pop – Page 16 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Peace De Résistance – Boston Dynamics

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.

TRACK | Thick Shakes – Friends Like These

“Friends Like These” finds psych and synth pop alive and well in the heart of 2012. Frenetic and full of venom, it’s composed of much good garage rock tones and texture. After the requisite feedback and count-off, the track promptly hurtles forward with conspicuously limited relent.

Fusing together in an abiogenesis of noise, the reverb becomes an instrument itself. A beachhead of melody is quickly established and familiarized through repetition. Nothing overstays. In the sub-2-minute run-time, most effort is spent building our amusements into monuments, decorating, and then deconstructing them.

The plate tectonics shift. A tidal wave rises from the sea to vanquish the invading army. The cassette remains buyable from Aurora7 records via the Bandcamp.

TRACK | Paper Lady – EVE

With much cool and cutting tone about its meteoric structure, “EVE” is a new dream pop / freak folk single from Allston Mass.’ Paper Lady. In it the tale of Eden and the subsequent expulsion is told from Eve’s perspective.

All these fables were pruned and bludgeoned a hundred times after their invention, in translation, misremembrance or intentional contortion, before later stagnating in the evidentiary locker of print and given the illusion of hallowed perpetuity.

The generally agreed upon narrative by authorities features an array of unjust hierarchies ripe for reassessing. The track provides one entry toward a well overdue investment of agency, and with enough style and conviction for a convincing telling. Deft and deliberate, its value is in the considered application of defiance, the stylistic glint and gale of the production, and the inherent virtue of unlearning the lie.

There is much great attention to detail in the production, piercing synth and strings along with carefully incorporated chirps of birdsong in the field recorded elements. An expertly phased and delivered vocal hard cap lands and the end of the verses like lightning and leaves you in an unanticipated sort of awe.

Its lineage is situated in the pantheon of rich parables and commiserations. In both the storytelling and tones the track is reminiscent of some greats within the folk rock genres like Diane Cluck, Townes Van Zandt, and Amy Annelle. There is the feeling of a prairie reframed through the grand metaphor, or a woodland cracked from the frame and wound around your finger.

There are available to us innumerable lies primed for decoding. If we’re going to continue living in these myths, the culture must be malleable. The track provides a good example of the ongoing negotiations resultant from our declining tolerance for the sheer brutality of the world and all its flagrant hypocrisy and pretense. It is a small but welcome offer of a course correction.

TRACK | Noun Verb Adjective – Skinsuit

“Skinsuit” is from Noun Verb Adjective’s Deluxe expanded edition of Boys in the Sand, entering the track list right where the prior record left off. A summery collapse of a track that appends the already dauntingly great EP.

It’s genre is foremost experimental lo-fi and noise pop. And while playfully constructed, it’s still subservient primarily to the strong, underlying melodies of the lead guitar and vocals.

Field recording elements adjust the scope to further break the medium and open new avenues of meaning. It is an intricate series of subsections, and there’s much auditory creative problem solving as a creative act. Indebted to and inspired by tradition but a bit bored of it also, the track is inventive and gently disorienting.

TRACK | Magic Potion – Deep Web

From 2015’s Melt EP, “Deep Web” is composed of alt-pop and lo-fi form, all crust and quiet conviction. Effortlessly injected through the sluice of any standard issue headphones, the tremolo and echo phase about in their own time, kindly warping by its recollecting whatever it reverberates around.

After the Geiger counter count us off, the track is calmly plodding and delicately estranged. Without ornamentation it’s baldness quickly assuages any initial threat of alienation and welcomes you into this amicably mangled realm.

Sold out on the Bandcamp beyond the infinitely affordable digital form, the Beech Coma cassette tape can still be found on Discogs.

TRACK | Cousins – Secret Weapon

From Halifax circa 2011, rumble and awe ground up in sequences of noise, Cousins’ “Secret Weapon” sounds like the lifting of a curse or at least one annulled by the reckoning.

Essentially it is rock music but for the sake of killing space and in line with the great and proud tradition of hair splitting, there are the evidentiary threads of lo-fi garage and grunge pop.

Returning to the old playlists, the track is a great relief after sorting through the protean forms of demo submissions and gauntlet of prospective tabs, navigating nascent piles mostly before they become fit for consumption. This is, in contrast, well rendered and sterling sludge.

It can be got in red vinyl physical form from the myriad vendors of discogs or check also 2014’s full length The Halls Of Wickwire ordered direct.

TRACK | Gorgeous Bully – I Can See

“I Can See” is more fine fuzz-pop/shoegaze from Manchester’s Gorgeous Bully. Acting as the opener from 2017’s Great Blue, the track is a thermal buzz indented by a tale of self-imposed exile and exodus.

With much molt and murmur to it, it’s a mid-tempo sea of rich lo-fi texture and tone. If you are acclimated to the nuance in the noise, there’s a lot of good to be found in that hum of driving bass among the incisions of vacillating electric lead guitar and faded confessions.

Casettes are sold out from the esteemed Z Tapes but infinitely unlimited and agreeably intangible digital forms can still be got.

TRACK | Blasted Canyons – Holy Geometry

“Holy Geometry” is an account of the formation of the sacred moon. Or, more accurately, it isn’t. But it sounds like it could be an audio rendering of some similar sort of giant-impact hypothesis, if not the colliding of Theia with the proto-earth.

Castle Face Records · Blasted Canyons – Holy Geometry

After the impact, in the glut of crunch and craft, there is part an mending and part the ejection which formed the natural satellite, tilted the primary sphere and provided us the seasons. “This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

In the constant mire of all that is, it can be difficult to select what to frame. But Blasted Canyon’s have here configured a bookend of melted synth and texture, bracketing the track like a primordial swamp. Once escaped, and, if “Raised by Wolves” is accurate, soon enough to be returned to.

The vinyl can be purchased from Castle Face Records.

TRACK | Honey Radar – Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast

“Scorpions Bought Me Breakfast” is a rich and winding series of simple melodies, woven into a shelter, the bringing together of scraps providing a place to return to. Like almost anything good and well thought of after, at a minute in length it is almost over before it’s begun.

The rasp of a drum clacks like the sound made by the spokes on the moon lander, or the rattle of the ice machine at the in-house café of Cape Canaveral. The bass is the alternate shadow realm variation of the surface dwelling dueling melody provided by the staggered vocal and lead guitar.

I am a firm proponent of the “start small and build things of significance” model of songwriting and this is a prime example. It is drenched in style and feels like a semi-conscious novella, a dream derived from the nap.

TRACK | Chook Race – Pop Song

There’s a rotating cast of 4-5 people in 30 Australian garage rock bands and they’re all good. It’s like any crime drama show you’ve ever seen on the BBC: 4 guys and 4 gals in a rotating cast of who gets to play the detective.

The influence is both disproportionate and good, at least as far as this subject of another tendril of the empire is concerned. “Pop Song” features what guts would jangle like if they were made of metal and could reverberate audibly.

Much like the US of America, Australia has had a succession of mediocre crackpots at the helm. Nevertheless, within the music scene and across the last decade there has been a similar set of assumptions about harnessing the heart, about how and when… And the technologies available to record… And the styles aimed at through them… And the influences accumulated plus or minus the current trends, which are adopted and which abandoned… And possibly some similar sort of water table contaminated neurotoxins consumed.

Whatever the case may be, there’s some not insignificant overlap in these regards and a hundred others that output after all the variables something deemed ideal.

I suggest a reputable publisher offer me a $50k advance to sort this all out… or some vastly more qualified Australian I guess.

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