Tag: bedroom

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – CLOWNING

5/5 golden merles

Writing on Busted Head Racket in December I accused them of crafting “delightful and difficult to kill earworms.” The new work is just as infested and likewise just as rabid and relentless, a prized commotion carved in synths and the probable simulacra of a slide whistle. Or is it the real deal? I would ask you to decide. Asundered with intention and contented in collected the notions, it’s rattling along with conviction and guts.

It finally, mercifully, drove out an alternate jingle from my mind. Lyrics are something to do with everything, or faced with the daily phases of self-reported observations, vacillating in the performance of personhood, bounding between enchantment and disenchantment, mockery and conviction. Coherently capturing ambivalence is sometimes later more akin to the feeling at the moment, and a better document for it. The world will grind you into dust but, if you’re lucky, there’s a stage of becoming a fine paste prior to dehydration. A nice soothing balm.

Look at the video by throat.pasta over at Tremendo Garaje. According to TG, the EP will release around this rotten globe in cassette form from Painscale (AUS), Pogo Til You Puke (UK), Idiotape Records (FR), Spyasola Records(DE), Harry Records(NL), Blä Records (SE), SYF Records (PL) and Painters Tape Records (US). Name your own price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Mo Troper – For You To Sing

5/5 golden merles

Good and due praise has been delivered to Mo Troper’s new tune “For You To Sing.” The recent track is an inspired calibration of power pop instrumentation. The only slack is intentional and left to reverberate with complimentary tone, a pure slice of steel and nickel pluck and glimmer. Jealousy and rivalry ferment in syrupy crystalline tones that exceptionally accent the chronicler’s annoyed-anguish. It’s pretty much timeless as far as the run of our lifetimes is concerned and the embodiment of dancing in degraded states underneath an outsized heart.

Guitar leads and vocal melodies interweave in a manner in which each subsection is given room to breathe and compliment every subsequent element. There’s also a good lesson in here concerning how to captivate through storytelling within the medium. From the first ‘well, (pause)’ the narrative lines alter in subtle variations that elaborate on the stakes and intentions, cohesive and reliably unreliable.

It’s built so finely in these numerous elaborations, seeking and retaining rich texture and idiosyncratic lyrical twist that works to buffer it from the passage of time. There’s too much good and unique character to it, built up over eons of influence, reaching beyond the notes and lines at something larger, that any imitators would almost by definition fail to replicate.

Internally bleeding, I really loved MTV and had it among the best records of 2022. Really looking forward to the futures worthy concocting. $1 on the bandcamp for the single.

TRACK | Max García Conover – 5 to 4 (ft. paula prieto)

5/5 golden merles

In Max García Conover’s “5 to 4” there is an attempt to reclaim wonder from the pit of kitsch, and dance delicately around that border, lifting. It’s got rare quality and a kind of playful but ruthless cunning that keeps the lines fresh and rewards instead of the normal, standardized route of punishing attention. A novel approach. The EP set is “somewhat inspired by a suitcase full of letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother in the 1940s,” when she was in a hospital for the consumptive poor and he was a different person.

The EP has a good concept and a better execution, most of the value situated in its coherent perspective and phrasing. The featured track including killer lines like “The endless metal barbed in metal,” and “it came down just like you said it would, five to four against the poor,” landing resoundingly within the rhyming scheme.

And that feels not too distanced from Townes or Woody, far more in line with that school than the modern conception of folk that always seems to diminish in its refinement of style above substance, paralleling our diets and or assorted gods. There is a great rarity with which folk music seems relevant to me, with this calibrated style and substance, feel and fondant. It’s been given such a bad name through regular consumption that it feels such a shock when you do get a dose of the decent.

Found and stolen from the esteemed scouting of Jon Doyle at VariousSmallFlames.co.uk. Everything in Winter EP is $5 on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Golden Hallway Music – Radiant Park Collage

5/5 golden merles

Golden Hallway Music revels in saturation and subtle intention. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 seems to understand that the purpose of the pulse is a side effect, and that there’s a heart beating somewhere other and the movement is the aftermath echoing throughout the body. There’s a lot of that subterranean engine documented here across a few concurrent sensors, claiming to be live and feeling like it. It has plenty of refraction and careening, but consistently and repeatedly with gentle variations within the coherent structure.

From my dullards point of view, abstraction tends to flatter authority. What is the difference between this and the other abstractions I find distasteful? Not Not Fun seems to know. And I think the work provides some intimation of allegiance. Titles, tones and influence, conspiring in the common era. Minimal but rich in its rawness, paced in a manner that is difficult to convert into something damning or damaging.

It was recorded by expansive mining of the melodies and then an extracting of excerpts. “Radiant Park Collage” works up and charts the sort of layers that have their own intimations of language or kinds of simple systems, deliberately but slowly compounding to give way to larger complexities. And the symbolic representation of that evolution seems valuable.

Redefining some single units of measure, it will be released April 7th.



TRACK | Frankie Traandruppel – Ocean Song (featuring bontridders)

5/5 golden merles

We previously celebrated Frankie Traandruppel’s timeless “The Darkness (Comes to town),” and on the strength of that track I am obligated to consider anything else he’s putting forward. On Yadda Yadda the most effective track is the collaboration and closer, “Ocean Song,” featuring Anderlecht’s bontridders. It’s something like unreckonable lo-fi bedroom rock stained with texture and tonal radiance.

