TRACK | Wombo – Below The House

5/5 golden merles

Wombo’s Fairy Rust is one of my most anticipated records for awhile and the “Below the House” single is the well chosen/ideal entry. The staccato conversational admissions form the crux of the thing with the bass riff bubbling beneath, absorbing all the terrestrial elements; a nonabrasive and brightly melted solo closes the sequence, outsized, life-like.

From the start you feel a cache is built up with reserves of the flitting but determined melodic phrases, the simple accumulating into gentle grandiosity through the appropriate sequential consequences. Lots of unknowable but familiar components, plainly cryptic, recognizably indecipherable and the like.

Wombo are on tour and the vinyl’s out on Brooklyn’s Fire Talk Records, black or red for a buck more. It’s good sound to hear.

TRACK | Dinero Romero – Laser Beam of Consciousness

5/5 golden merles

“Laser Beam of Consciousness” from Louisville’s Dinero Romero was a central piece of the last mix. With much warmth and warbling, the track is a kind of psych rock which evolves like a placid fever dream, methodical and yet genial in its delirium.

The song in no way begins to address the question of whether it’s performers are… “either people dressed in regalia to look like spirits, or they are spirits.” It’s anybody’s guess. But they are employed, with heads filled with fog and in a stupor on the trip home. A nice, dreamy track concerning how you spend your time and to what do you devote the few brief moments of coherent focus.

It can be bought for an increasingly devalued buck.

TRACK | The Archaeas – Absent Mind

5/5 golden merles

The Archaeas “Absent Mind” is a dose of fiery garage-punk imported from Louisville, Kentucky. Recent P&P favorites Wombo are also from the neighborhood. But the ultimate embodiment of human evil Mitch McConnell also resides there, lest you think it strictly heavenly indie rock turf.

The track has all the peculiarities of elegantly controlled chaos and strikes a marked balance between its upfront, surgical pop characteristics and the smoldering, ruptured punk elements.

In the series of humiliations and degradations known as ‘the world,’ this can be a difficult balance to strike, what with all the distractions and immiserations afoot. But, considered or intuited, it has been achieved; the whole s/t album is great. With respect to Style vs Substance, Content vs Form, Design vs Function, Et Cetera vs Etc, there is enough tasteful thrash and tarnish around the imminently coherent core for you to invest your credulity in.

As the empire collapses, turns its exported brutality inward, and quality of life decline for us all, we’ll surely turn on one another instead of our shared oppressors. But one thing I hope we can all agree upon is that Louisville is making some sick tunes and that we’re both proud of and thankful for them.