Tag: Ohio

TRACK | Catastrophic Dance Ensemble – Panko

5/5 golden merles

The assignment understanders have arrived. What do the rest of you have to say for yourselves? Cincinnati-found Catastrophic Dance Ensemble make rapid, roaming, detailed eggpunk. Gently putrefied, as a measure of gauging its place within the world, and thriving in the rot all around us. Its welts and warp mirror many of my own less convincing accusations; a fiery and balanced form.

In recent surveys most people claim they know when it is appropriate to twist a melody like pulling someone by the lapels out of the window. But in reality hardly 7 in 10 could do it if pressed. Beyond the hypothetical, these Ohioans have done it here. The instrumental backend is even an excellent melodic tumble, all of it finding some much needed humor in the hemorrhage and goes some way toward explaining why we can’t have nice things.

In league with the good goings on of Leipzig, Berlin, Melbourne and Montreal, the Cincinnati punk rock scene is strong, it seems, from afar. If you’ve recently granted positive appraisals to egg and experiment kings like Mesh, FIVE BUCKS, and C.P.R. Doll, I suppose this would be an easy affixation. Name your price at the bandcamp.

TRACK | Guided by Voices – You’re Not an Airplane

5/5 golden merles

Dayton rockers GBV even further stripped down here, just Pollard and piano on this lovely quasi-lament. The pathos is insurmountable, coming in waves from the fluctuations of the tape deck, and early and then late in the noise, some squeaking that might be crickets or a rotary winding.

It’s very effective. At 33 seconds in length, a formidable track to cap off the album. It feels like an ode to the rust belt (At this point, maybe not then / maybe even then), and there is an immense hollowness to the claim that “the race is yet to come.” It hurts. But also there’s some hope in it; not in the short or the medium term, but maybe metaphorically, or at least that time is long and ours is not the only telling.

TRACK | Times New Viking – Half Day In Hell

5/5 golden merles

With the proper balance of muck and bile, “Half Day In Hell” conspires to deliver noise pop rock with great wrath and fission. In this base of static hum, no melody is sacrificed to the texture but heightened by it.

Not exactly discordant, it is raised to extremes of saturation with very modest deterioration to melodic intent. Elliott and Murphy trade vocals in the haze, refining the wavelengths. It’s the best produced thing I have listened to (revisited) in ages.

After the last week of inconsequential societal response into a myriad horrors, lines like “we will stay forever for a week,” “we have done all that we can do,” “and don’t agree on what to do just to kill time,” and “we couldn’t come together even if we tried,” land a little bit differently, arbitrarily recontextualized to the present in the constant mire of all that is. But these statements remain vaguely stated enough to interpretively address any given scope of social incongruity.

It is modestly miraculous, full of fine trepidation, not reliant on habits and precedent but reaching in its forms to match the emotion and intention. It feels refined but natural and that is a bit freeing. Often when this path is followed it leads into greater abstraction that discounts melody and a greater loss of coherence. Which is fine, but needn’t be the case. Finding that balance is powerful and admirable.

TRACK | Sam Stansfield – creeps are out

5/5 golden merles

Carefully constructed and richly arranged, Extreme Falcon is a proper album in a manner of speaking. It is also a good lesson on how to take your influences as seeds and how to use them to grow a hybrid vision of a new, compelling world.

There is a different quality to art you not only admire but wish you had made. The warmth of the world-building within the storytelling and the crystalline structures of favorably overlapping tones, it all come across as a place well observed and conceptually rendered. Minimal elements merge together, often subdued or absent of drums but never seeming to lack a solid foundation or structure, legibly blurred and blossoming.

To put it in a kind of context that roughly approximates lineage, there are somewhat similar guts and graces to projects like Guided by Voices, The Microphones/Mount Eerie, and Julie Doiron. My favorite sequence runs tracks 7 through 9, “creeps are out,” “lazer tang,” and “company car.” The arrangement feels not unlike the honor of being forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. The luckiest of all resolutions.

I recently read that ~90% of Sumerian/cuneiform tablets have yet to be translated. Most appear to be related to basic business or home accounting, but many are journals, myths, histories… It would be nice if future archeologists surveying the muck of the geological record could favor such things that seem to easily contain within them relatable and self-contained multitudes. Black or Turquois vinyl available on Slick Rock Records.

TRACK | Crime of Passing – Vision Talk

5/5 golden merles

Geographically in the world as it has been mapped, Crime of Passing are from Ohio. In the empire of aesthetic this s/t album sits near the capital, wherever that happens to metaphorically lie… probably not far from John Carpenter’s prison island version of Manhattan.

Right out the gate there is apparent enough texture and melody to be a strong contender for the year-end lists.
“Tender Fixation” is the lead single and a great, hounding track. But “Vision Talk” is the easiest revolver for me. If you gave me a hundred years I couldn’t make a single track with this much clarity that is simultaneously as dense and textured.

The tome includes plenty of chrome plated and finely calibrated tracks. Post-punk often loses its edge and some of it’s precision in the prolonged mire of continuing to act despite an acknowledged futility for doing so. But Crime of Passing takes those tones/aesthetic and shocks them back to life, keeping the complexity of the characteristics and sense of impending doom but also maintaining a bit of fire lit underneath it.

Both phasing and finely focused, it regularly, impossibly, rides the line between both decimated and decipherable.

TRACK | Vacation – Captain Unsensible

5/5 golden merles

Vacation’s Zen Quality Seed Crystal opens with two very strong tracks for the genus rock-type.

Both Hole that Once Held a Screw and Captain Unsensible have the spark of lo-fi magic and that can be found similarly glinting about in golden-era Brian Jonestown Massacre/Guided by Voices layering.

If the goal is to access the feeling, the production is expert. Just on the right side of coherence, it’s good and it’s probably a kind of mastery.