Tag: garage rock

TRACK | Smirk – Mind Temp

5/5 golden merles

I’m 5 or so EPs behind on Smirk’s oeuvre and it’s unfortunate. Mind Temp was on the prior mix and Cassette II is on the year-end list for 2020.

All the fundamentals of tone, texture, melody and structure are in place. And it’s a great relief to me having listened to much that has no sense of itself, much that has no regard for arrangement and harmony, much that does not capture a feeling, much that contains neither compelling doom-saying nor derring-do. Whereas this does.

It’s some Lo-Fi guitar pop, good and good for you. Do as I say, not as I do and go listen to the rest of the assembled tunes as well.

TRACK | The Worms – Quality Time

5/5 golden merles

I have so many tabs open… I have not yet gotten to The Worms 2020 release Back to the Bog. But I did enjoy the holy hell out of 2016’s Everything in Order. So it would be no surprise if there are gems in there as well.

There is great buoyancy within this fuzz, and an elastic reverberation of muscle and meat. It is music made by humans and more or less for them. That is a compliment of the highest order, as I am also a man, of sorts, and prefer this type of music.

If you too make music for humans there might also be 5 Golden Merles in it for you. This is incentivization. This is priming the pump of the indifferent universe. I am accessorizing the void.

TRACK | Skeptics – Open Sea

5/5 golden merles

Here I am quoting Toussaint on the Barcelona band and Orwell on the French one… the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter.

Both are flawed, heroic individuals disowned by the armchair left for impurities in their revolutionary action. One exiled to death and the other merely shot in the neck. From the cozy homes of the present, they were later deemed apostates, unworthy of the cause, as it develops in the void of the mind, pure, impossible, and bloodless.

What if you didn’t know the names of your own heroes?

“In the Ramblas they halted us while a borrowed band played some revolutionary tune or other. Once again the conquering-hero stuff — shouting and enthusiasm, red flags and red and black flags everywhere, friendly crowds thronging the pavement to have a look at us, women waving from the windows.”

“How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now! The train was packed so tight with men that there was barely room even on the floor, let alone on the seats. At the last moment Williams’s wife came rushing down the platform and gave us a bottle of wine and a foot of that bright red sausage which tastes of soap and gives you diarrhoea. The train crawled out of Catalonia and on to the plateau of Aragon at the normal wartime speed of something under twenty kilometres an hour.”

Homage to Catalonia – G. Orwell.

TRACK | CHROMA – Por Llegar

5/5 golden merles

Por Llegar is indicative of the sort of rage we collectively feel — or those individuals who are capable of feeling part of a collective — in the face of the overwhelming forces presently arrayed against decency.

As Toussaint wrote, “…that you should let yourself be deceived by our ancient tyrants who are only using one-half of our unhappy brothers in order to load the other with chains.”

“Nadie te va a salvar / No one is going to save you”

We are, unfortunately, the ones we have been waiting for. What else can you think watching teachers scramble on the floor as a sideshow in order to sustain themselves and provide basic materials for their students?

TRACK | Sheer Mag – Expect the Bayonet

5/5 golden merles

Some of you latecomers may know this as the theme to Useful Idiots pod with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper. But with great pride I say that I was among the billion people to have heard it prior to this exposure. Which still puts me in the top 12% of listeners. Not bad.

Sadly, such things are rare, this sort of lyrical content and impassioned delivery, in a format that is meant to be heard and not merely tolerated.

So before the worlds been reduced to soot
Solidarity for those underfoot
I better remind ya
Or you’ll surely regret
And if you don’t give us the ballot
Expect the bayonet


TRACK | Terrible Truths – False Hope

5/5 golden merles

Teetering ideally between math and art rock, pop rock and garage rock, the core essence of it is simply good and engaging.

Rarely does it seem a song is written and recorded at such an optimal time for the elements that make up its composition.

This feels bottled at the right moment, excised from the aether more or less intact.


TRACK | The Mystery Lights – Watching the News Gives Me the Blues

5/5 golden merles

This is the 57th post here, day by day, but the sentiment of this track applies to any given present day or any day in the foreseeable future for that matter. Our deranged, bloodthirsty and perpetually underfunded society will see to that.

We are incapable of wresting funds to properly address systemic fault from the hands of the gluttons that dominate and cripple our infrastructure and damn the general wellbeing.

Stylistically the mystery lights (mercifully) seem to have skipped a few decades of rock tropes and pull from a richer, older, but somehow fresher history, influences better preserved in their tombs than whatever has been recently left rotting in the sun.


TRACK | Golden Daze – Never Comin’ Back

5/5 golden merles

Somewhat recently a friend or at least acquaintance of mine from high school / college passed away. I don’t even know how. But he had a blog that I used to intermittently remember and then voraciously read through every 3-6 months.

We were young and in bands simultaneously, from neighboring towns in the suburbs of Indianapolis. And while he was undeniably cooler/more musically gifted in all respects, we would host shows for one another and play on the same bill at places like The Festivilla and a rented Eaton Hall.

Later, as many good Hoosiers, we ended up at the same college (IU Bloomington).

In any case, we’d say ‘hello’ around town. And after his death I was very glad to see the blog remain accessible. It is full of his lovely poetry, lyrics, and daily testaments. It is valuable to me both for his insightful assessments and selfishly for my own tangential relation to them.

Part of the reason for starting this was 1) return the favor of people writing kindly about my obviously insufficient music, to return a part of that good feeling to others. 2) After death I’ll have some kind of semi-public record that any one could visit, and maybe enjoy if they have similar trash-rock tastes.

Regardless, this is a good song that mirrors that nostalgia.


TRACK | Deaf Chonky – Shirley

5/5 golden merles

Let us please have more songs that address explicitly unjust hierarchies… and, if possible, ideally, remain compelling with regard to instrumentation and lyrical craft.

“there’s burning to be done / so I’ll sleep when I’m dead”

The track is more than a little seething. And with great energy and righteousness there is a palpable sense of alienation and disgust.

It reminds me of a quote of Camus writing about the poet René Char:

Camus felt that Char…

“was quite alone, without having a taste for solitude. And he cannot conceive of a life without friendship, and he cannot love most of the men around today. Therefore he is very demanding to the few men he esteems, sometimes violently so… He deserves to be encouraged and accepted wholly because he himself is whole and of a quality so rare that without him it would take the world far too long to be reborn.”


TRACK | Los Tones – What Happened

5/5 golden merles

In Los Tones’ What Happened we have some quintessential fun pop-garage rock. There is an undeniably solid lead riff set atop driving drums and a compelling vocal delivery.

The verses don’t undercut the chorus, they’re stabilizing, though they are ballast for balance. There are no gratuitous asides, fills or solos.

Every aspect combines to serve the core purpose of contributing to the single.

The track pushes slightly past the three minute mark then gracefully exits after one final build in which the band manages to more than muster sufficient intensity required to justify this trek which tacks another minute onto the runtime.