Tag: bedroom

TRACK | Hierophants – Hail Stones

5/5 golden merles

From Hierophants’ debut, “Hail Stones” careens and craters, a daydream of destruction and elemental escape from the self. Lo-fi rock from Geelong, Australia, it is appreciably equal parts glittering and gloom.

I like the symmetry and measure throughout. The drums stem off in reserved but significant patterns, steadily alternating in variance, keeping things on the whole goodly deviated during the synth and vocal melodies iterative delineations. That harmony and tension dynamic adds a lot of good depth and proportion to how it all falls precisely together.

The ruminations about transformation are fun and inventive interludes to the core instrumentation. It is refreshing to see the percussive aspect used as the element that is given freer reign to pick apart the structure, an inversion of tradition while all the pieces still combine favorably.

It can be yours for $12.99 as black vinyl from Goner Records, or a buck more for the Yellow mold.

TRACK | Violent Change – Unit A

5/5 golden merles

“Unit A” is the easiest point of entry to a great experimental lo-fi rock set, VC3. Awash in fuzz and form, the rampant melody augments and deviates in plenty of soaring and delicate ways. There’s enough feinting at traditional form coinciding with the stylistic subversion to keep it fresh and engaging.

There’s a lot in the way of texture and the weighting thereof: the processing all around, the vocal layers elevating at the chorus and a sparingly employed harmonica stretching the tactile wave. All of this is solidly plating the hooks, enshrining and embracing the more established elements.

Within the genre and particularly to those acclimated, there’s a lot of admirable gradation and nuance to the discernible creative problem solving. This refinement pulls some aspects of the abstraction away from suspicion, provides a benefit of the doubt in areas that lack explicit mechanisms of conveying meaning.

See also the Chunklet Industries Honey Radar/VC split from 2021 for some complimentary schemes.

TRACK | Yumbo – A House

5/5 golden merles

“A House” is determinedly and reverently assembling influence from what’s left of the world into remarkable folk and experimental pop. From the compilation The Fruit of Errata, itself derived from 4 albums appearing from ’98 to the present, the track is composed of inventively paced through orthogonal backing vocals and angular instrumentation.

The patterns are established and subverted, populating the soundscape with many recursions amidst the collapse. That sense of newly cut paths amidst familiar ground feels like exploring amidst friends, like adventuring in good company. It’s absorbing and convincingly arranged.

There are many finely detailed asides within. The Double LP by Morr Music and Alien Transistor can be got for €29.99 with some shipping.

TRACK | The Woolen Men – Head On The Ground

5/5 golden merles

The Woolen Men are Portland-based Oregonians who remind us that pop + punk need not be anything kitsch, that one can take some of the redeeming qualities of either and make a tremendous, infectious thing. Venerable and vacillating, the stakes are kept high, the form is relished, and it only seems intent on inflicting a moderate amount of damage.

The sirens of the synth gild everything, disintegrating it, opening the lane elegantly for when we’re cut back to bass and drum alone. And then the pronouncement: i hit a wall / but it wasn’t hard at all. It’s a convincing consultation or induction to the rumination, unadorned but substantive; blunt but never dull, a great and graceful cudgel.

Why do these two genres, pop and punk, so often combine to such supremely reprehensible results? Possibly, it’s the noxious hypocrisy of their purported intentions: one includes the implicit ideology of rebellion and the other has a cloyingly myopic fixation on the interpersonal or at-best abstraction. Not here, however. There’s a balance struck. An assembly of influences filtered through a prism of good intentions. It all comes across as earnest, a frank and alluring synthesis.

The vinyl is $10 from Woodsist.

TRACK | Wren Kitz – Hexed

5/5 golden merles

A deliberate and ravaging album of many intricacies and plenty of codas, Early Worm by Wren Kitz is a real fine set of musical numbers. Promptly following the raw and expansive “Georgie,” the gentlest entry point comes through “Hexed,” a song about crying moons and the digging of bones.

The track is considered and palpable psych-folk and rock. It describes a kind of anti-heroes journey or an escape from ones self in the service of traversing an emotional landscape. The problems are bound to proximity, figuratively or literally — I don’t know. But born of an immediacy that can be at least differed and approached later from another angle or as another person, weathering the hex or inverting the curse.

