Tag: lo-fi

TRACK | The Drin – Reach Through the Midnight

5/5 golden merles

“Reach Through the Midnight” is substantive and transportive proto/post-punk, a strong prelude and segue into the larger album which releases from Mangel Records (EU) / Future Shock (US) on the 21st of September. Forecasting, slightly sickly, resting on the border between worlds, both marking and blocking the portal. You’d do well to study its habits. The phrasing and motion gives one the impression of basking in the warmth of the pyre.

A sound melodic refrain is coupled with the expression of unnerving/foreboding visions; immense texture and instrumentation rise to meet the mood, ardently rattling before burning out. These are things I can relate to. The recitations involved will either manifest or undermine their impending summoning. We’ll just have to wait and find out which. The album is primed to deliver.

The sluice of culture that I’ve cut into the mountain face of the void, the one responsible for draining all content toward me, has determined that I should hear this track a couple times. And it was right, it has won me over. All hail the sluice of culture dug out by hand from the mountain of void to deliver tonal sustenance. Particularly, Snooping The Bandcamp, OneTwoxu.de and Manierenversagen. Look to them for more if you like this.

TRACK | Repulsion Switch – Optimista

5/5 golden merles

Repulsion Switch’s EP features variations on a theme via accelerated lo-fi Buenos Aires egg punk. Rapid, minimal and winged, the sort of scuttled remains of rock a low ranking demon might envision during a weekend away at a sensory deprivation tank. It breaks into being at four tracks in three minutes and forty two seconds. It is better than most formative fiction you have consumed.

The balance is admirable. Venturing out into abstraction despite the commitment to form, it is consistently corroded and it’s playing with how many pieces can be removed before collapse. It has cracked the code and is now faithful to the formula.

As it evaporates upon entry, we may as well start it on the first track, “Optimista,” but I prefer the third best, “Flavors,” as the most choice from the set. Anyway, If it makes it down the track list, there is not much of an impact crater visible after. But it is a spectacle worthy of consumption in either case. I’m glad to know it. Etch it into your hard drive and heart for a mere $1 USD (or more).

TRACK | C.P.R. Doll – Drabness

5/5 golden merles

Australian lo-fi rock super-duper group C.P.R. Doll will have you carving out your own bones and honing them into guitar picks just to play along. If you lack bones or sufficient resolve it’ll at least inspire some passive admiration at the stacked, cascading and careening egg punk melodies and demoniac phrasing. They start small and build things of significance which is all you can really ask for in this regrettable world. The accumulation is a great.

It is one of the permutations of rock I enjoy, with the emphasis on mutation. The attention to detail is superb, and there is a great intention in the solving temporal and spatial logic traps that crop up in any map of the soundscape, thwarting every pitfall, escaping entanglement of dullness either through invention or evasion.

There’s a smash and grab ethos: cut it if off it starts to stale, salvage what you can, promptly grow another limb to replace the one left caught in the snare. Each track is spiraling into control: moving forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always confidently twirling towards freedom.

I am told by tippy top tier punk curator Tremendo Garaje that it is to be made available in the US of A by Under The Gun Records and already sold out of Europe in an absurdly limited 20 copies edition by Goodbye Boozy.

TRACK | Trauma Harness – Megasilmax

5/5 golden merles

“Megasilmax” is electric St. Louis post-punk and garage rock, scalding and salving and adequately seditious. It is also the beautiful death knell of Lumpy Records. After a litany of shared releases, Ten Years of Trauma is a compilation adroitly made up of selections from Trauma Harness’ digital or limited cassette runs.

The whole set of tracks is electric, radiating the joy of making art with chums. What at first seems tangled –synths dissecting the channels, askance percussive melodic phrasing, momentum shifting slightly ahead of the BPM in a manner which defies the space–on closer inspection is ornately structured behind a fever.

After and before “Megasilmax” it carries on evincing and delivering, and then a compilation built across a decade feels like a solid record, built to be collectively perceived. The sound is established throughout with a kind of unified vision and purpose. The standards are set and then met in each attempt, goalposts not so much as swaying in the breeze. The digital is $6 and vinyl in a set of 500 for $17.

TRACK | Troll Dolly – Pooly

5/5 golden merles

Vancouver’s Troll Dolly has crafted some truly special experimental folk. Kindness is rarely given this level of craft and careful introduction into the world, for either one’s self or the other, and here it is both. Usually, its refinement is often hurried or perfunctory, the author somewhat slack, neither on the attack or defensive. Generally it is delivered with the understanding of either immediate acceptance and dismissal or an insurmountable suspicion/doubt enforcing its limitations. “Pooly” conveys a intricate context promptly and stunningly with both credulity and grace.

There’s a great deal of nuance to it, reflected in the production and the concepts, it contains the toil and tact needed for coherent processing of more complex ideas and emotions. The strongest line of the track, for me, is one that is not repeated, and regarding the expression of love: I’m afraid to ask for it / because I wake up in a deficit. Even when there is redundancy, for effect, it is accompanied by a new melody driving the point in a slightly different direction, providing scope. Grief, gray areas, and equal parts mournful and hopeful.

Its effect feels vast and outsized within the framework of the album/set of songs. Similar to the rawness combined with confrontation of A Crow Looked at Me, the medium is granted a status/use it doesn’t usually fulfill. And that is exciting and rare.

It runs parallel to precious and mighty things like Doiron’s I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day, Olsen’s If It’s Alive, It Will, and Martch’s Now You Know. A kind of self-actualized consideration without a compromise to form.

