Tag: alt rock

TRACK | The Kerosene Hours – Who’s That In My Room

5/5 golden merles

The perfect slice of alt rock paranoia, The Kerosene Hours’ “Who’s That in my Room” explores an inordinately compelling post-punk impostor self-diagnosis. The hooks are immense. The intensity of the lead drives forward the reckoning, while archival samples introduce a series of eerie phantasmal pedagogues emerging as deficient and outmoded council. It all combines to convincingly attest that the observed double life is worth leading.

Octave shifts and echo in the choral arrangements probably foremost, the tune’s construction is extremely carefully designed. Silverstein’s wailing, its range and melodic fervor, is simply gorgeous. The negative space employed and the phasing of discrete components throughout the soundscape is something to really appreciate in headphones.

During the push into the final chorus the modulated synth pulses apply a counterweighted melody after the field loop, adding a welcome variance to the crescendo, escalating the final advance, and precisely taking its own advice (“try to modify the stimulus”).

It’s a great repeater, hard to exhaust on successive listens. Pay what you will at the bandcamp, it is available at the price that you determine. For complimenting media, maybe also check out Bastie, Dehghani, Nkondo et al’s criminally underrated Gobelins short “Lonely Dogs.”

TRACK | jack petrone – pavement

5/5 golden merles

jack petrone’s track “pavement” does a lot with deceptively a little. The two chords pendular migration of the verse spans the width of the world, though its description could be of any given city or town. With the immense quality of the fine inky texture of overlapping noise you may lose a little coherence within that resonant hum, but only in the best possible shoegaze/alt manner of seeping and flooding. It’s a nice place to be, this gently discordant soundscape.

What appeals to me most is the near constant elaborations and punctuations of choral noise, guitar, and synth which offer carefully designated counterweights to the warmth and steady haze. These attributes reify the song as place, concretize the foundations, populate the landscape with monuments and working ruins.

trash is everywhere / dog shit on the ground /… thousand pounds of dirt and glass / falls in unison

Like any good visitation the stopover is abbreviated. There’s still plenty of time before the mires novelty diminishes and envelopes under less agreeable terms; somewhere safely situated around the two minute mark in this case.

The distinction of that melodic and tonal enchantment in contrast to the stark grit of the imagery makes it a rich and compelling piece. Investigate further and/or pay what you will on the bandcamp. Compare and contrast with Delaby, Takhedmit, & Giboury’s strange and excellent micro-short “Clavel Gris.”


TRACK | Goon – Death Spells

5/5 golden merles

With “Death Spells,” Kenny Becker and Goon have again (and again) produced some of the most engaging melodic psych folk around. In the elaborately warped structure you are agreeably consumed, intricacies compiling and enveloping, comfortably saturating the self without obliterating it. Some trick.

“Death spells are coming down / don’t go outside.” That’s how it begins. It really seems to me like some small banner held aloft in attempt to redeem the medium from utter ruin. Its composition and manner of maneuvering stands out like a healthy thumb amidst the swollen hand and arm and body and world at large.

Why don’t more people do this, don’t even seem to desire it? Probably because it is difficult. For most songwriters, after a couple of bars the intention is lost or staggers. After a couple iterations the melody conforms to a bare, essential framework, the tendrils and impulses are shorn and hewn for functionality, reproducibility. While writing a song you have to remember it.

There’s a fair amount of bravery to desire this type of expansion. And it’s something the maker must consider during the making, from the outset, as desirable. The risk of either excess, mathematical purity or utterly indistinct irrelevance, begs for a balance. And the only scale is an intuitive understanding of form and the history of shared forms/symbols with the audience. Awareness and ability do not often go hand in hand.

It breaks my brain that the first reviews of Goon on this blog are now 3 years old for how fresh the tracks still sound, timeless I guess. The track is $2 on the bandcamp.

If you like it, see somewhat similar operators: memory card, Melaina Kol, Windowsill. This is the direction (anti)folk should move into and a good illustration of how to incorporate uncertainty into the model without losing the essence, a bridge that has been burned but remains traversable.

Short recommendation:
For a similar level of attention to detail and world building, see Georges Schwizgebel, “78 Tours.“

TRACK | Casual Technicians – Dark Matter Falling

5/5 golden merles

America’s heart is effectively vestigial, the body running on delusion alone. But every now and again it beats, startling and amusing us.

Folk rock, alt country, freak folk, anti-folk; whatever dendritic subgenre Casual Technician’s “Dark Matter Falling” roughly fits into beyond Rock, these are things that exist in a state of defiance to the grotesque bulk of another definition. Please remember that the heart is also an outlier in relation to the other organs and would be considered an outcast among them.

We don’t need to retread that in the general appraisal Folk lacks self awareness and Country‘s sick bravado and sweetness makes me want to peacefully disassociate into an eternal coma, god willing, at the expense of my demonic private insurers.

But on the periphery and in the shadowy wasteland of upstate New York there exists at least one aggregated cabal of Portlanders intent on redeeming noise and structuring it in a manner that makes people feel whole and not diminished. If you’re familiar with Townes, Csehak, Von Schleicher, and Van Gaalen (North American, at least), it’s a bit like these things.

A large part of it’s glory is the celebration of real collaboration, unions of narration and melodic intentions merging. The contrasts and collisions are all of similar quality and keep it from congealing.

Otherwise it’s just experiment and invention informed by history but not beholden to it, offered up thoughtfully without conceding an opulent melodic core, conducted with utmost conviction and replete with distinct language. Maybe it seems easy when put like that, but it isn’t.

There are two super strong singles already up. Cassette via Repeating Cloud on 11/15/24. Digital on the bandcamp for $7.