Tag: bandcamp

TRACK | Guided by Voices – You’re Not an Airplane

5/5 golden merles

Dayton rockers GBV even further stripped down here, just Pollard and piano on this lovely quasi-lament. The pathos is insurmountable, coming in waves from the fluctuations of the tape deck, and early and then late in the noise, some squeaking that might be crickets or a rotary winding.

It’s very effective. At 33 seconds in length, a formidable track to cap off the album. It feels like an ode to the rust belt (At this point, maybe not then / maybe even then), and there is an immense hollowness to the claim that “the race is yet to come.” It hurts. But also there’s some hope in it; not in the short or the medium term, but maybe metaphorically, or at least that time is long and ours is not the only telling.

TRACK | Tamaryn – Love Fade

5/5 golden merles

A nested blaze of shoegaze tones from San Francisco, it caroms about absorbing and addressing the void at scale. We’re about a decade out from release but the reverberations are fortunately just this side of eternal.

Echoing, cavernous instrumentation propels forward in concordant jangle. The lyrics speak of a reassessment in the harsh light of day.

Elemental, arching momentum builds a resonant, sonic wave, thermal and synergistic. Anyway, you know what shoegaze is: sonorous crashing, dissipating entropy that is also somehow continually regenerative. This is that kind of goodness.

TRACK | Peluquería Canina – Hilda Zaude

5/5 golden merles

“Hilda Zaude” is solid psych-punk rock from Madrid, Spain. It’s contains overlapping guitar phrasing echoing and bounding in a kind of pop-sludge anthem.

The lyrics translated from the Basque speak of death and mourning. It surrounds you / chills your whole body / you are dead / I don’t understand anything.

This is complimented by the menacing, at times reverb-shrieking lead guitar tones, ominous bass, and purposefully dreary scale. The chorus is direct, composed of a solitary scream of “¡ahhh!”

It’s a foreboding track that also has an element of the festive or ceremonial to it, a good mix of garage and ghastly.

TRACK | Prison Affair – Nice Guys

5/5 golden merles

Spanish lo-fi texture god-ghouls, Prison Affair return with Demo III, a slick and bountiful repeater. Top tier sludge and melody worship, it is both sickly and perpetually fun.

The aesthetic sense is something akin to reliably nailing Jell-O/jelly/ectoplasm to the wall; take your pick. Hard to quantify and deceptively simple, spatially ingenious, modestly amuck stuff.

The excited and concurrent release among the lo dash fi pipeline was impressive, dropping last month across Tremendo Garaje, Harakiri Diat, and tagoschlucam, among others, to much outpouring of love. They are highly consistent and rightfully flourishing, short and detailed tracks hyper focused on quality over quantity yet regularly uploading great sets of EPs/demos.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – Summer with Phil

5/5 golden merles

One of my favorite garage-surf records, Can’t Get No has a wealth of hooks and much nuanced noise in the murkiest depths of it’s of lo-fi production.

What stands out most is the labor involved in honing these complimentary tones and the stunning results from this joy of invention.

“Summer with Phil” is quietly ornate, teasing out melodies, amorphously coagulating and decaying. The passages are faithfully and formatively statured throughout, with consistency rising from the formidable 2010 s/t.

I have not spent enough time with 2020’s Automatic Changer, but will rectify this in the near-term. Can’t Get No has a few colored vinyl on the second hand market.

TRACK | Tawings – Listerine

5/5 golden merles

Post-punk/pop from Japan, Tawings sculpt tunes that blend various rock influences minimalistically but with much warble and precision. The instrumentation shakes and severs, fitful and concerted, to great, elaborated result.

With “Listerine” particularly the track is paced in a sophisticated lurch, with many flourishes punctuating the soundscape.

The internal logic of the tactful ornamentation locks decisively around the steady bass and drum foundation. The phrasing and lyricism is agile throughout, happy to fall apart, but prevailing in the act, composed and resolute.

Unique and fun, the vinyl is available for about ~$35 including the shipping from Japan on the bandcamp. There’s also a super cool looking partially clear/cutout case for the single version, but so far no availability on the Discogs.

TRACK | Son Bou – Hundí Mis Labios En Los Suyos

5/5 golden merles

Son Bou’s 2013 self-titled EP is blazing indie punk from Barcelona, built of or on a small fire. In either case, they’re tuning to the flame. It holds the finest lo-fi hymnals and tempo shifts, the melodies keenly cut reliably across the set.

The lyrics for the selected track translated bluntly into English are about love, its cultural expectations and preferred collaborators. The arrangement is divinely shifting, hammering together a few fine forms that turn seamlessly along the axis. The velocity changes keep fresh and the variance between verses and are appended by a bridge of textural vocalizations. It is an excellent repeater.

The EP can be ordered from Barcelona for €6 or more + shipping from Hao!Discos. Alternatively Discogs has the 7″ for some very reasonable fees on a few that have made it to the US. Otherwise an absurdly reasonable Euro for the digital issue.

TRACK | thanks for coming – losing touch (nyc)

5/5 golden merles

Direct and daunting in its indexes, “losing touch (nyc)” is a track about friends idly assuming divergent trajectories and how relationships either require continual maintenance or they stagnate, starve, or dissolve into thin air. It is a great conversational pop song about a lack of communication.

I wasn’t sure whether to feature the demo variation or the latter above with its assured layers of instrumentation, usually favoring the former for its sincerity and getting a bit closer to the moment the track takes shape. But nothing seems lost in the interim, and, alternatively in the latter, some phrasing is refined and the bass glows underneath.

There is an inspired octave shift that hones the verse and particularly the chorus hook. The modular orbit of the verse-chorus-verse syncs up solidly. It’s a heartrending and elegant track; it’s great.

TRACK | Liquids – Dont Wanna Get to Know You

5/5 golden merles

Solo project of Mat Williams of Indiana, Liquids’ Life is Pain Idiot is beaming, howling punk rock. Too many tracks to feature appropriately, so featuring the first I heard. The album end-to-end holds consistently and admirably steady delivering a series of lean and singed tracks.

That it’s a largely solo effort is truly impressive, no sense of motion or desire is lost in the administered layering. The vocal performance is appropriately clutching and cracking, landing as though live, buzzing over the vehement instrumentation. The vision is readily apparent and highly realized.

Discogs chatter claims a vinyl is in the works, hopefully this is the case. Until then it’s $5 on the digital platform all listening would take place on anyway.

TRACK | Christian Fitness – Kill the Bored

5/5 golden merles

Finding a bit of humor in the proverbial hemorrhage, Christian Fitness is equipped to reframe the general malaise in a way that may bring you amusement. Striking synths and string-approximations hammer tones into shapely assemblages, with much invention in the language, its phrasing of fine hooks.

Would you say you are a timebomb ticking / or just a normal person dealing badly with change?

There’s a great deal of care put into the honing of textures and lines. Blatantly tactful, manifesting the mess but with levity, it’s truly a nice state of mind to get trapped in. Not a band I know well. It didn’t stick on first exposure but the tab was still open in the rancid nest of endless windows, and now I realize I’m about a 100 tracks behind on something quite special and good.