Tag: garage rock

TRACK | That Hideous Sound – Funny Insides

5/5 golden merles

That Hideous Sound has built a bedroom lo-fi rock track from discarded sunshine, utilizing twisted blood as a propellant. Its alternating sync of garage tone is held aloft and amended with a density of layered backing vocals, their varied trajectories glowingly cascading downward. The whole miscellany is shining and the right kind of sordid.

The fundamentals are nailed and the tonal textures irradiated, slickly building momentum throughout. With that rising, explicating over the expanses as it does, I’d wager most will rejoice to share in it. The final minute of three involves transitioning into some controlled experimentation, concluding in a sundry of cloaked loops at the latter stages. It’s all very good and pleasant, if you ask me.

A digital copy of the track can be downloaded to your personal solid state or hard disc drive for $1 USD. Or, for the wise investor, the album of 10 tracks is aggregated at $7, a savings of 30%. It is to be released October 7th, should the world continue to exist at such a time.

TRACK | The Gobs – Tuffer Than You

5/5 golden merles

Hard to pick a single track off this exceptional Split EP shared between The Gobs and Ex-White. But I’ve settled on the first track of this side, “Tuffer Than You.” It’s exquisite synth accented garage punk, composed of hardened snow scraped out from under the car and built into a brilliant effigy. The production decay is a correcting mechanism, it better represents the environment from which it was derived.

Notably, the reverence is low. The melodies are quality and effortlessly interlocking; it’s bound up nicely in this loaded frame. Free reign is given to some selected tones and the others are curtailed dutifully around the stomp and stagger; together they’re textured/paced to allow the happy suspending of doubt in the murk of it all.

Truly the 4-track split itself will likely end up on the year-end list. The 300 wax pieces have some yet to be disseminated from Germany, $20 to Turbo Discos with shipping is a steal if you have the cash to ship.

TRACK | No Knuckle – HALO

5/5 golden merles

No Knuckle’s “HALO” is richly textured, guttural Oregonian rock n’ roll and proto-punk. The track is a record of loss and lament, processed with the much escalating style that warrants your attention. It is equal parts sharp, wrought and fraying over the four primary phases of amorphous hooks, all combining in elaborate invention.

The subject is an examination of the death and decline of those in your immediate periphery, of family, both lost and those left sharing in the loss. It is processing grief and making a difficult event into a beautiful record of the occurrence, an act that reconfigures its presence in your life. Our lives are made up of such moments: some recollected in fixation, while all the others obliviate, the artistry allowing for reframing.

The repetition of the chorus is earned, after digging into the details: your brothers wayward gaze, the apparent untethered presence of the recently departed. There’s a great weighting to the variations and their sequence before and after in the differing methods of narration. It is valuable to have this darkness told and healthier than the disassociation and derealization we mostly pass through these passages under the veil of. And, regardless of all that, it rocks. Digital’s $3, Vinyl is out now on LA’s Tomothy Records.

TRACK | C.P.R. Doll – Drabness

5/5 golden merles

Australian lo-fi rock super-duper group C.P.R. Doll will have you carving out your own bones and honing them into guitar picks just to play along. If you lack bones or sufficient resolve it’ll at least inspire some passive admiration at the stacked, cascading and careening egg punk melodies and demoniac phrasing. They start small and build things of significance which is all you can really ask for in this regrettable world. The accumulation is a great.

It is one of the permutations of rock I enjoy, with the emphasis on mutation. The attention to detail is superb, and there is a great intention in the solving temporal and spatial logic traps that crop up in any map of the soundscape, thwarting every pitfall, escaping entanglement of dullness either through invention or evasion.

There’s a smash and grab ethos: cut it if off it starts to stale, salvage what you can, promptly grow another limb to replace the one left caught in the snare. Each track is spiraling into control: moving forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always confidently twirling towards freedom.

I am told by tippy top tier punk curator Tremendo Garaje that it is to be made available in the US of A by Under The Gun Records and already sold out of Europe in an absurdly limited 20 copies edition by Goodbye Boozy.

TRACK | Trauma Harness – Megasilmax

5/5 golden merles

“Megasilmax” is electric St. Louis post-punk and garage rock, scalding and salving and adequately seditious. It is also the beautiful death knell of Lumpy Records. After a litany of shared releases, Ten Years of Trauma is a compilation adroitly made up of selections from Trauma Harness’ digital or limited cassette runs.

The whole set of tracks is electric, radiating the joy of making art with chums. What at first seems tangled –synths dissecting the channels, askance percussive melodic phrasing, momentum shifting slightly ahead of the BPM in a manner which defies the space–on closer inspection is ornately structured behind a fever.

