Tag: goner records

TRACK | Hierophants – Hail Stones

5/5 golden merles

From Hierophants’ debut, “Hail Stones” careens and craters, a daydream of destruction and elemental escape from the self. Lo-fi rock from Geelong, Australia, it is appreciably equal parts glittering and gloom.

I like the symmetry and measure throughout. The drums stem off in reserved but significant patterns, steadily alternating in variance, keeping things on the whole goodly deviated during the synth and vocal melodies iterative delineations. That harmony and tension dynamic adds a lot of good depth and proportion to how it all falls precisely together.

The ruminations about transformation are fun and inventive interludes to the core instrumentation. It is refreshing to see the percussive aspect used as the element that is given freer reign to pick apart the structure, an inversion of tradition while all the pieces still combine favorably.

It can be yours for $12.99 as black vinyl from Goner Records, or a buck more for the Yellow mold.

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.