It is a glinting and extensive track and album, with much fine detailing and world building. It should be a little or a lot more celebrated. And further evidence of the good drawing to it the good, there’s cover artwork by Dylan Jones, who’s also done some for Woolen Men.

TRACK | April Magazine – AM

5/5 golden merles

The instrumental opener to What If The Ceiling Were A Kite: Vol. 1, “AM” is composed of syrup and the earthy, burnt scent of summer. It is lo-fi bedroom rock that lumbers and pivots, encompassing, warm upon the field recorded road.

The tempo, texture, and braided melody capture a piece of nostalgia in a bottle. The blurry bloom of its treading lowers your blood pressure several points, induces a not uncomfortable numbness. A bit dangerous, it’s not to be dwelt in forever. At two minutes in length it remains a nice reprieve from the earth so fallen and fraught with sadness.

There’s lots of solid twee/indie pop and instrumental/ambient gales populating the disc. A handful of the second pressing vinyl remain unclaimed.

TRACK | The Lavender Flu – Demons In The Dusk

5/5 golden merles

Experimental psych and folk rock from Oregon, The Lavender Flu’s “Demons in the Dusk” finds the lugubrious periphery of rock to be a haunting and inviting sector. And they offer great returns residing and mining this quarter comfortably immediately before collapse.

The album as a whole is consistently wailing and receding, working within its own internal logic that promptly consumes the listener. But “Demons In The Dusk” is probably the foremost hook, the crown jewel of a barb that easiest draws you in. It rewards your patience with a strange, strangled style, then an uptick of treble and trembling in the end.

As we hurtle unapologetically toward a new dark age, estranged from the storied ends, adrift and listless, it suits us well. At least the paths run parallel. Craven and composed, it saunters to the threat of annihilation, an easy going end that specifically omits a mea culpa, “The Lies that you breathe / will follow you.”

4 sides for 30 wending tracks, the double vinyl is around.

TRACK | Akusmi – Divine Moments of Truth

5/5 golden merles

An inspired enmeshing of momentum, electronica curtailed to contain only the essential. Of a stunningly metered jazz/experimental set, “Divine Moments of Truth” stands out to me as a pinnacle of those forms.

The relative minimalism of what transpires builds into a great escape, evenly, cleanly out of its abstraction. It feels as though there is something at stake and yet remains “as simple as possible but not one bit simpler,” the energy is convincingly condensed in such a way as to warp your perception of relative space time. A credible spell, intuitively assembled, or the result of finely tuned music theory, I don’t know. But the kind of wonder and admiration I feel for its accumulated reserves is like the saying that any technology produced by a significantly advanced civilizations is indistinguishable from magic.

Arriving last week into the world, there’s ~30 clear vinyl remaining from a set of 300. Not a bad return on anything in the common era, much less a finely rendered crop of electronic jazz concoctions.

TRACK | Jack Stauber – Dead Weight

5/5 golden merles

The strength of Dead Weight lays in it hemorrhaging melody and the lack of limitations embodied in the core of its chaotic good. An endless series of synths rotate in sequence of killer calibration, all the way to its frenetic, gargled conclusion.

A perpetual no-skip on the gauntlet rotation, Jack’s sense of detailing is remarkable across mediums (See: 2020’s musical-horror short Opal). Also for more tunes check his other musical projects/collaborations with Joose and Zaki.

He’s been away for a bit as far as I can tell after Opal/HiLo, so, in either case of hibernation or another project patiently building, I am greatly looking forward to whatever medium he favors in the coming years.

TRACK | Cut Worms – Like Going Down Sideways

5/5 golden merles

One of the strongest 2-song 7″ I’ve come across, a pair of my favorites from the buildup to Alien Sunset. “Like Going Down Sideways” is delicate and dreamy alt country. It is also an expert projection of layering a demo into a fully fledged lo-fi phenomenon.

There’s a lot of wonder to the piercing polarization of the complimentary layered vocal lanes, creeping in solemnly from the treetops of hell before the chorus raises. The track also features texturally many deliberate flourishes, like a couple of the briefest xylophone or glockenspiel cameos known to man; arriving to puncture amidst the plucking and contribute just a bit more of the percussive, glinting and gleaming.

The persistent room noise in this version is lovely. This one came out perfected and doesn’t need refining. You can still buy the split from Randy Records for all of $6.50 plus shipping.