Tag: garage

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.


TRACK | Orchid Mantis – Don’t Wake Me Up

5/5 golden merles

Carrying the torch of Jeans Wilder Sparkler, similar elements are here infused a decade later and with different meaning.

Spectral and with more than a glancing glimmer of the void, the lead guitar melody loops back upon itself, an ouroboros, devouring it’s own tail indefinitely.

This perpetual motion machine can be yours for the low, low price of $3.


TRACK | Obnox – It’s so hard to break a habit

5/5 golden merles

Obnox’s phenomenal cover of The Webs is what I imagine American pop music would presently sound more like if we were better capable of grappling with our shared degraded condition.

Never has such unimaginable wealth been localized within a region and disseminated so unevenly among it’s inhabitants. With every opportunity for alternative, there is an extreme disregard offered the general well being.

Simultaneous with this disparity, no other nation has such a collective misunderstanding of itself, it’s glories and indignities.

Not only are the people defeated, routed, but proudly so. Rabid nationalism is exclusively here an obvious humiliation, frothing and raving, we pledge our devotion to an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and a kleptocracy, which hold dominion under the false label of democracy.

And how do you make pop music within this context, knowing the conditions? It’s hard to break a habit.


TRACK | La Secte Du Futur – Future is Better

5/5 golden merles

From the bass synth and bass guitar out the gate intermingling, to the vocals metallic net of echo, every tone in this is great.

There are a couple buried synths in the mix, something I am deeply sympathetic to, offering up their own variant melodies to the alter of noise. They are just apparent enough to flesh things out and keep things interesting.

This gentle revisionism speaks to the chaos at the heart of the track. Whether The Future is Better or Never is better, something must change.

TRACK | Total Revenge – Jeep Cherokee

5/5 golden merles

There’s a few great tracks on Total Revenge’s S/T, but Jeep Cherokee is my favorite of the set.

Drums that register somewhere between trashcan and streetlight corral a blown out but triumphant melody, bleeding out graciously into the verse. All of this builds pretty quickly to some kind of boil before dissipating in feedback to close out the record.

“I do all the things that I should / For once in my life I feel good”

Check out also The Fair for similar sludgery that reaches comparable heights of wonder.

TRACK | Girl Racers – Rubber

5/5 golden merles

In Rubber, Girl Racers have created a single worthy of your great fondness.

Direct but also bound up in much playful production and a glut of buoyant layers, the fine vocal irreverence is attenuated by a steady, unflinching instrumentation.

Hearing it makes me miss being in a proper band, whiling away in the basement preparing heaps of markedly hopeless material. But it was fun. And this captures that sense of joy.

You, there, boy, what day is this?

This is good. This is inventive and more than a bit volatile. Check out the other offerings from Three Door Records as well.

ALBUM | Katie Von Schleicher – Shitty Hits

5/5 golden merles

Shitty Hits is one of the best albums of the last decade. It is endlessly impressive and inspiring material, awash in fervent commiseration, fearsome eulogizing, and in this way it is difficult to choose one track to feature.

Knowing how good the subsequent offerings are, starting with track one makes sense.

There are no fewer than several dozen instances in which effortlessness combines seamlessly with the elaborate. Like in Going Down when it almost sounds like it’s all about to fall apart, stalling just after the field recording, then careening back into the chorus, outdoing the previous effort’s loop. Or essentially all of The Image, or Life’s a lie... or Isolator, or Hold…

There is a great quote that is applicable here from an article reviewing Denis Johnson’s Lament of the Sea Maiden by Geoff Dyer, “Control is achieved through willing proximity to its loss.”

And that is anything with content and form, style and substance, design and function. But rarely is it metered so consistently with such exactitude and genius.

With great rarity does the lo-fi indie bedroom-rock world produce things that are both believably personal and properly anthemic. Generally speaking, for most working within this subset, the ambition doesn’t stretch much farther than the size of the room it was crafted in.

Exceptions include the occasional track by Joanna, Spencer and that immensely talented okie who wrote Funeral. But they are everywhere here. If you play it you too will become pleasantly impaled on one of the very many hooks.

Katie Von Schleicher has written two remarkable albums in the last few years and I doubt either of you vulgarians own them yet. You can still buy Shitty Hits on vinyl at the bandcamp.

Also follow on Instagram for quality bird-centric social media content second only to Marianne Williamson.

TRACK | Unity – Big Dreams #2

5/5 golden merles

“Big Dreams, don’t know where to put them / up on the shelf”

Big Dreams is a sandcastle made of sugar.

It is 25ft tall and even when the water comes in as a tide that afternoon it takes 8 days to dissolve, fully one day more than it took some lord to create the world and it’s peripheral, irrelevant universe (as it is alleged).

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying about science, probably, “It should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” And that is also a pretty good way to think about pop music.

A distillation and honing of hooks into their purest form. Unity have made here a good example of that phenomenon.

I prefer the demo version posted here to the one that later appears on the subsequent S/T LP. Fortunately the world is big enough for both.

TRACK | Nerve City – Sleepwalker

5/5 golden merles

Sleepwalker is an outsized, large thing built of small glories and grace.

The skeletal structure of the percussion never falters as the track progresses down the spine of the behemoth, notch by notch, clacking beyond each reliably subsequent disc.

Somehow all of this is divined by nearly clean guitar tones, a bit of tremolo and the faithful tambourine.

Before the curvature shifts, the song ends. We’re only able to recover a fragment of the fossil that was pulled from the earth.

The rest is left for us to imagine. Scales or feathers, take your pick.

Jason Boyer has exciting materials of various mediums on the big cartel and some highly promising upcoming collaborations. Also check out the full Sleepwalker EP on bandcamp.

TRACK | Friendo – Pass Times

5/5 golden merles

Pass Times features many characteristics I greatly admire when done well: some fine, howling backing vocals, symbol splashes that connote momentum in the chorus, reverb that begins to bite on the build, reaching the edge of the expanse and folding back over onto itself.

Listening back to it now, it’s almost as though the people playing the instruments can hear one another and are able to react accordingly, like there exists a framework but also some agency within it.

And though it sounds easy, why don’t more people do it? Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t effortless but that which is hard earned.

Plus, despite it’s detestable monarchist nomenclature, I prefer Royal Crown Cola to the other sodas… not that I would ever buy or drink any of those paragons of chemical castration. But if I had to choose, gun to my head, it’d be RC most of the time.

In the last decade since the release of Pass Times its creator, Cookie Brunel, has been making heaps of exciting art, some of which is new music.