After and before “Megasilmax” it carries on evincing and delivering, and then a compilation built across a decade feels like a solid record, built to be collectively perceived. The sound is established throughout with a kind of unified vision and purpose. The standards are set and then met in each attempt, goalposts not so much as swaying in the breeze. The digital is $6 and vinyl in a set of 500 for $17.

TRACK | CLAMM – Something New

5/5 golden merles

Melbourne’s CLAMM offer “Something New,” fangs bared, among a set of impassioned punk and garage rock tracks. The works are ruminating and requesting assistance, an allegiance at the threat of annihilation. The direct language and reiteration of themes insist that this is real seeking/beseeching, decidedly not posture or play on the scales of invest or escape.

The production cracks, daunting and declarative. An authoritative and aggrieved vocal at the core of the track holds court: in a time of mass disillusionment and a growing desperation for reinvention, what can be salvaged and what must be discarded? A reason, a sign. something new. Backing vocals collude with some horns that act as a wax seal on the exit and work to elevate the scope.

Vinyl’s are out from Meat Machine (UK, Europe and Asia) and Chapter Music (rest of world -> this means you, USA) — if you’re off planet or shedding all material possessions in anticipation of the end, digitally it’s $13 AUD worth of audio.

TRACK | Girl – Pavement

5/5 golden merles

Girl makes New Jersey-based alt rock with elements of avant and experimentation, holed up in the basement/garage and dispatched from a wave of reverence. Coming amidst much invention, “Pavement” is the fermented earworm closer of the Ghost EP, the best entry point, and that rarer sort of ephemera made up of mental models trained on tunes that seems to have a half-life of several generations.

In the breadth of thrash and strum there is a slow burn that accumulates with interest, rending late back into the chorus before extinguishing. There’s a stalking melody under arouras of reverb, all punctuated by formidable cymbals rides that orient and direct. The slates so well set by the time it degrades the scale one final time it is a relief.

I was introduced to the track by James’ reliably aligned scouting over at Kick Out The James (WZBC) mixcloud, in the very good August 19th set. Ghost EP as a digital album is $8 or more at bandcamp.

TRACK | Freak Genes – Strange Charm

5/5 golden merles

“Strange Charm” arrives in a set of consistently plumbed concepts and a larger narrative fixated on the veil, particularly in a Bostrom/Boltzmann sense. And there should be more of this in the world as we know it, simulation or other, because it’s just so damn much fun. The track is composed of sheer keys and guts, synth punk with fervor as the foundation, maniacally forecasting the intricacies of an artificial future.

In the manufacturing of a new and immediate heaven there will be gradients of adaptation and those left behind, some willingly. “Energy bars low above your head,” a beach devoid of touch: the details are effectively populated.

There is within these elements a great deal of world building done (–about world building), new classifications and clearances, presaging emerging rifts that we only have the slightest direct precedents for, despite very familiar themes. It’s full of playful prescience and with enough hooks to convince you to gladly remain and be absorbed within the futurist subject matter.

It arrived today and is fully streamable: there are vinyl variations in limited runs for $20-22 from the esteemed Feel It Records; suitably the digital version is name your own price.

TRACK | Onyon – Window Shopper

5/5 golden merles

From the estranged estate of Leipzig, another entry in the perpetual golden era of post-punk in Germany. Our friends Onyon have embedded some driving beats in a cloudless convening of no wave tones, as elaborately as it needs to be under the circumstance, with instrumentation direct and effective, including only the muck immediately necessary to instigate life.

For an emergent phenomenon particularly the tape is notably consistent, arriving frustratingly fully formed. A cohesive and iridescent set of tunes, arising like a great reprieve amidst the hunting and gathering. It is not reaching in its representation of events, the quotidian enshrined in considered tribute, melded to a melody and reified with friends.

As the first tape and abiogenesis, it’s remarkably strong and to be treasured. The work has physical media out on the genuinely/reliably great law offices of U-Bac & Flennen in March of 2022 and now Trouble In Mind (Chicago) for US distribution. Cassettes $12/Digital $10.

TRACK | Class – Steady Hands

5/5 golden merles

Garage rock from Tucson, “Steady Hands” is the best produced grumbling and thrashing you’ll likely hear this fortnight. It’s superbly well conceived and executed, built from a palette of primeval sorts. It is a good example of some nice punk/pop accentuated in scalding oil, fermented in the sun.

All the dreams you held so near / have gone to shit / falling from the lowest point / you’ll soon find out / is high enough to be destroyed

If this is something you find unrelatable: congrats, I guess. But for those of us that don’t live in a cotton candy house, that’s some proper commiseration. With a bit of field to fortify, there is much to admire, the melody and hook done justice by key performances and attentive detailing. It’s a carefully built hex for which you don’t have to wait long for the curse to kick in.

Name your price on the bandcamp, or an $8 buck cassette can be acquired from Feel It Records, fine folk affiliated with The Cowboys, Sweeping Promises and Alien Nosejob.