From the bass synth and bass guitar out the gate intermingling, to the vocals metallic net of echo, every tone in this is great.
There are a couple buried synths in the mix, something I am deeply sympathetic to, offering up their own variant melodies to the alter of noise. They are just apparent enough to flesh things out and keep things interesting.
This gentle revisionism speaks to the chaos at the heart of the track. Whether The Future is Better or Never is better, something must change.
As mentioned in the prior post, The Mountain Goats’ The Water Song feeds nicely into this track, in tempo, theme and texture.
And it is all a lot of texture, isn’t it. It’s such a lovely, warm, lugubrious track.
The 50s pop influences are here, gently warped through the lo-fi bedroom lens. If it’s not already in some slow motion film sequence or twenty it will be soon enough.
The mood has been captured or crafted and awaits appropriation, to be shuffled sequentially, reformed into a new purpose. It’s too good not to be gathered up and set against new backgrounds, some complimentary, some gaudy and/or heartless.
Z-ZERO is 90 seconds of blown-out synth pop punk.
The bifurcated melody lets for once the bridge also be the chorus, and it is no small wonder that this works out fine. Yet again, Australia has shown us the way.
It’s all very good. There’s enough style that it lapses back into substance at some point in the general mire, the rhythm guitar bounding back and forth across the soundscape throughout.
“26 without a shot / that’s more than Bonnie and Clyde got”
Never one to shy away from a lengthy title no matter whose blog title section it will disrupt, CFTPA/Owen Ashworth writes songs plenty good enough to overlook this flaw.
It starts with twinkling starlight keys affixed to a broad void of bass drum, just listen to the song. It is all beginning. Synthetic clapping, you should listen for that. And there’s a tremendous organ solo that plays Tom off. You can just listen to it.
“Give me a chance to be a stranger / give me a chance to be forgotten”
The drums land in the mix somewhere at the base of the skull, in the limbic system or lizard brain. I’m not sure I heard them the first 10 times I listened to the song, but you feel them.
And anyway with Chancer the guitar hooks are the centerpiece, adorned in fuzz and jangle.
There are at least three vocal tracks spread across the headphone range in various states of singsong and staggered slightly in delay and octave. They all unite in a fine megazord in the mix, sword accessorized.
There’s a few great tracks on Total Revenge’s S/T, but Jeep Cherokee is my favorite of the set.
Drums that register somewhere between trashcan and streetlight corral a blown out but triumphant melody, bleeding out graciously into the verse. All of this builds pretty quickly to some kind of boil before dissipating in feedback to close out the record.
“I do all the things that I should / For once in my life I feel good”
Check out also The Fair for similar sludgery that reaches comparable heights of wonder.
Beauty Sleep is utterly great dreamy, spectral synth pop. A small triumph of pacing, texture and enveloping synthesizers.
“fell asleep in the garden / the flowers are starting to take root in my brain”
The immensely carefully constructed unfolding is something we can all learn a lesson or two from.
There is a lot to admire in the crafting, the phasing of layers, and the levels and positioning at which field recording elements are place peripherally, never pulling too much focus from the ear-worm chorus and verses.
It is good. Check out other sounds he’s made at the soundcloud.
Shitty Hits is one of the best albums of the last decade. It is endlessly impressive and inspiring material, awash in fervent commiseration, fearsome eulogizing, and in this way it is difficult to choose one track to feature.
Knowing how good the subsequent offerings are, starting with track one makes sense.
There are no fewer than several dozen instances in which effortlessness combines seamlessly with the elaborate. Like in Going Down when it almost sounds like it’s all about to fall apart, stalling just after the field recording, then careening back into the chorus, outdoing the previous effort’s loop. Or essentially all of The Image, or Life’s a lie... or Isolator, or Hold…
There is a great quote that is applicable here from an article reviewing Denis Johnson’s Lament of the Sea Maiden by Geoff Dyer, “Control is achieved through willing proximity to its loss.”
And that is anything with content and form, style and substance, design and function. But rarely is it metered so consistently with such exactitude and genius.
With great rarity does the lo-fi indie bedroom-rock world produce things that are both believably personal and properly anthemic. Generally speaking, for most working within this subset, the ambition doesn’t stretch much farther than the size of the room it was crafted in.
Exceptions include the occasional track by Joanna, Spencer and that immensely talented okie who wrote Funeral. But they are everywhere here. If you play it you too will become pleasantly impaled on one of the very many hooks.
Katie Von Schleicher has written two remarkable albums in the last few years and I doubt either of you vulgarians own them yet. You can still buy Shitty Hits on vinyl at the bandcamp.
Also follow on Instagram for quality bird-centric social media content second only to Marianne Williamson.
La Tormenta is the final track on Daga Voladora’s wonderful album Chiu-Chium (“an onomatopoeic representation of the sound made by a flying dagger,” referenced in track 5).
The album cover approximates well the texture, color palette and detailing within: varied warm and fractured synthesizers revolve around the vocal heart of each track.
The track selected, La Tormenta, is an account or rumination on being at sea in the midst of a storms throes. A cover of Lorena Álvarez, the poise of this rendition is held in perpetual balance by the 4-5 electronic murmurs.
There is among them what appears to be a synth estimation of a harpsichord involved, that calmed but febrile plucking. The style is of the highest order, pacing, structure, production and melody.
The calming and all consuming dread is felt, whether in defiance or resignation. And the beauty of this lamentation contorts to good whatever cruelty of fate initiated the storms summoning. There is an account. They have come out the other side.
“Big Dreams, don’t know where to put them / up on the shelf”
Big Dreams is a sandcastle made of sugar.
It is 25ft tall and even when the water comes in as a tide that afternoon it takes 8 days to dissolve, fully one day more than it took some lord to create the world and it’s peripheral, irrelevant universe (as it is alleged).
Albert Einstein was quoted as saying about science, probably, “It should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” And that is also a pretty good way to think about pop music.
A distillation and honing of hooks into their purest form. Unity have made here a good example of that phenomenon.
Plainly & Painfully 