Vacation’s Zen Quality Seed Crystal opens with two very strong tracks for the genus rock-type.
Both Hole that Once Held a Screw and Captain Unsensible have the spark of lo-fi magic and that can be found similarly glinting about in golden-era Brian Jonestown Massacre/Guided by Voices layering.
If the goal is to access the feeling, the production is expert. Just on the right side of coherence, it’s good and it’s probably a kind of mastery.
Daydream provide high energy and experimentation around traditional structures.
The borderline incoherent vocals are still great as instrument and texture. But the lyrics are also there on the bandcamp if you want to read the fine print:
“Can it smirk? Can I take any power from it?”
Coming out in December 2020, Mystic Operative still made the year-end list last time around the sun. Maybe because it has a strange and wonderful density to the performances. Every 2-3 minute long song feels twice that, and in a good way.
And in this way the song/album feels like the raw material of a type of rock music, some kind of natural resource, almost unfiltered but for the mix. Elemental and admirable.
It is within our capacity to build better worlds.
This is a song that encourages this practice, implores a reassessment of unjust hierarchies, and seems to reference one of the greatest films ever made, Elem Klimov’s Come and See.
“Fuck off, the old world.”
With a rich and subtle arrangement, Lean Year provide a good base for reinvention. Like Adam Curtis in Can’t get you out of my head: This entry is not the vision but a request for one.
The song is a precursor to the vision, but nonetheless a necessity, a rebuff, and a necessary bridge to what is coming. A good prompt and great entreaty.
Listening to new music you find that most songs are speaking in vague and grand generalities. Their subjects are love and death, to the extent they have them. By and large, the melody is the message.
Most songs are used as a platform to display the singer’s performative talents. And depending on your cultural conditioning you can grant them credulity or not.
“I was only calling / to talk to my brother”
This isn’t that. Mope Grooves’ Here comes another one appears to be a song about a relationship. And within that an interaction. And within that an instance.
Music is a tool. Whatever conditioning I have been subjected to and/or later sought out values lyricism including storytelling and texture.
And in minimalistic instances like this one, the gravity of limited phrasing amplifies its significance. All of this creates a small but highly detailed world, one possible to escape into, if you want, and is some real nice storytelling.
Lord Knows Best is a well calibrated machine of a song. Like clockwork, spiraling gears gracefully align the complimentary melodies while brackets of tones reinforce them.
Full of purpose and with great density, it must be lowered by crane carefully into the heart.
Check out Alex Zhang Hungtai’s more experimental, clamber and field rec’d new stuff as well, Young Gods Run Free.
There are two excellent renditions of this song on No Silver / No Gold. The other is a better single, but the version included below from the end of the album is preferred.
“Has anybody seen my bag / it’s the one I put together for the leaving”
This is what folk/americana could be and should be known as: all the layers of grit, complexity, simplicity, and directness. A unique and passionate delivery, playful and apocalyptic.
And just the one long note on the organ, putting Iggy to shame; making him out to be an overachieving opportunist for all those additional percussive hammerings.
Stamp is one of them joyous garage rock lamentations, end to end.
Everything down to the outro refrain and terminal exclamation are so well balanced and calibrated, it almost defies belief. The fuzz and fade are most agreeably punctuated by the lead guitars tremolo.
Disgust and disillusionment never sounded so kindly, even merry. Tom Waits enjoys “Beautiful melodies telling (him) terrible things,” and so do I.
It is Good.
Well, well is a stunning track and, good news, the whole album is built like this. Maybe a full, proper review to come when things settle down a bit.
But Black Bug’s s/t is a well contained rampage of burning saw patterns, choral uproar and properly clobbered digi drums.
15 tracks and no song is longer than 2:08.
Female/Male tradeoff the purging, vocal utterances and I don’t know if any album is as much fun as this is fun.
Name your price.
San Diego’s Teenage Burritos 2016 s/t has much good within it.
The standout tracks for me are Prom Song and the one rated here/posted below, Kamikaze. But the whole thing is so fluent in building convincing garage rock fragments that it appears effortless.
A real compelling alchemy of elements, dodging and compiling. I prefer this version featuring Andreas from Holograms to the other two listed on their bandcamp:
Even given the perpetual deluge of quality bandcamp content that no one of us will ever be able to sort through, it is borderline criminal that Windowsill’s “Twolip” has 9 sales to date.
Recommended to me initially by my internet-pal Paolo Yumol (who makes fine music in his own right), this track is sheer wonder and sweetly confides in its listener in the most appealingly warped and ravaged manner.
The strings and refracted melodic variations and repetitions build to great effect. The detailing and textures are comprehensively plotted. Its greatness is readily apparent. ok?
Plainly & Painfully 