If a song is a way of remaining within a conversation, this is approaching a healthy version of that honing and mantra refinement. Music is storytelling provided the greater context of form, style affording weight/significance that otherwise requires time or additional context to establish. These are simple definitions but their qualitative realization is a uncommon and welcome. Seeing as we seem to be approaching an era in which we will be covering ourselves in blood to stop from burning, it is a relief to see something moving in the opposite direction, offering healing and a compelling vision.

TRACK | CLAMM – Something New

5/5 golden merles

Melbourne’s CLAMM offer “Something New,” fangs bared, among a set of impassioned punk and garage rock tracks. The works are ruminating and requesting assistance, an allegiance at the threat of annihilation. The direct language and reiteration of themes insist that this is real seeking/beseeching, decidedly not posture or play on the scales of invest or escape.

The production cracks, daunting and declarative. An authoritative and aggrieved vocal at the core of the track holds court: in a time of mass disillusionment and a growing desperation for reinvention, what can be salvaged and what must be discarded? A reason, a sign. something new. Backing vocals collude with some horns that act as a wax seal on the exit and work to elevate the scope.

Vinyl’s are out from Meat Machine (UK, Europe and Asia) and Chapter Music (rest of world -> this means you, USA) — if you’re off planet or shedding all material possessions in anticipation of the end, digitally it’s $13 AUD worth of audio.

TRACK | Girl – Pavement

5/5 golden merles

Girl makes New Jersey-based alt rock with elements of avant and experimentation, holed up in the basement/garage and dispatched from a wave of reverence. Coming amidst much invention, “Pavement” is the fermented earworm closer of the Ghost EP, the best entry point, and that rarer sort of ephemera made up of mental models trained on tunes that seems to have a half-life of several generations.

In the breadth of thrash and strum there is a slow burn that accumulates with interest, rending late back into the chorus before extinguishing. There’s a stalking melody under arouras of reverb, all punctuated by formidable cymbals rides that orient and direct. The slates so well set by the time it degrades the scale one final time it is a relief.

I was introduced to the track by James’ reliably aligned scouting over at Kick Out The James (WZBC) mixcloud, in the very good August 19th set. Ghost EP as a digital album is $8 or more at bandcamp.

TRACK | Freak Genes – Strange Charm

5/5 golden merles

“Strange Charm” arrives in a set of consistently plumbed concepts and a larger narrative fixated on the veil, particularly in a Bostrom/Boltzmann sense. And there should be more of this in the world as we know it, simulation or other, because it’s just so damn much fun. The track is composed of sheer keys and guts, synth punk with fervor as the foundation, maniacally forecasting the intricacies of an artificial future.

In the manufacturing of a new and immediate heaven there will be gradients of adaptation and those left behind, some willingly. “Energy bars low above your head,” a beach devoid of touch: the details are effectively populated.

There is within these elements a great deal of world building done (–about world building), new classifications and clearances, presaging emerging rifts that we only have the slightest direct precedents for, despite very familiar themes. It’s full of playful prescience and with enough hooks to convince you to gladly remain and be absorbed within the futurist subject matter.

It arrived today and is fully streamable: there are vinyl variations in limited runs for $20-22 from the esteemed Feel It Records; suitably the digital version is name your own price.

TRACK | Frances Chang – flower childs

5/5 golden merles

Frances Chang’s “flower childs” is made up of the stuff of slowcore, psych-singer songwriter, and expertly extracted from the bedroom recordings. It has an arc that rises from the hope found in craft, the most direct determination of destiny, and then, meteorically, quickly, pivots into some dearly dreaded speculation: i’m so happy / i could cry / i’m writing and music sounds good again. It operates with all the damning and deliberate wonder you could hope for.

The melodies are found in their nascent form before repetition hammers them into rote reminders and set queues. The reverb hangs around, an intermittent percussive xylophone accentuates it. In the telling, some halcyon days are recounted which needed to be lost in order to be truly valued, or maybe even realized for their worth.

Forever is found wanting, concepts collide with the earth, invariably misaligned in manifestation. Forgiveness is afforded or withheld, to be redeemed later with interest. what if you don’t forgive me? / or even worse if you do… Is the best way forward a doubling down on delusion or maybe in the end (there is no end) living as comfortably as possible in perpetual doubt.

I wrote recently about Haneke’s Amour, “I guess this is what films would be like if they were made for humans and by humans instead of by corporations and for money,” and this is near enough the musical equivalent; limited in posturing, full of exploration. There are tapes for $10 and FLAC files for $8.

TRACK | Egg Idiot – Barf Life

5/5 golden merles

We may remain in Leipzig for awhile, the scene is flourishing, filled with good and strange things in this baleful era. Egg Idiot is frenzied diy synth and bedroom punk. It may also be the closest thing music has to Ideonella sakaiensis, the bacterium that manages to prosper in the ocean now polluted by plastic; in other words: something seemingly built for, adapting to, and thriving in hell.

The style is rough, rabid/rapid instrumentation, cranked and howling into a vocoder. Many, if not most, submissions I receive contain a distinct lack of muck/bile, but here we have both stylistically and explicitly the proper degree of murky resolve: I’m a bottomless pit / filled with vomit.

It’s a crime not to couple the coverage of “BARF LIFE” without featuring also the video George Bruzzle has concocted to go with his tune. You might have to go back to Chad Vangaalen’s Molten Light vid to find a demon this multifaceted. The cover above is from a super limited run on Berlin’s Henne Records, but it is pay what you will in digi form.