Tag: bedroom

TRACK | Noah Renaissance – Beauty Sleep

5/5 golden merles

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.

ALBUM | Katie Von Schleicher – Shitty Hits

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | Daga Voladora – La Tormenta

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | Friendo – Pass Times

5/5 golden merles

Pass Times features many characteristics I greatly admire when done well: some fine, howling backing vocals, symbol splashes that connote momentum in the chorus, reverb that begins to bite on the build, reaching the edge of the expanse and folding back over onto itself.

Listening back to it now, it’s almost as though the people playing the instruments can hear one another and are able to react accordingly, like there exists a framework but also some agency within it.

And though it sounds easy, why don’t more people do it? Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t effortless but that which is hard earned.

Plus, despite it’s detestable monarchist nomenclature, I prefer Royal Crown Cola to the other sodas… not that I would ever buy or drink any of those paragons of chemical castration. But if I had to choose, gun to my head, it’d be RC most of the time.

In the last decade since the release of Pass Times its creator, Cookie Brunel, has been making heaps of exciting art, some of which is new music.

TRACK | Lean Year – Come and See

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | DVA – Javornicek

5/5 golden merles

Javornicek is a song…

“sung in a secret language… dedicated to the little kitten Javorníček, who was castaway with its spaceship by Nové Hrady. It spent one day with us, warming up, eating and then continuing its flight to its home planet.”

Are you not sold on this description? Maybe then you are on the wrong trash-rock blog.

It’s a lovely assemblage of field recorded loops and percussive detailing, gravel steps, the pluck of nested ukuleles. And it’s just about mixed better than anything i’ve ever heard.

TRACK | Dirty Beaches – Lord Knows Best

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | The Baptist Generals – Going Back Song

5/5 golden merles

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.

TRACK | Eola – Chaosos

5/5 golden merles

A simple handful of elements combine in this 72 second track to mimic the creation of the universe, and in a pretty flattering way.

Deceptively simple and full of wonder, there are only limited number of components: The 1-2-3-4 scale on the piano, the organ’s repeated quiver, and the various dreamy octave orations.

“Over your shoulder, chaos is growing”

This was the 5th track on a mix I made to drive to NY in 2010. The song was released a few weeks prior. My good friend Larry had moved to Hell’s Kitchen and needed a roommate.

I had my degree. I’d worked on a few failed campaigns. The grandfather I was assisting had died in hospice. It was a good time to move.

Listening to it now I am filled with both great nostalgia and anxiety. I feel like I’m driving a rented minivan in the dark, one long shot from Indiana, a folding bed and a box of clothes rattling around in the cab. stupid, hopeful.

Deliriously tired, when I dropped off the van I forgot the CDs in the cup holder. I know that the first worker who found them rightfully threw them out. But I was also hoping that maybe they didn’t notice them. And maybe the next inhabitant had found them and used them on their trek to LA, or Chicago, or back home, or wherever.

TRACK | Naomi Punk – Gentle Movement Toward Sensual Liberation

5/5 golden merles

In somewhat keeping with the aside, this is an instrumental track on an album that otherwise features exceptional vocal production and performances.

And within that context, after the also superb track Burned Body, Gentle Movement toward Sensual Liberation lands with the most wobbled grace and poise.

An enclave of singing synths deliver a kind of orchestral chamber pop, built around two well textured, extra-strength melodies.