Tag: oregon

TRACK | Nick Normal – Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)

5/5 golden merles

Dense and quietly devastating garage pop from Portland, Nick Normal’s “Rocket To Russia (Saved My Life)” opens with a David Lynch cameo and proceeds to bludgeon you with an inventive dredging of the interpersonal.

Lie to yourself / But please don’t ever lie to me

There’s a lot of rich, orthogonal storytelling put to work compiling an era, moving with assurance through the sequential reminiscences. Parsing the pastiche, it covers more ground than seems intuitively possible. The zonal telling is clobbered by some masterfully metered lo-fi tones.

TRACK | The Whines – Take Care of Yourself

5/5 golden merles

From Portland and off The Whines/Burning Yellows split of 2013, “Take Care of Yourself” is a haze of poignant concerns, fretful hooks and rock conveyed in a state of half combustion.

The song contains the kind of nuance and knowing one throws at another only indirectly, say in a song, for example. It is full of fundamentals, calculated decay and proactive ambivalence; much nuance and much heart.

The beseeching or bereaved refrain is a hook itself, among many. Balanced and imploring, the track is a tined and canny document. We’ve all been hit with worse.

TRACK | Daydream – Duality of Love

5/5 golden merles

Daydream provide high energy and experimentation around traditional structures.

The borderline incoherent vocals are still great as instrument and texture. But the lyrics are also there on the bandcamp if you want to read the fine print:

“Can it smirk? Can I take any power from it?”

Coming out in December 2020, Mystic Operative still made the year-end list last time around the sun. Maybe because it has a strange and wonderful density to the performances. Every 2-3 minute long song feels twice that, and in a good way.

And in this way the song/album feels like the raw material of a type of rock music, some kind of natural resource, almost unfiltered but for the mix. Elemental and admirable.