Tag: garage rock

TRACK | That Ghost – Moon And The Almighty

5/5 golden merles

Previously I’ve written on Ryan Thomas Schmale melancholic and gorgeous work under Myers Rooney, I Hope It Is Only a Room. “Moon And The Almighty” is an earlier, coarser garage rock track. It was provided to a defunct compilations project made by a defunct label that was funding largely defunct DIY venues.

A marching eulogy of a track, it burns and it is glowing. The vocals and instrumentation collude in a fine mist of metallic static. The unraveling is a spectacle, with vocalizations cruising along it’s descent, Death is coming / To take me soon. Transitioning, the passage moves to favoring yowling at the point of disintegration, embers still alight.

In contrast to the Myers Rooney To Bleed album, this conveys Schmale’s great range of evocation; there a drifting and gilding the expanse, here a measured writhing and smiting. A strong working songwriter that deserves a bit of your support if you are able.

There’s a new 2022 split with mr submissive also to check out.

TRACK | cool sorcery – Sea Dream

5/5 golden merles

Bedroom-based Brazilian garage rock, striking and resourceful in its conceits and reimagining. There’s plenty of genre blurring in the service of tone, punk and dream pop, and all culminating in much good from where I’m sat. One of the best produced lo-fi albums I’ve heard in ages.

“Sea Dream” caps off the album and brings the set to a close with a little bit of the venom tapped, but the whole set is filled with pointed and momentous hooks. Smoggy, snarling and slick, it’s a bit melted and mystifying, with much fine attention to detail including the field recording to place the epitaph.

The weighted mix of live and drum machine is an emphatic and impressive simulacra instructing you how to build out from the skeleton to craft a convincing body of work; how to reinforce and animate the heart without inhibiting credulity. It’s $5 USD on the bandcamp page.

TRACK | Wand – Flying Golem

5/5 golden merles

Psychedelic rock from LA, “Flying Golem” convincingly summons something strange and special from the inanimate. The instrumentation approximates something graceful, aloft and massive. Driving melodic guitars grind and latch to the steadfast percussion, synths delicately sprout from the structure.

I have very limited patience for guitar solos in general but this one is adequately shattering and incorporates the discordant with deliberate experimentation. Through its winding and dissolution it manages to say something new and complimentary within the context of the demolition.

Sadly the bandcamp has one selectively available track, so the YouTube link won’t show up in the hype machine. But also check out the beautiful video on youtube directed and animated by Meghan Tryon & Garrett M Davis. $9 for the digital, abridged in its preview. The vinyl’s relatively rare but can be located for the right price.

TRACK | checkpoint – gravedigger

5/5 golden merles

Kicking and combustible punk from Melbourne, “gravedigger” is structurally inventive and paced in variable pulses that keep the ballistic style and texture fresh. Rewardingly unyielding and pleasantly vile.

The digi drum metronome acts as a petri dish that the crust of a culture grows rapidly out of. Ruthless and rejoicing, what lyrics crack through the veil of muck beyond the title concern epistemology, the nature of knowledge. What is known before the graves are dug, what can and can’t be passed on.

An attitude so churlish it would be to the surprise of no one if they were to have dinner with Groucho tonight. On the Bandcamp they threaten an upcoming LP that we look forward to.

TRACK | Vivian Girls – I Heard You Say

5/5 golden merles

It is mercifully easy to be absorbed in the cascading vocal harmonies of “I Heard You Say.” Its many graceful hooks effectively converge with a sense of punk dread and foreboding. And there is some real force of these coalescing influences.

The instrumentation is quietly elaborate for the garage rock genre, sneaking, rattling and smashing in support. There is much smoldering grit to the production. Everything collapsing through the phases into its right place, nothing extraneous just perfectly balanced.

Between Vivian Girls/The Babies, Cassie Ramone is one of my favorite songwriters. 250 days into this project, it is difficult to believe that I haven’t yet featured either and this is the remedy to that. It’s an oversight.

