garage – Page 19 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Death Lens – Witching Hour

It is difficult to keep the bile intact as it populates the mold, all to be bound and set, maneuvering within the pop structure.

If you like The Cramps Psychedelic Jungle but despise this, I would wager that the nostalgia has rotted your brain.

Or you’re partial to The Stooges’ Funhouse but don’t see any redeeming qualities in what Death Lens are retching up here, well then something is off, and future assessment are brought into question. In my estimation your pure perceiver may be found untrue and needs calibration.

TRACK | Hair Peace – Summertime

In the bleak mid-winter, let’s dwell on sunnier times discussed and celebrated in Hair Peace’s Summertime, as featured on their 2014 Summer EP. It has a melody like radioactive molasses. It compels you to have faith in the youths. It reminds you that verses and choruses can coexist in peace, hair peace.

That I am the only individual who has purchased this item (from the Bandcamp page, at least), is a kind of crime against humanity. Some CDs were apparently available at Bloomington, IN’s, wonderful Landlocked music, where I spent a good deal of student loan money at their various locations one hundred years ago.

It was Schopenhauer who said “Man can do what he wants but not want what he wants.” OK, But you should want this EP. It’s good. Contract it today.

TRACK | The Worms – Quality Time

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

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

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

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

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 | Heaters – Levitate Thigh

For anyone who knows that hooks are made of metal and think that it’s high time they sounded like it.

In the writing I’d have probably lost my nerve and had that build successfully utilized once. But Heaters are wiser and more competent in their construction. And it is a thing of wonder.

Maybe this is all it takes to qualify the grand in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Lesser things have been given bigger honors.

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

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

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.

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