Tag: NYC

TRACK | King-Mob – Pendulum Days

5/5 golden merles

In an era defined by death, disease, and (gestures broadly), commiseration is the best thing a person can do. King-Mob’s “Pendulum Days” is a track of lush alt/noise rock that describes unease and routine over degraded percussive fractals, subsections merging and collapsing in precise heaps. The mastery it offers is that of ordered disorientation. And the feeling of its familiarity is an uneasy but nonetheless welcome revelation.

The complexity and calculated elaborations of the instrumental play are worthy of admiration. The soundscape is finely tuned in a delicate cacophony. All that careful attention paid to the sampling is successfully populating the undergirding of the song’s structure and acts to center some direct and cunning hooks, complementing and following the form.

The richness of the reversed cymbals and reverberated swells produces a nice, dense soil from which the lead guitar and vocal may flourish. The direction and warp of those segments both mimicking and reifying that titular swing forward, then later agreeably inverted by the tether.

If I am discerning it properly, my favorite line operates also as a top-tier toast for the times we labor under: “to gods who never listen.”

Most listeners will likely relate to the narrative of a life defined by what would have formerly passed for recurrent aberration and colonized exclusively by apparitions. In the end, the gears shift to what appears an escape or transition, symbolically lurching off perhaps out of the rut, away from those who would have you passive, idle, and obedient, and reminding that there is only justice in this world if we make it. The new Arabesque EP can be found on the bandcamp.

By way of exploring similar themes of ensnare/emancipation, maybe you can check out Mathieu Labaye’s “Orgesticulanismus.”

TRACK | Maggie Carson – From Here To Anywhere

5/5 golden merles

Second single off the up-coming The Dark Was Aglow (June 24th, Open Ocean), “From Here To Anywhere” is Americana full of vibrant twang and vengeance. A fanged and full-throated track which demonstrates that anguish is the engine of revival.

How do I leave / if the road’s just a halo?

There is a remarkable rising to it. With much might and lightly mangled, a strong and rousing performance has been captured. There’s great range and effect as the vocal rises to meet the instrumentation, the swelling synth and glittering banjo elevating alongside. It’s part commiseration, part rallying cry.

Having toured and performed with acts like Sharon Jones, Dr. Dog, and Nana Grizol, there seems to be a quality and breadth of first-hand and collaborative influences to pull from. It is a small spectacle, drawing on some subtle genre fusions while at heart remaining in the folk-traditional realm.

Open Ocean is not-for-profit record label with a donation and gift contribution model of acquiring both the vinyl and digital editions, suggested at $30/$10 respectively. I have seen plenty of pay-what-you-want digi releases, but none yet in the physical form, so please consider supporting these Rockaway Beach based operators.

TRACK | thanks for coming – losing touch (nyc)

5/5 golden merles

Direct and daunting in its indexes, “losing touch (nyc)” is a track about friends idly assuming divergent trajectories and how relationships either require continual maintenance or they stagnate, starve, or dissolve into thin air. It is a great conversational pop song about a lack of communication.

I wasn’t sure whether to feature the demo variation or the latter above with its assured layers of instrumentation, usually favoring the former for its sincerity and getting a bit closer to the moment the track takes shape. But nothing seems lost in the interim, and, alternatively in the latter, some phrasing is refined and the bass glows underneath.

There is an inspired octave shift that hones the verse and particularly the chorus hook. The modular orbit of the verse-chorus-verse syncs up solidly. It’s a heartrending and elegant track; it’s great.

TRACK | Peace De Résistance – Boston Dynamics

5/5 golden merles

Bits and Pieces is one of the best albums I’ve run into in a few months. There’s a good amount of majesty present in the makeup, marbled and purring in its forms. It is unfortunately unusual to see melody and lyric pushing one another forward with such driven conviction.

Rarely is such rich and dripping style as intricately tangled in such an explicit text. Generally the songwriter starts with one and gestures toward the other: the melody takes primacy or the lyrical contents do instead. But once one is established, some small concessions are made toward the other, coherence and style ending up in an uneasy truce for the sake of the song.

But throughout this superb Peace De Résistance album, melody and message are either manifested simultaneously into the world fully formed or have been spliced apart repeatedly and rearranged back together in a kind of exquisite corpse of composition, obstructing any easy tracing of the lineage. However it happens, the delivery and production combine for the tracks to feel like an organic force of nature, the collusion obscuring the craft and leaving only an elemental entity to admire.

There is little room for misinterpretation, the many thesis have been clearly nailed. There is much disillusionment and a great detailing of the current external perfidies. We are entering an era of ideologies after a prolonged period of holy-admiration for markets. And in this moment it is refreshing to see such disgust for false impressions appear alongside a great appreciation for style and texture, alchemic and melded.