Tag: garage

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – City of Electric Light

5/5 golden merles

In 2008 I was working for Democratic Party as a field organizer on a couple of campaigns for congress and governor, but also in support of one particular presidential candidate that purported to offer hope and/or change.

I had free housing and ~$300 a week in exchange for my labor of 16 hours a day. This comes out to somewhere in the region of $3/hour before taxes. Once I tried to buy one of the regional organizers a beer and he said, “Don’t be insane, I know how much you make.” I was 22 and looked 16, but for an awful, awful beard. I was a terrible public speaker.

Soft Airplane was my reliable soundtrack for driving down from the volunteer-housing mountain-hill every morning, winding off to our shared office in downtown Madison, Indiana. The songs are deeply tied to this moment of relative youth and although I love them they are a little painful to revisit.

We were clearly on the side of good and decency, it seemed to me. The moment appeared full of potential. The technically anti-war, pro-healthcare candidate was about to win a landslide national election.

This was before the military surges, the corporate bailouts, the drone assassinations, the heritage foundation healthcare plan, the squandered supermajority, the absolved Iraq war criminals, and all the other weak-willed incrementalism that damned us and continues to provide momentum for the ongoing backlash.

I didn’t know then what Adolph Reed had accurately assessed in 1996, over a decade prior:

“…a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future… We have to do better.”

I am both somewhat nostalgic for this sense of purpose and opportunity in youth to fulfill it and ashamed of it, the actual legacy and faith in a couple of morally compromised figureheads. I am also ashamed that I made a lot of good friends that I immediately lost contact with after the election. I will hope to do better going forward and continue to relish the capacity for change.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

5/5 golden merles

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | The Cowboys – Hands of Love (Around My Throat)

5/5 golden merles

As I write this there we’re just shy of half a million confirmed daily cases of the virus known as “Covid-19.” Yes, that was technically several days ago, maybe that number has subsided or doubled by now, easily either. This Blog is prepared beforehand though it doesn’t seem like it.

Point is, given the holiday, that’s a lot of loving hands around a lot of throats.

To make this review more about me, I’ve started to collect low-dollar records that I love/find online. Trying to buy them directly from the artist or label is the way to go, 100%.

But sometimes you miss a release by a hundred or so years and everyone related to it are dead. In this case, you must go to discogs and pay several pennies to have your media mail chucked into the holiday delivery truck and driven across the plague ravaged nation to your door.

The Cowboys are from Bloomington, IN, the home of both midwestern crap rock and my alma mater. Hands of Love, Take me back, Prized Pig, Negativity Scene, Like a Man, Say Hello to the Sun (For Me)… there’s no shortage of quality here. It’s easily one of the best records of whatever year it came out, 2017 I guess.

TRACK | Wombo – Sad World

5/5 golden merles

Wombo’s Blossomlooksdownuponus is end-to-end the best full length I’ve heard in awhile. No doubt some variation of the recent singles, EPs and LPs will find their way onto the next few mixes I spam unsolicited at my friends and family. And, again, I owe it to the folks at various small flames. Go there, it’s better than this place.

There are extreme levels of grace on this thing. What a talented team of folks, threading the needle of perception, of content and form, of what is tolerable and what is memorable.

As the old saying goes, a camel has a greater chance of passing through the eye of a needle than an art rock band has of creating a convincing hook.

There is here a form of post-punk that aspires for much more than novelty or style, that backs aesthetic with songcraft and substance, using the energy in either to propel the other forward. Sometimes one or the other is sufficient, but it needn’t be.

I can’t help feeling like my merely mentioning it degrades it’s quality slightly, which is maybe why I haven’t heard of the thing to this point. But there is too much to admire within.

I have blundered slightly in purchasing the WOMBO COMBO, denying me unlimited streaming rights to the LP. However, it may genuinely be worth purchasing twice.


TRACK | Stephen J. Denning – Out of My Depth

5/5 golden merles

On bandcamp Denning describes this as “fuzzy, midwestern surf rock.” And that it is.

Well, I don’t know if he’s midwestern. I have no way of knowing where Stephen J. Denning is at any given moment nor even any reliable means of adequately tracking him to within a region of several miles. And I’ll testify to that in court.

But listen here you assembled invalids, you timeless quant of dullards, you lil’, diminutive shits: there are more agreeable tones in this tiny tomb than all the Muppet mass graves of our youths combined.

There’s no easy way to say this. But I don’t think words themselves can do the track justice, I’m sorry. You’ll just have to listen to it, there’s no way around it.

TRACK | cupid and the stupids – Love and Liquor

5/5 golden merles

The controlled chaos on display in Love and Liquor is a great gift. Both the lead and backing vocals are tremendously good. I am desperately indebted to the crescendo of “Breaking my Heart,” the primary melody and it’s various subsystems; it’s carried me through a couple days at least.

A recurring theme here in my myriad appreciations are the pulling together of lo-fi pieces into a coherent and anthemic whole, unabashedly taking the stripped down, dollar-bin components of quasi-functional home recording devices and software and elevating them to an effect most major studios can’t accomplish.

That’s a fundamental part of the glory of the ineffable.

It is more likely found in the efforts of those determined to uncover it through the dedicated pursuit of creative problem solving, passionately preoccupied with honoring truth and the capture of a feeling.

And every time it succeeds another gear-head reinvests in a piece of technology that is the solution to almost certainly nothing, certain that this time it will be different. Alas… that is not what is lacking.

If you’re turned off by the production, I’d beg you to listen to it 3-4 times and push through it. The greatness is there. It’s not even particularly obscured.

TRACK | Casey Wells – Archive

5/5 golden merles

Songs can suffer from overworking and mismanagement of resources. This is the opposite of that. There’s so much subtle detailing throughout outfitted to the 63 second run time that it probably punches at least 64lbs above its weight. Welterweights beware.

The cultural conditioning around genres (that I also am awash and dissolving within) here is present but the attention to the construction is orchestral and there is a rich/great breadth to the soundscape.

I am am a sucker for a bit of texture and field recording phasing in to the pop-core, and after revolving about the track, which helps to ground it in a place and time, and provides a context to err out of or embrace. but either way a nice stage to move on.

TRACK | Sweeping Promises – Hunger for a Way Out

5/5 golden merles

Ear worms are good for you, they eat out the wax on the way to your brain. What happens after is lost to us, all records vanish mysteriously after this phase. But I think it is likely good.

This thing is so well crafted it appears genetically modified by big pharma for the purposes of profit, no regard given to the side effects we’ve come to expect from any form of progress.

But also it is just extremely good pop-rock music: guitars tuned and struck properly, synths decoratively detailing the expanse. There’s not much slack in it. And that which is present is properly and quickly used to reel you back in.

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 | KIEFF – Whatever

5/5 golden merles

These KIEFF demos come to us via the fine folks Smikkelbaard. Now would be the perfect time to post a link to KIEFF’s cover of Last Christmas. But I don’t want to. Do they know it’s Christmas? Who cares.

Whatever is recorded and mixed to a near perfect state of presentation. The bass line and guitar lead take the fractal structures of a few art deco struts and builds them into a verifiable sanctuary of a shack.

It is subtle, humble and better than it has any right to be, better than we could ever deserve. You can check shelter off the hierarchy of needs, the manger will suffice.