Tag: garage

TRACK | Cosme – ♀/♂

5/5 golden merles

More Groschi flagged digi drum gruel,
Cosme’s “♀/♂” has the right balance of grime and pop. Mexico-based egg and post-punk with track titles designed to stymie the algorithm. It features sharp synths. It is agreeably weird and pulpy. If you polish this it would die, the act breaking the barrier needed for breathing the muck it is coated in.

When the primary melody finally releases its jaws the newly minted guitar & synth hook cushions the transition into another form. That sequence kindly allows for a brief recuperation before proceeding into another mauling.

There’s a really fine assemblage of instrumental and vocal hooks then a bit of late-stage discordance on vocoder production that merges them into one. Additional digi-drum variant fills keep it all nice and novel in the detailing, fleshing out the piece. If one were so inclined you could surely dance to it with minimal hardship.

Demo No. 3 is currently $2.70 for the .wav files or $8.50 on the remaining cassettes. Maybe you can in the sequence of your life pair it with Priit Pärn’s “…And Plays Tricks.”

TRACK | Shrapnel – Catch You Out

5/5 golden merles

New external stimuli, Shrapnel’s “Catch You Out” is the sort of opener that lets you know you are in good hands for the remainder. Tones that mirror the nascent grit of becoming: yolk and seep, the assembled tribunal, that strange pounding as it echoes through the wall of your egg.

There is a community, an archive and an arbiter of it, “they say / you’re stumbling through the dark.” The cadre of informed have determined you are lost. These second person pronouncements casually accrue.

They continue:

“Benevolence / is scratching at the door / how is your innocence / your biggest flaw?” Rhyming door and flaw is something possibly only an Australian could amicably get away with. But we’re in luck. Also glorious: the enjambment as manifest by melody and tempo.

I’ve labeled it lo-fi/garage, but that’s not exactly or even really or even quite true. The textures are nuanced, dense, crinkly and sculpted. To anybody supping from a similar gulch and chewing a similar sediment, the distinction is apparent. There’s a lot of care applied to weighting that sonic range, curating its breadth and character. It’s great.

$10 AUD digital/$35 AUD Vinyl. 300 copies from Tenth Court. That’s cheaper in dollars. As an aside, go and check out “Goodbye Jerome!” by Sillard, Farr and Selnet.

TRACK | Eel Men – Exeter Exit

5/5 golden merles

Great, calloused post-punk-pop from London’s Eel Men, “Exeter Exit” also has enough hooks to easily impale the slipperiest bastards among you.

With lines like, “I don’t care, she’s a friend of mine / lies / we’ve all heard that before,” the narrative form is constructed from varied bits of gently alternating parallax, consistent in tone and neatly accumulating. Characters and corpses alternate momentarily in the spotlight, the storytelling driving at a feeling the author brought back from this place.

I wrote about Intro / Ode To Mr Hudson back in 2022, the new material finds Eel Men exploring familiar forms. The knives are sharpened here a bit, the ethereal congealing, filed down into a point. There’s still enough grime around the edges; the same sense of decaying elaboration, artifacts pulled from the earth with the dirt still on. And the fervor remains well intact.

The immense and catching chorus is granted only twice, the authors have enough self respect to limit these applications, when surely seven or more times could be gotten away with. The gentle incongruity of strumming patterns stretching the breadth of the headset also demurs from the predictable. Both are impulses to be admired and ultimately extend the life of the thing by several hard won eons.

Preorder Stop It! Do Something. out March 7th, 2025, from No Front Teeth Records in the UK and Big Neck Records in the US.

TRACK | Good Flying Birds – Wallace

5/5 golden merles

Indianapolis-based indie garage-poppers Good Flying Birds‘ have released the newly compiled talulah’s tape (21-24). Some sweet and intricate rock music, “Wallace” is my favorite of that set. Just when you thought the world’s desiccated husk couldn’t get any less appealing: whammo, some real fun and charming gas exits from an unknown reservoir. Arriving just in time for whatever horrors lurk just outside our temporal periphery, it’s a great relief to me personally.

A blended approximation of influence might include bits of Kevin Barnes, Alex Giannascoli, Lewis Allan Reed, and the three individuals within the great Grass Widow assemblage. Or just go see what they say for themselves. In either case take it from me, someone dumb and desperate enough to play the lottery: we’re lucky to have these songs.

