Tag: garage rock

TRACK | Gus Englehorn – Exercise Your Demons

5/5 golden merles

Gus Englehorn’s “Exercise Your Demons” is solid, spectral pop. The Alaska by-way-of Montreal singer-songwriter has bottled a sample of corrosion and blood in this one, a cocktail forged from the extraction of the heart and its subsequent erosion.

The tissue sample of a track is a pleasantly scalding synthesis of lo-fi garage and folk-pop confessional. It is impassioned and it is earnest, and it quickly endears you to its progenitors.

22 to 25 / I don’t know how I survived / yet I did survive

The song concerns the literal and figurative action of sunlight as the best disinfectant, how with concerted motion the body and the brain release their chemical excretions, and how these mend or mire us. It is a very literal call to action, and that in exercise you sometimes also find an adjacent exorcism.

Visceral and vehement, the elemental and orchestral waves of textured conveyance are spellbinding stuff. There is sentiment, fever and a tangible fervor tied to the recollecting. It is a welcome missive and highly relatable to those among us who have survived the rigors of youth or are presently experiencing them.

Please see also the wonderfully rendered vid and buy the tape, vinyl, cd and album zine constructed with great craft and intention from artist, director and drummer Estée Preda over at Secret City Records.

TRACK | Hanoi Janes – Across the Sea

5/5 golden merles

Joyous but bittersweet lo-fi garage pop, “Across the Sea” by Hanoi Janes is another from the Captured Tracks era of indie rock hegemony, when I first became acquainted with so many peeking widows and voided dogs.

Waves of reverb break against the shore. The approximation of a xylophone stutters, piercing. A heart is thrown across the sea and there’s one final pledge to remain the same.

The overwhelming sense is one of revelry in the time of adventuring. But there’s also a remorse at the opportunity cost of ever doing any one thing, the instead, those left behind, going as opposed to staying: the prospective revelries or troubles on either end.

Very few lines rapidly convey the universal conflict. The rest of the story is told in the tones of tremolo and the rapturous melodies and these speak clearly more to a promising future than the dread of absence or omission.

There are again Discog links for a reasonable price in the assemblage of atoms.

TRACK | Ganglians – Hair

5/5 golden merles

Ganglians’ “Hair” is an experimental pop rock track that is both burnishing and brandishing the light. It is a celebration of style and form, embodying a rush and bounding, and the hail of dust and ash as one in motion unsettles the earth.

There’s a kind of sublime sense of movement that rallies quickly into stride, pivoting proximal at the mutations of the landscape.

Torrents of yelp and drum collide in sequence, and it’s a lot of fun; mostly joyous, largely incoherent. It is something I would imagine Karl Meltzer listening to while breaking the Appalachian Trail record on a diet of candy and beer.

It can be acquired for a reasonable price in the physical form, though the bandcamp no longer appears to exist, if it ever did. Or get the s/t 12″ new directly from the good folks at Woodsist.

TRACK | Milk Music – Twists & Turns & Headtrips

5/5 golden merles

Heartfelt and hanging on the knife-edge at all times, there is a fervor to the making that feels borderline heretical in “Twists & Turns & Headtrips.”

Much heart piercing sentiment and enough texture to make it seem real, this time. Formidable and fleeting passages that balance the content and form, momentum with purpose in contrast to so much other sound and fury lashing into the void.

The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, and the response to any social strife or environmental collapse is a further militarization of the police.

I was torn on a track to feature, mostly between “Headtrips” and subsequent song, “Who’s been in my dreams?” They’d sell the skin off your face / if the money was right / who’s been in my dream? With the tones and manic right-of-way approaching the likes of Television, The Violent Femmes, and The Cramps. If these are things you have and will again appreciate: go, conspire.

TRACK | Reading Rainbow – Stand Back and Take a Good Look (The Nerves)

5/5 golden merles

Off the superb Volar Records 2013 comp Under the Covers Vol. 2: A Tribute to Paul Collins, Peter Case, and Jack Lee (of the Nerves), Reading Rainbow’s version of “Stand Back and Take a Good Look” is more than a cover, structurally reengineering the track to great result.

It is a minimalist but dynamic adaptation: rolling hills of reverb careening and overlapping the dual vocal melodies, reciting the refrain as command. A bit of the coarseness has been refined formalistically, but partially reintroduced in the richness of guitar tone. It is a fitting tribute and feels like the hooks have only been honed over the elapsed decades.

The opening track, Grass Widow’s “Why are You Walking Out on Love,” also stands out as another especially constructive modification. A gateway to some great songwriting/songwriters, available for $7 from Volar.

TRACK | TJ Cabot – SD Action (Revisited)

5/5 golden merles

TJ Cabot’s “SD Action” (Revisited) is Canadian DIY punk at its finest. Frying and frayed vocals push the needle into the good kind of overloading, while drums rattle in time like the gavel of a mad judge.

