Tag: casual technicians

TRACK | Casual Technicians – A Lifetime In The Morning

5/5 golden merles

Songwriting triumvirate Nathan Baumgartner, Boone Howard and Tyler Keene have returned with an album (Well Once There Was A King) of playful profundity, earnest strife, and drive-thru funerals. While melodically devoted, it is also again an anomaly among a landscape of folk and rock dominated with fashion, franchise, and anti-poetics.

“It feels too easy to forget/the lie I settle on”

Conceptually the album starts from a bizarre notion of songwriting: what if melody wasn’t a crutch for generalities but instead an enhancement to storytelling populated with keen or amusing observations? A novel conceit among those who generally shovel their shit my way. And, it must be said, a great relief.

“If I only had a mile to go/I’d find a place to lay my head/but I’m traveling on a road that never ends”

Sometimes you must subvert the song to accurately project the world back onto itself. Examples of that sort of happy mangling are many on the album: the muttered uttering of “…to love” in “Power City, USA, Part 2,” the muddied waters at the beginning of “A Road That Never Ends,” prompting and framing its sincerity, and the fractured request of “Please/don’t/worr/y” on “I’ve Lost Control of the Ending.” These are good ideas, well realized within the medium of a song.

The curvature of the carnival mirror realigns the source from out-sized to proper proportion, hymns carefully crafted to contort and bypass inherent biases. Some chances taken for me don’t land as solidly but that is the nature of experimentation, risk and reward. And the rewards greatly outweigh the blunders here. Plus it’s an expansive album; and as a living document, some sections may grow on you as others rot and wither over time.

It’s pay what you will on the bandcamp. Sending also with it Takashi Ito’s “The Moon.”

TRACK | Casual Technicians – Dark Matter Falling

5/5 golden merles

America’s heart is effectively vestigial, the body running on delusion alone. But every now and again it beats, startling and amusing us.

Folk rock, alt country, freak folk, anti-folk; whatever dendritic subgenre Casual Technician’s “Dark Matter Falling” roughly fits into beyond Rock, these are things that exist in a state of defiance to the grotesque bulk of another definition. Please remember that the heart is also an outlier in relation to the other organs and would be considered an outcast among them.

We don’t need to retread that in the general appraisal Folk lacks self awareness and Country‘s sick bravado and sweetness makes me want to peacefully disassociate into an eternal coma, god willing, at the expense of my demonic private insurers.

But on the periphery and in the shadowy wasteland of upstate New York there exists at least one aggregated cabal of Portlanders intent on redeeming noise and structuring it in a manner that makes people feel whole and not diminished. If you’re familiar with Townes, Csehak, Von Schleicher, and Van Gaalen (North American, at least), it’s a bit like these things.

A large part of it’s glory is the celebration of real collaboration, unions of narration and melodic intentions merging. The contrasts and collisions are all of similar quality and keep it from congealing.

Otherwise it’s just experiment and invention informed by history but not beholden to it, offered up thoughtfully without conceding an opulent melodic core, conducted with utmost conviction and replete with distinct language. Maybe it seems easy when put like that, but it isn’t.

There are two super strong singles already up. Cassette via Repeating Cloud on 11/15/24. Digital on the bandcamp for $7.