Tag: pop

TRACK | Ricky Eat Acid – april six

5/5 golden merles

“April Six” is my favorite of a very fine set of tracks, more instrumental material of imminently lovely proportion from Ricky Eat Acid (Aka Sam Ray).

I’m a month (and a decade) behind posting this empirical wonder here in March ’22, but the piece feels to me like a pretty fair embodiment of spring (What year? Every year. Get out): a fragility of form, but resolute and more or less eternal.

There is documenting here the capturing of ‘becoming’ as a measure of being. It feels simultaneously like an end and a beginning. That is likely what all art should hold a bit of, the acknowledgement of phases: more ambiguity, more uncertainty, more transitory; that which appears to be paying respect to change.

The collision of time with tone and whatever runoff makes its way along the sluice onto the tape. Anyway, it’s quite pretty and you can take it however you like at whatever price seems fair.

TRACK | Gus Englehorn – Exercise Your Demons

5/5 golden merles

Gus Englehorn’s “Exercise Your Demons” is solid, spectral pop. The Alaska by-way-of Montreal singer-songwriter has bottled a sample of corrosion and blood in this one, a cocktail forged from the extraction of the heart and its subsequent erosion.

The tissue sample of a track is a pleasantly scalding synthesis of lo-fi garage and folk-pop confessional. It is impassioned and it is earnest, and it quickly endears you to its progenitors.

22 to 25 / I don’t know how I survived / yet I did survive

The song concerns the literal and figurative action of sunlight as the best disinfectant, how with concerted motion the body and the brain release their chemical excretions, and how these mend or mire us. It is a very literal call to action, and that in exercise you sometimes also find an adjacent exorcism.

Visceral and vehement, the elemental and orchestral waves of textured conveyance are spellbinding stuff. There is sentiment, fever and a tangible fervor tied to the recollecting. It is a welcome missive and highly relatable to those among us who have survived the rigors of youth or are presently experiencing them.

Please see also the wonderfully rendered vid and buy the tape, vinyl, cd and album zine constructed with great craft and intention from artist, director and drummer Estée Preda over at Secret City Records.

TRACK | Hanoi Janes – Across the Sea

5/5 golden merles

Joyous but bittersweet lo-fi garage pop, “Across the Sea” by Hanoi Janes is another from the Captured Tracks era of indie rock hegemony, when I first became acquainted with so many peeking widows and voided dogs.

Waves of reverb break against the shore. The approximation of a xylophone stutters, piercing. A heart is thrown across the sea and there’s one final pledge to remain the same.

The overwhelming sense is one of revelry in the time of adventuring. But there’s also a remorse at the opportunity cost of ever doing any one thing, the instead, those left behind, going as opposed to staying: the prospective revelries or troubles on either end.

Very few lines rapidly convey the universal conflict. The rest of the story is told in the tones of tremolo and the rapturous melodies and these speak clearly more to a promising future than the dread of absence or omission.

There are again Discog links for a reasonable price in the assemblage of atoms.

TRACK | Ganglians – Hair

5/5 golden merles

Ganglians’ “Hair” is an experimental pop rock track that is both burnishing and brandishing the light. It is a celebration of style and form, embodying a rush and bounding, and the hail of dust and ash as one in motion unsettles the earth.

There’s a kind of sublime sense of movement that rallies quickly into stride, pivoting proximal at the mutations of the landscape.

Torrents of yelp and drum collide in sequence, and it’s a lot of fun; mostly joyous, largely incoherent. It is something I would imagine Karl Meltzer listening to while breaking the Appalachian Trail record on a diet of candy and beer.

It can be acquired for a reasonable price in the physical form, though the bandcamp no longer appears to exist, if it ever did. Or get the s/t 12″ new directly from the good folks at Woodsist.

TRACK | GZ Grant – Bonds of Love

5/5 golden merles

Whether it’s Rules of Love, Hands of Love, or Bonds of Love, GZ Grant’s new single is in good company examining loves hidden facets and exploring its less celebrated aspects. Full of much aura and ache, it is psych-pop rock which questions the many-splendored thing.

Direct and undiminished lyricism gets enveloped in lo-fi texture, its merits heightened in the haze, while outlining the catch or comeuppance tied to ever being known. The language is borderline eternal pop fare, both classic and slightly alien: terms, conditions, a stage to assuage or embrace your fears.