Is there anything left other than SD/spite driven action at this point? How else to summon the energy to awaken each morning, much less go about vanquishing your eternal enemies?

I found this track on tr0tsky’s punk and rock Mixcloud series “Pretend You Like It.” Ogle it for more fine scouting &/or commiserate in our collective, aimless anguish by buying the EP for $4 CAD.

ALBUM | Pangea – Living Dummy

5/5 golden merles

Together Pangea’s Living Dummy (2011) is a classic garage rock album. Though they’ve had many fine singles since then, for my tastes, nothing is quite as dense with ideas or as relentlessly resourceful with its inspiration.

Maybe there is something wrong with my brain that this album remains more or less evergreen in its spinning. The variance and hooks, its balance of bile and sentiment, add up to such a lovely document. Think of how much better off we’d all be if this was what passed for a more mainstream branch of pop-punk. It has inspired many, but you know what I mean: household/pop culture level of mind-meme infestation.

It sits with Dead Ghosts, The Cowboys, and The Babies, in my memory of the era which is only (somehow, I don’t know) fairly recently being pulled apart from the present. One of my sister’s earlier memories is my mother pulling off to the side of the road to weep after The Eagles were played on the classic rock radio station. Luckily, I don’t own a car. So there will be no further self reflection on mortality and impending death.

On Living Dummy there is great value in the band’s pushing and perverting of garage rock with idiosyncrasy and heart, infusing life into the curdled maxims and anachronisms of person-with-guitar rock. As F. Scott F. put it, “It takes a genius to whine appealingly.” And that is essentially what is happening here.

Pangea are currently on tour with two California dates remaining at the Observatory and the Regent theater, then they’re off to Europe for a few months. The record is $7 digitally on bandcamp. Or you can stream it elsewhere, I assume, for $0.0014 per play, as rendered accessible by your favored cartel of thugs’ server farm.

TRACK | Crime of Passing – Vision Talk

5/5 golden merles

Geographically in the world as it has been mapped, Crime of Passing are from Ohio. In the empire of aesthetic this s/t album sits near the capital, wherever that happens to metaphorically lie… probably not far from John Carpenter’s prison island version of Manhattan.

Right out the gate there is apparent enough texture and melody to be a strong contender for the year-end lists.
“Tender Fixation” is the lead single and a great, hounding track. But “Vision Talk” is the easiest revolver for me. If you gave me a hundred years I couldn’t make a single track with this much clarity that is simultaneously as dense and textured.

The tome includes plenty of chrome plated and finely calibrated tracks. Post-punk often loses its edge and some of it’s precision in the prolonged mire of continuing to act despite an acknowledged futility for doing so. But Crime of Passing takes those tones/aesthetic and shocks them back to life, keeping the complexity of the characteristics and sense of impending doom but also maintaining a bit of fire lit underneath it.

Both phasing and finely focused, it regularly, impossibly, rides the line between both decimated and decipherable.

TRACK | The Shifters – A Believer

5/5 golden merles

“A Believer” is a bit more Australian garage rock excellence from Melbourne’s The Shifters. Gradual and gracious tones that creep about the periphery, blossoming and cleaving to the meditative frame. Soldered together with synths, an incise track largely devoid of excess.

You can forsake all your earthly possessions and embrace the void with a nice, transferrable digital purchase that still benefits the band in some miniscule but not immeasurable capacity. And it includes a 21 minute live set as well in addition to the original couplet. The second-hand market has the wax disk for about $50 big ones.

TRACK | The Mystery Lights – What Happens When You Turn The Devil Down

5/5 golden merles

Ambition and rock music are not two things that readily go hand in hand. If they do, it is usually in a gruesome and unnerving manner. If they do it is in a way that gets diverted into purely worshipping form and/or disgusting commercialization.

When it goes wrong in the direction of marketability, you get the generic. When it goes wrong in relation to form, it ends up as math-rock’s hounding idiosyncrasy, which often gets lost in the pattern of its own making, as ornamentation for the sake of overelaboration, and makes a game of the grandiose at the expense of all else.

Surely that can somehow highlight the humanity underneath the approximation of machinery, directing perception toward the margins. But what a lot of faffing about to get to something you can just render directly.

The Mystery Light’s have a different kind of ambition. They’re convinced of their own sensibilities, and when they manifest it is like steel folded over toward a purest form of redundancy. They find a way to pay homage and derive creative works from the primordial soup of classic garage rock somehow without that long simmering bile becoming stale.

There is invention and resourcefulness. There is a craft and creativity to the process so far removed from the infinite covers and karaoke repetitions within the genre. Yet, in an era paranoid of feeling and fueled on derivations, it is easy to see them confused for reenactors. That would be a mistake.