TRACK | Genuine Leather – gunshy

5/5 golden merles

Genuine Leather’sgunshy” is indie pop-rock with much cunning sample and synth. Melodically imbued with a kind of immaculate fervor, it’s emotional appeal is embedded in a hook so honed it might effectively puncture through time like a wormhole. If it lands for you, it will loop.

The simple bass synths ostinato and its gentle variations are accented with the occasional stagger and instrumental emphasis, everything complimenting expertly with concerted purpose. Whatever engenders that sense of falling or flight, its momentum is almost pure. And the engineering of it is a refreshing, relatively lo-fi marvel.

It is rare to keep this sort of sense of joy and purpose in the first place, much less as a work transitions from demo into finished article. Although the chorus indulges (rightfully) at length, the bridge eventually offers some passage of relent, before again briefly rebounding back into the welcome refrain.

It’s a fine entry into the pantheon of gently petrified and bedraggled indie earworms. It’s probably for fans of other hooks with immense grueling persistence and the calculated crimson phases of Jack Stauber’s “Dead Weight,” Son of Salami’s “Baby Mayo,” Video Age’s “Throwing Knives,” or Sheer Mag’s “Expect the Bayonet.

The track is $1.50 on the bandcamp. Or maybe just throw it on a soundtrack so the man can eat? Short-wise look to Sophie Koko Gate’s “Half Wet.

TRACK | variety – Plover

5/5 golden merles

Variety’s “Plover” is Texan avantpop rock composed of compelling narrative subversion, sticky melody and tone. The hook is a compacted material derived from descriptions of naturalistic imagery, the conflict of the domesticated and undomesticated in comparison to the authors interpersonal dilemmas. It’s thoughtful and pretty dang fun.

I need my streams and mountains tempered by the grim specter of death. Gluck and Johnson, Bly and Ruefle. Some human fingerprints on the felled log, beach towels on the bog, a figure ever-present on the vista to trample and insist.

Whereas at the end of “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” Wright pulls it all back home, a new frame, fitted, variety’s entry point with “Plover” is immediate. But it functions in a similar way. The relationship is described then promptly the tangent turns away, meanders off skyward, the footnote consuming the page. And then another. Relative to the original focus, the elaborated metaphor informs the initial concern, compounding all the more weight.

Two of the greatest modern scouts of imaginative rock have already signed off on the making, Groschi and Doyle. If you’re not already following them, what are you doing here?

The singles are combining into an album to be released in November: bandcamp / name your price.