bedroom – Page 14 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Privacy Issues – Hold My Breath

Privacy Issues’ self titled is some of the lo-est fi-est EP to come out of 2020, which is still relevant to us thanks to the nature of time progressing forward and rarely if ever backward, despite the desires of the regressive.

The guitar hooks interplay with that circular writing structure, everything guided by the minimal drumming, and all of this works alongside the very high quality vocal melodies.

It seems simple, but it isn’t. Or it is, but in the way that a diamond is simple: freely forming, found in dirt, but honed over millennia.

I bought the tape and I have no tape player. But someday maybe I will? Probably one can still be purchased from the goodwill for a few dollars and then fixed for a few dollars more.

TRACK | Hair Peace – Summertime

In the bleak mid-winter, let’s dwell on sunnier times discussed and celebrated in Hair Peace’s Summertime, as featured on their 2014 Summer EP. It has a melody like radioactive molasses. It compels you to have faith in the youths. It reminds you that verses and choruses can coexist in peace, hair peace.

That I am the only individual who has purchased this item (from the Bandcamp page, at least), is a kind of crime against humanity. Some CDs were apparently available at Bloomington, IN’s, wonderful Landlocked music, where I spent a good deal of student loan money at their various locations one hundred years ago.

It was Schopenhauer who said “Man can do what he wants but not want what he wants.” OK, But you should want this EP. It’s good. Contract it today.

TRACK | Sibylle Baier – Tonight

Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green was “Recorded in the early 70’s in her home on a reel to reel recording device,” then sat unreleased for 40-50 years.

It is with a profound sense of dread that you consider this and realize that this set of tracks was one of the lucky ones. That most things of this caliber are, if recorded at all, languishing in moldy basements, storage lockers and landfills.

These were things that played live in a community, maybe, a handful of times, then had no outlet. Songs that the corporate scouting and release structure had no use for on commercial grounds, in a culture plagued by products. Ads on, in , and bracketing all media, like cancer in the body, determining what lives and dies. As artists or creators we have a responsibility to mitigate or eliminate this if possible.

Which is why Bandcamp is such a fine platform and model to emulate. Perhaps it will be bought out and crushed eventually. But for now it is the very best option available.

TRACK | Coma Cinema – Satan Made a Mansion

I don’t think anybody can in good faith argue with how good a line, “Satan made a mansion for love to live when it dies,” especially in the way it is casually uttered here, and considering its fine abbreviated state existing as both precursor and title.

Few and far between are such killer refrains.

And that is not yet to mention some of the best lo-ish-er-fi production this side of the infinite lapse.

You don’t need me to tell you whose fingerprints are on this one. I only wish I could do my influences this kind of fearless and forthright justice.

TRACK | Orchid Mantis – Don’t Wake Me Up

Carrying the torch of Jeans Wilder Sparkler, similar elements are here infused a decade later and with different meaning.

Spectral and with more than a glancing glimmer of the void, the lead guitar melody loops back upon itself, an ouroboros, devouring it’s own tail indefinitely.

This perpetual motion machine can be yours for the low, low price of $3.

TRACK | Jeans Wilder – Sparkler

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.

TRACK | The Mountain Goats – The Water Song

John Darnielle has carved out a place in the world for himself through an exhaustive output of decades worth catchy and insightful pop music.

It is seemingly self-sustaining and I admire him a great deal for this achievement. As the gears about us churn and crush everyone else, John has managed not to be ground into a fine paste.

That is not at all to say that he didn’t have his fair share of hard times, from what I understand, those due all sentient beasts. But that he continued to create throughout them and continues to make interesting media. At some point most people stop.

This song is gleefully dire. There are some field recording elements for texture, subtle but sticky backing vocals in the chorus, and the bareness of John’s grating/glorious voice.

I am most familiar with this song in the context of a mix in which it feeds directly into Jeans Wilder’s Sparkler. And that will be posted next. Due to the way chronology works in archiving posts, it will be in order but now perceived out of order. The trick is that it doesn’t matter.

TRACK | Son of Salami – Baby Mayo

Baby Mayo is a blast from the not so distant past of 2012.

It was a simpler time. Instagram gave a generation of not-yet-middle-aged millennials a reason to live. One neoliberal oligarchy apologist was our symbolic figurehead instead of another. And the domestication of the dog continued unabated.

Looking back over it now it is a real triumph of lo-fi bedroom rock. Both melodically interesting, lyrically playful, strange but also truly pretty.

I am all for representations of abrupt and seemingly arbitrary deterioration, having experienced them personally as a bipedal multicellular biological organism, like when the track hits a disintegration loop or two.

There is a lot of craft and detail going into this track which may be lost on some less familiar with the genre. Mostly because it sounds like an ice cream truck falling apart upon reentry. but it is there.

TRACK | Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Tom Justice, The Choir Boy Robber, Apprehended at Ace Hardware in Libertyville, IL

“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.

TRACK | Total Revenge – Jeep Cherokee

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.

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