There’s a lot to admire in the additional experimental and ulterior elements: a lead guitar line that chokes on its own distorted tail, the idiosyncratic hurl and hum of the lead vocal delivery, and the crystal chalice of a synth to help drown the remnants.

There is also an immensely admirable music video accompanying the single offering a rich tapestry of symbols and fine cinematography, depicting well the double-edged sword of it all. Give it a look / What’s the worst that could happen? Sacrifice a few moments of your freedom, youth and fortune to find out.

TRACK | Milk Music – Twists & Turns & Headtrips

5/5 golden merles

Heartfelt and hanging on the knife-edge at all times, there is a fervor to the making that feels borderline heretical in “Twists & Turns & Headtrips.”

Much heart piercing sentiment and enough texture to make it seem real, this time. Formidable and fleeting passages that balance the content and form, momentum with purpose in contrast to so much other sound and fury lashing into the void.

The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, and the response to any social strife or environmental collapse is a further militarization of the police.

I was torn on a track to feature, mostly between “Headtrips” and subsequent song, “Who’s been in my dreams?” They’d sell the skin off your face / if the money was right / who’s been in my dream? With the tones and manic right-of-way approaching the likes of Television, The Violent Femmes, and The Cramps. If these are things you have and will again appreciate: go, conspire.

TRACK | The Padla Bear Outfit & Mak – Love

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi pop rock courtesy of our Russian friends The Padla Bear Outfit & Mak, “Love” is candid, carefree, and flickering track. Melodies carom about, concentric and determined to revel. The cover is well suited to this sentiment, featuring a Christmas tree built of drums, a soaring dragon in place of the angel.

Does Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public affairs at Colombia University, know she is featured in one of the summery-est songs ever to come out of Saint Petersburg? The odds are unlikely. But it should be an honor if unearthed.

While our two failed empires bicker at one another, expanding outward at great expense even as they collapse internally, the subjects of these respective oligarchies can appreciate the art produced and commiserate. We have brothers everywhere and they too are ruled by bastards.

TRACK | Household – Phases

5/5 golden merles

I am very happy to pay tribute to the minimalist post-punk of Household’s “Phases” every time the shuffling god demands it. In the rumbling and rancor, there is also a kind of courtesy in its blunted cutting.

this is no accident / it’s never yielding fate
rationalize my friend / but it is far too late

A small, honed document of some devastation, the designated point at which two trajectories were changed from alignment. Not ending in undue harm, but an extraction.

There is undoubtedly a bit buoyancy in the blood feud, the mutual respect to at least document the severance. To take its significance and repurpose it into a new beginning. And an explanation provided before the exodus; the point of a breach and breaking as an amelioration. I do love these tracks that in this processing can be seen demonstrably contorting the bad to good.

TRACK | Reading Rainbow – Stand Back and Take a Good Look (The Nerves)

5/5 golden merles

Off the superb Volar Records 2013 comp Under the Covers Vol. 2: A Tribute to Paul Collins, Peter Case, and Jack Lee (of the Nerves), Reading Rainbow’s version of “Stand Back and Take a Good Look” is more than a cover, structurally reengineering the track to great result.

It is a minimalist but dynamic adaptation: rolling hills of reverb careening and overlapping the dual vocal melodies, reciting the refrain as command. A bit of the coarseness has been refined formalistically, but partially reintroduced in the richness of guitar tone. It is a fitting tribute and feels like the hooks have only been honed over the elapsed decades.

The opening track, Grass Widow’s “Why are You Walking Out on Love,” also stands out as another especially constructive modification. A gateway to some great songwriting/songwriters, available for $7 from Volar.

TRACK | Women – Eyesore

5/5 golden merles

“Eyesore” is a clinic on texture and tone. The track is a How-to with respect to texturing a track so well that you don’t need a proper hook to emerge until 4 minutes in. Once it lands it can only be extracted surgically.

There is so much more room for experimentation in pop/rock that can venture into new territory and yet remain catchy and instantly resonate. Women were comfortable operating within this space. The album itself and the ST before it are legendary stuff, and so is the continued work by Flegel under Cindy Lee.

I’ve written on “Heavy Metal” here, as “pretty captivating, and contorts the space of any room into which it is freed.” A sentence I don’t remember writing but am very happy to find here, reminding me that sometimes articulation happens and it isn’t just incoherent rambling, desperately melting down thesauri and clumsily reconstituting them.