Wondering through what’s left of the wasteland, it’s my favorite thing out of Indiana since at least The Cowboys. The sequences are arranged as though a human has carefully considered them and intricately compiled their subsections, culminating with delicate intention, maybe bordering on mathrock in some of its steeper niches. It’s careful, thoughtful work. I truly wish them well with whatever happens next after one emerges, budding gently out of the earth. I guess either promptly being stomped to death or maybe something good might happen.

There’s a run of 100 tapes on Rotten Apple, $8. They’ll be gone soon. Please also see the tracks on the Inscrutable Records comp with Answering Machines and Soup Activists.

COMP | Palestine Solidarity Compilation

5/5 golden merles

The Palestine Solidarity Compilation is one of the most stacked comps of the era and for the cause eating at the conscience of the world. Just look at the list for many favorites of this portal: Billiam, Busted Head Racket, Rude Television, Cool Sorcery, Gee Tee, Cherry Cheeks, and the many and the more, 27 tracks of playful and cursed invention. Further good news, all the included songs are unreleased, demos, covers, or live versions, so you may become a craprock completionist and cleans some small portion of your soul in the process.

Highlights for me are Balaclava‘s “Swimming Up Up Up,” a devocore/egg punk blinder, collapsing with great intention and some real fun melodic subversion in the latter stages. And Moshi Moshi and the Moist Boys‘ “Pitchforks and Torches,” which operates primarily by gallantly gliding its synthpunk guts across the soundscape. There are many new names to investigate here, many I had not come into contact with previously, and this is a welcome introduction amidst much good company.

Give if you’ve got and can afford to. There is thrashing, there is jangle, there is wallop, and all going toward the cause of providing a tiny bit of support for those who continue to face dehumanization and death daily.

Please see the bandcamp description of the album for how to buy (…it isn’t $1,000). Make a donation and then email them directly for a code. Tapes from Idiotapes (EU) and Godless American (US).

TRACK | Gob Psychic – Harnessed Energy

5/5 golden merles

In praise of unpolished polemics: there is a reasonable case to be made that half-articulated rage is the purest form. It’s straight from the source, cut with the contextual and peripheral distractions, before it is honed into a refined simulacra for mounting on the wall. “Harnessed Energy” by Aarhus Denmark’s Gob Psychic is a good approximation of that impulse, the documented split between archetype and the feeling, language grappling with emotion.

Of course the art is in the perpetual reimagining of the scene: the accumulation of experience cultivated into a written explanation of events, coupled to the genre of cultural conditioning. Then comes the collaborating on accompanying music, the practice to achieve a reproducible form, the live performances tailored by practical necessity, and finally the studio rendering that attempts to preserve or recreate the original sensation or at least some equally amusing derivative variation.

That process is impressively captured here. It’s a great credit to the band, production and mix (Sauna Studios with Neil R. Young, mixing by Jeppe Grønbæk Andersen). It doesn’t feel to me stale or stilted. When you deal in a perpetual stream of these materials, the gradient is apparent. It seems to have emerged into the world fully formed, revealed.

That obviously isn’t the case due to the nature of making things and releasing them globally. But convincing the cynical consumer/listener of this is the magic trick. There’s no wooden tongue clacking, no resentment at having to repeat ones self. “I’m not like those men / I hope I’m not like those men,” is screamed with a visceral quarter pound of conviction. The doubt remains present and compelling. Maybe it is in the room with you right now.

If it resonates, perhaps also look at Cathedrale’s Houses are Built the Same, Black Bug’s s/t, and Egg Idiot’s Meltdown. Vinyls on Le Cèpe Records (Paris) and name-your-price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | The Uptights – Jasper

5/5 golden merles

Oslo’s The Uptights have created in “Jasper” a multifaceted fuck-you of a tune, some real fun experimental lo-fi post-punk. Early hooks are hung on a static howling, doused in reverb and abandoned in sequence. From this admirable mire three distinct subsections are carved and then collapsed at the emergence of each newly favored form. It is resolute in relation to what it is not, competently corrupted. The contrasting components of this set provide by their shared presence a murky but welcome depth of field, one that is surprisingly vast and inviting.

