. Most reliable things are bad. but this is good and should be encouraged.

February 10th, 2023, is the arrival of the record, the tapes and vinyls seem destined to quickly diminish. US version out on Total Punk Records in Portland.