The track is warm and refractive, a brightly self-contained geode of a tune. In it the plaintive gliding vocal scales the percussive friction of a looping synth-string sample and the steady bloom of the rhythm guitar. It’s a lot bigger than the sum of these crassly cataloged parts, concave, immense and foggy around the edges of the glittering expanse. For a sense of scale you can, for instance, pretty happily live and die in it.

It motions to you from the beach. It’s intentions aren’t clear but the attention is enough. Music is a tool that can be used for many different things. I don’t know what it does but it seems useful. Yadda Yadda is out now on Ronny Rex for the low, low cost of making up a number.

TRACK | Decomisos La Toledana – Deprisa, Deprisa

5/5 golden merles

Madrid lo-fi burning with the light, gently obscured but unquestionably recognizable. The track is transcending time through the amalgamated fuel of rock influence and intentional media consumption. And in converting this into a new unit, its value is immediately apparent. The entire demo set has that character, driving at something greater than the genre but utilizing it as a medium for the purposes of conveying. That is hopefully what you want from all art: taking what is at hand and what has resonated, and then tuning it to your own frequency. It does this.

The engine is guitar tone, a viscus echo bleeding off the lead vocal melody, and some tight and direct drumming. It’s familiarity and form that can feel frontloaded with nostalgia, as though it is a unit of articulation convenient to assign a period of your own life, characteristics that are endearing and worthy of application. You could have had it then, but you didn’t, now you do. That is the joy of the thing; another lovely arc of the echo as it emits, another good ring charted around the base, some momentum to keep moving at all or in sync to, a record of our dendrochronology.

Found through Groschi’s tireless searching, part of a four piece mix that will work perfectly as an antidote to all the Christmas playlists you will likely subjected to.

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – Wouldn’t you like 2 Know

5/5 golden merles

Bedroom lo-fi synth pop from Australia, the release from Idiotape Records (Paris) contains two ounces worth of delightful and difficult to kill earworms. The refinement is pronounced and very much appreciated: layers phasing and melodies shifting in precise sequence, the variance in lyric keeping us sated in the recurrent loops.

There’s great detailing in the margins, like the delicate death rattle production on the vocal lanes or the tinny-washed out drums that splash late on in the dying embers. It has great density to it but the appearance of pure candy and handles like a cartoon mallet: swiftly, against the odds, pleasantly gruesome.

The track features the dogged honing of hooks as previously manifested by so many of our senescent idols, by that I mean maybe it has some golden era le tigre feelings about it, maybe a touch of Metric, or of times new viking; things I like and you likely liked too.

The cost is €2 on the bandcamp for the files or €5 for the tape before shipping. See what you can do.

TRACK | vivi milne – In 2

5/5 golden merles

Solstice is bedroom/lo-fi folk that is elaborately cut together, pulling at interpersonal strands and cogently tracing them back into their universal underpinnings. It follows closely on the heels after 2020’s also great Double Headed Deer and is akin to that cloth. “In 2” is a good representation of the style and substance of that storytelling, demarcating the unease in the daring, fractured totality.

The vocal tracks heavy leftward arc feels present in the room, the thoughtful melodies are at all times in a state of serenely careening. It feels like a personal but not indulgent document, a good, individual archive of the era and that is rare and valuable. “There are certain memories that remain inviolate to the ravages of time,” fortunately.

Sometimes songwriters use both style and text and it is a great relief. Maybe you think this is the default, but I tell you it is not. At least not to the extent by which both are refined or cataloged. It’s a lot less poised to perish than anything else you’ve been sold this month, musically or otherwise. $7 on the bandcamp for the set.

TRACK | Melaina Kol – Nu

5/5 golden merles

Melaina Kol creates Youngsville, North Carolina-based lo-fi bedroom rock. AMOSAT is layered in rich and compelling material, a delicately discordant ambiance constructed with much persistently viable misdirection stacked around the solid songwriting. “Nu” offers loads of angular pieces approaching of their own accord, an entire woven world of it to delve and get lost in, subtle hooks and abundant texture.

If I ever make anything good, I’ll have taken some lessons from this: its patience and sense of rerouting the narrative within the greater whole. There a lot of skill in guiding the persistent observer or judge in a kind of favorable figment or refracting everything in a favorable light; it’s nice to see such skill given to the refinement of experiment and innumerable unique transitions between tracks.

All of that is of value and is a kind of expertise that slowly accumulates an audience in the world, at least you hope so. It can be held by Naming your price at the bandcamp. Also check out the re-release of a set of 2017 tracks now out on tape/digital from 7th Heaven.

TRACK | los spunky’s – te escribiré canciones de amor

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi bedroom punk from Santiago, Chile, providing great heart and guts among other inexplicable innards throughout the convection. The tracks give some heavy pop sensibilities but offer them estranged from professionalized depersonalization of corporate art. Some direct, convincing evidence these tunes and textures can be held in high esteem outside of what has become of our culture, and can persist without ulterior motives. It is a welcome reminder.

It has the inevitable influence of radio, youth, nostalgia and combines it with the human desire for direct melodies about extremely simple/impossibly complicated things like ‘love.’ But in doing so also is stripping out the obligatory advertisements and operates similar to other independent media as though a musical ad blocker. Working directly without the pretense of polish, dissipating the sickly attaché which has been engineered to leech off our every action, while maintaining the preferences that seem to us inextricable from systems of oppression but are very much not.

Taking the good while shedding the parasitical, this feels healthy. And another glimpse of some small, personal vision of a way forward. Lots of good dreaming coming out of Chile lately, despite the turning down of the constitution. A different world is possible, break through the bullshit, return to basics and reinvent the world. Name your price on the Bandcamp.