Within this arrangement the track seems to feed off of itself in a complex and closed system. It is pleasant to witness. By populating the relative void of the medium in this way we are able to see and define something more clearly than if it were otherwise an isolated instance or series of tracks. Instead of fostering some post-punk hack medley, the negative space envelops the substances, rematerializing them afterward in new forms, glowing, growing and exhibiting signs of life. The movement and misdirection creates a admirable gap in which other imagined aspects are allowed to flourish.

If you’re a fan of Flegel you will be familiar with the feeling derived from expert arrangements. It’s the same in any medium, but this is a good example.

By the allotment of elements you’ve been intentionally given something to recognize in relation to one another: a sense of scale and speed, relative motion in focus instead of a blur, a foundational frame of reference that allows for orientation. That is something music can but often does not offer: a signpost in a sea of dark, a diminishing of alienation for the observer. Maybe a couple of metaphors need to be tacked together to get at the scope of it, but that’s the general idea.

I don’t think most writers even know to want it. This type of articulation is often discounted or crudely overelaborated to the point of the grandiose and the monstrous and it all collapses, some limitation of consciousness or patience usually inhibits their ideal manner of consumption. The texture and tone has to be right to be of a compelling type to even tolerate the transference. Counted off and casually scuttled, as here, you don’t need some minutia fixated vulgarity, at just under three minutes the graceful brevity achieves a similar end and doesn’t rot out under your gaze in the process.

I was dreaming arrives October 27th. The cost is 99 NOK for the cassette or 30 for the digital (~$3).

TRACK | Being Dead – Muriel’s Big Day Off

5/5 golden merles

The Being Dead duo put out one of my very favorite albums of last year, Zero Percent APR’s Higher and Higher Forever. They consistently identify and deliver strange causes for celebration in a homogenized period of concentrated wealth and rights restrictions that desperately needs them. The whimsy and wrath is what is warranted, having fun in hell, and holding court on the ineffable indelible shit. Artpop can be good and have a big heart.

A couple of real go getters. Weird but with good cause. Good movements. Melodies as intricate and warbling as the sentiments, complexities that interlock amusingly but always cater first to the feeling of the thing. You, too, could be telling stories in content and form. Probably not this good, but you can do it as evidenced by this thing existing, it’s proof.

There’s plenty taken from convention, the shared language and lineage of pop and anti-folk that makes the work approachable. But every track is also subverted with such care and conviction, ensuring that each effort/song finds a path that leads somewhere new and rewarding. Please just read Szarkowski on the thicket for a brief and compelling summary of this manner of work:

“When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no play that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.”

Slack is anticipated, and the line is cut before it tangles or tied into a bow. Examples are the emphatic lull in phrasing, setting up the spelling of Muriel with a long pause that adds additional equivocating “like this:” or the ‘TV Time’ bridge that reads like a medley-merger and the verses recounting of an immediate return to the shoe store.

All of this can be coopted and killed. And will be, but for now it isn’t and that is good. Discs, tapes, records, digital, all available here, and releasing the 14th of July.

TRACK | REIZ – Kauschiene

5/5 golden merles

Another sprouting from the top-tier Leipzig scene, REIZ are relentless in their kinetic thresh. There’s a good pallet of blotchy bloodied tones and a proudly pop sentimentality to it. The care in detailing is always elevating it slightly beyond your ability to anticipate, appreciably above the good-enough imitators and pretenders. You’ll probably find enough fine warp to feel familiar if for some god forsaken reason you consume this text and curation regularly. It didn’t arrive in the summer but the summer suits it.

The set is fun and funny but not defanged. Playful and approachable without the kitsch that salts the soil and kills everything else around it. It features rotating vocalists and distinct instrumentation across a terribly well calibrated soundscape. You’re at home in the dusk and the wind is coming kindly through the windows. Nothing is set in stone. There is music playing on the periphery that does not alienate you.

For some recent brethren in melodic bleat and genially scourging impulse, maybe you’re already in favor of its spiritual brethren like Jeanines, Jesuslefilles, and Liquids? Ok, that’s just about enough reductive blubbering to hit publish.

It’s €3.50 for the congealed three years of tunes selected. That’s only €1.16666666666667 euro per year. Check the math if you don’t believe me.

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.