TRACK | TENTENT – Nieznany Ląd

5/5 golden merles

TENTENT provides dynamic post-punk from Warsaw. The title roughly translates as “Unknown Land.” It’s rallying and transfixing garage rock, patiently coursing in accumulated spirals that venture carefully outward from the sturdy melodic core.

There’s lots of intricate plotting to the instrumentation, tightly performed and locked into the bass exemplar. The track gives us a lesson in how to unfurl a melody that has otherwise fastened around its center. And when the lead breaks later and is freed from this orbit the culmination is deliberate and transcendent material. There’s a great deal of fine pacing and interplay.

The vinyl from Shovel head Records remains available in mint and gold, sent from Poland for about ~$25 with shipping.

TRACK | Dead Ghosts – What To Do

5/5 golden merles

“What To Do” is rapid, direct garage pop/rock. The static-distortion rises up to embrace you from the pyre beneath, fizzing and rasping. It’s finely fermented in its own haze and heartache; a joyous melodic sludge.

The production is a slushy stint of metallic rust, stormy and straightforward, strung together with the copper wire pulled from an abandoned home. Akin to The Riptides or Charlie and the Moonhearts, or any garage within view of the ocean.

Like the recently covered Can’t Get No, the Burger vinyl can be found across the globe with various dings and dents.

TRACK | TELE/VISIONS – Bloody

5/5 golden merles

The introduction and embrace of imperfections in the recording mirrors the chaos in our midst, the ever-present unknown. And this represents cumulatively less kitsch than if it were refined or faithfully and tediously extracted.

This inclusion or allowance of these attributes is a means of conveying that discordance (via distortion, in echo, etc, however reverberating), it approximates these symbolic and the metaphorical misgivings. It is the appropriate representation of factoring in uncertainty into your model, of both your collected perceptions and their conveying through representation in auditory art. And with this admission present upfront —the prospect of erring around the margins, the looming suspicions, the muck and mire— the intention of the work becomes more honest and true, its testaments more convincing.

“Bloody” is a marginally mangled lo-fi clinic on how melody can successfully conspire with tempo under these carefully crafted circumstances. The oscillations swing between movements, flagging and then forceful, hesitant and emboldened. The doubt grounds the professing in a world that resembles our own.

It stands in contrast to corporate refinement. That which has the power and engine to polish style down to bone and yet with all its menacing, perfected honing comes away saying nothing at all. Maybe, largely, because if it had anything of value to add it would promptly undermine the unjust hierarchies that lead to its ascendance?

I don’t know. I like this song, I think it’s fun and has good style. Now people can easily approximate either interpretation in their bedroom — the bile and barrage of the single mic garage or recordings from a pristine sound-proofed void— for now wrapped in the symbols of the past, sand always shifting beneath us. These things won’t mean the same thing to people later. But it is made by people from relatively now and for people from relatively now and in my present subjective opinion it is very good.

TRACK | Nick Normal – Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)

5/5 golden merles

Dense and quietly devastating garage pop from Portland, Nick Normal’s “Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)” opens with a David Lynch cameo and proceeds to bludgeon you with an inventive dredging of the interpersonal.

Lie to yourself / But please don’t ever lie to me

There’s a lot of rich, orthogonal storytelling put to work compiling an era, moving with assurance through the sequential reminiscences. Parsing the pastiche, it covers more ground than seems intuitively possible. The zonal telling is clobbered by some masterfully metered lo-fi tones.

TRACK | Guided by Voices – You’re Not an Airplane

5/5 golden merles

Dayton rockers GBV even further stripped down here, just Pollard and piano on this lovely quasi-lament. The pathos is insurmountable, coming in waves from the fluctuations of the tape deck, and early and then late in the noise, some squeaking that might be crickets or a rotary winding.

It’s very effective. At 33 seconds in length, a formidable track to cap off the album. It feels like an ode to the rust belt (At this point, maybe not then / maybe even then), and there is an immense hollowness to the claim that “the race is yet to come.” It hurts. But also there’s some hope in it; not in the short or the medium term, but maybe metaphorically, or at least that time is long and ours is not the only telling.