Tag: garage rock

TRACK | Tamaryn – Love Fade

5/5 golden merles

A nested blaze of shoegaze tones from San Francisco, it caroms about absorbing and addressing the void at scale. We’re about a decade out from release but the reverberations are fortunately just this side of eternal.

Echoing, cavernous instrumentation propels forward in concordant jangle. The lyrics speak of a reassessment in the harsh light of day.

Elemental, arching momentum builds a resonant, sonic wave, thermal and synergistic. Anyway, you know what shoegaze is: sonorous crashing, dissipating entropy that is also somehow continually regenerative. This is that kind of goodness.

TRACK | Peluquería Canina – Hilda Zaude

5/5 golden merles

“Hilda Zaude” is solid psych-punk rock from Madrid, Spain. It’s contains overlapping guitar phrasing echoing and bounding in a kind of pop-sludge anthem.

The lyrics translated from the Basque speak of death and mourning. It surrounds you / chills your whole body / you are dead / I don’t understand anything.

This is complimented by the menacing, at times reverb-shrieking lead guitar tones, ominous bass, and purposefully dreary scale. The chorus is direct, composed of a solitary scream of “¡ahhh!”

It’s a foreboding track that also has an element of the festive or ceremonial to it, a good mix of garage and ghastly.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – Summer with Phil

5/5 golden merles

One of my favorite garage-surf records, Can’t Get No has a wealth of hooks and much nuanced noise in the murkiest depths of it’s of lo-fi production.

What stands out most is the labor involved in honing these complimentary tones and the stunning results from this joy of invention.

“Summer with Phil” is quietly ornate, teasing out melodies, amorphously coagulating and decaying. The passages are faithfully and formatively statured throughout, with consistency rising from the formidable 2010 s/t.

I have not spent enough time with 2020’s Automatic Changer, but will rectify this in the near-term. Can’t Get No has a few colored vinyl on the second hand market.

TRACK | Times New Viking – Half Day In Hell

5/5 golden merles

With the proper balance of muck and bile, “Half Day In Hell” conspires to deliver noise pop rock with great wrath and fission. In this base of static hum, no melody is sacrificed to the texture but heightened by it.

Not exactly discordant, it is raised to extremes of saturation with very modest deterioration to melodic intent. Elliott and Murphy trade vocals in the haze, refining the wavelengths. It’s the best produced thing I have listened to (revisited) in ages.

After the last week of inconsequential societal response into a myriad horrors, lines like “we will stay forever for a week,” “we have done all that we can do,” “and don’t agree on what to do just to kill time,” and “we couldn’t come together even if we tried,” land a little bit differently, arbitrarily recontextualized to the present in the constant mire of all that is. But these statements remain vaguely stated enough to interpretively address any given scope of social incongruity.

It is modestly miraculous, full of fine trepidation, not reliant on habits and precedent but reaching in its forms to match the emotion and intention. It feels refined but natural and that is a bit freeing. Often when this path is followed it leads into greater abstraction that discounts melody and a greater loss of coherence. Which is fine, but needn’t be the case. Finding that balance is powerful and admirable.

TRACK | Tawings – Listerine

5/5 golden merles

Post-punk/pop from Japan, Tawings sculpt tunes that blend various rock influences minimalistically but with much warble and precision. The instrumentation shakes and severs, fitful and concerted, to great, elaborated result.

With “Listerine” particularly the track is paced in a sophisticated lurch, with many flourishes punctuating the soundscape.

The internal logic of the tactful ornamentation locks decisively around the steady bass and drum foundation. The phrasing and lyricism is agile throughout, happy to fall apart, but prevailing in the act, composed and resolute.

Unique and fun, the vinyl is available for about ~$35 including the shipping from Japan on the bandcamp. There’s also a super cool looking partially clear/cutout case for the single version, but so far no availability on the Discogs.

TRACK | Son Bou – Hundí Mis Labios En Los Suyos

5/5 golden merles

Son Bou’s 2013 self-titled EP is blazing indie punk from Barcelona, built of or on a small fire. In either case, they’re tuning to the flame. It holds the finest lo-fi hymnals and tempo shifts, the melodies keenly cut reliably across the set.

The lyrics for the selected track translated bluntly into English are about love, its cultural expectations and preferred collaborators. The arrangement is divinely shifting, hammering together a few fine forms that turn seamlessly along the axis. The velocity changes keep fresh and the variance between verses and are appended by a bridge of textural vocalizations. It is an excellent repeater.

The EP can be ordered from Barcelona for €6 or more + shipping from Hao!Discos. Alternatively Discogs has the 7″ for some very reasonable fees on a few that have made it to the US. Otherwise an absurdly reasonable Euro for the digital issue.

TRACK | Liquids – Dont Wanna Get to Know You

5/5 golden merles

Solo project of Mat Williams of Indiana, Liquids’ Life is Pain Idiot is beaming, howling punk rock. Too many tracks to feature appropriately, so featuring the first I heard. The album end-to-end holds consistently and admirably steady delivering a series of lean and singed tracks.

That it’s a largely solo effort is truly impressive, no sense of motion or desire is lost in the administered layering. The vocal performance is appropriately clutching and cracking, landing as though live, buzzing over the vehement instrumentation. The vision is readily apparent and highly realized.

Discogs chatter claims a vinyl is in the works, hopefully this is the case. Until then it’s $5 on the digital platform all listening would take place on anyway.

TRACK | Beta Maximo. – Busco corazones.

5/5 golden merles

Spanish lo-fi eggpunk from Úbeda. Grab the intangible digi-drum and sync your muscles to its writhing. Described on their instagram as DIYARI (Do It Yourself And Release Immediately), this aesthetic remains intact and uncompromised.

Spain vice. is a great set. Composed of no track longer than 1:45, it moves relentlessly, flashing past. Nothing overstays, everything burns out immediately in the friction of a few overlapping melodies of synth and guitar crammed into the centrifuge.

You can pay for it, to show your respects, on a donation-basis, howsoever many euros seems appropriate. It’s yet another admirable EP found through the exceedingly reliable hunting of onetwoxu.de.

TRACK | Beach Fossils – Twelve Roses

5/5 golden merles

“Twelve Roses” is super catchy lo-fi pop rock which conveys the weathering of a state of ennui and a longing to locate some channel or undercurrent of escape. It contains a cryptic nursery rhyme of a melody and two octave vocal layers collapsing into one another above some enduring, tinny drums and tambourine.

The delicate bass line runs part counter and part concert to the melodic vocal phrasing but compliments adding breadth to the aural tide. Depending on the bass levels of your setup maybe it comes in somewhere beneath the consciousness threshold but your heart probably noticed it, or anyway some intermediary of the limbic system.

It reminds me of an era of early dietary restrictions, huddling behind a desk in a closet (all eras really, but one specific desk, one specific closet), and growing a real bad, patchy beard through the power of neglect. Anniversary edition available on the Bandcamp from Bayonet Records.

TRACK | Tender Prey – Time Will Steal

5/5 golden merles

“Time Will Steal” is some foreboding and explosive Welsh garage pop from Cardiff-based Tender Prey. Echoing and incisive, it’s part incantation, part tempestuous alt-rock anthem.

The track really feels as though it was recorded at the ideal moment: somewhere nearing the end of the creative refinement but before the melodies stales from performance and repetition. The result is some soaring and mesmeric lo-fi rock.

The ephemeral and forceful vocal core, it’s delivery and production, is formidable. When the refrain hits and the gears shift again, interleaved harmonies coalesce and something good becomes great.

For more check out the Bandcamp for Tender Prey’s additional EPs and LPs, including the 2017 release “Falling Off Chairs.”