Tag: pop

TRACK | Young Prisms – Honeydew

5/5 golden merles

Ever since Jon at VariousSmallFlames reviewed Wombo this has become a fire talk records appreciation blog.

In their assessing and surveying I’m not sure they can do wrong? But I am afraid to investigate further. Why ruin a good thing? Let’s all ignore them going forward, maybe cut our gains for once.

Instead, Young Prisms grants us some shoegaze that hits like an icepick to the heart before melting conveniently away.

This is also very good. It is in that style of but also adding to the genre’s goods and greats like MBV, Lush, Wild Nothing, et al. And at their best, in the balance of the content and the form, quite close to the ones you already love.

TRACK | Print Head – Can You Complain

5/5 golden merles

All along the length and breadth of Happy Happy & Hardcore Pop Print Head have constructed a balanced audio experience with remarkable depth and detail to get agreeably lost in.

For €2 EUR you’re not likely going to get a better bargain of lo-fi art-pop any time soon. As I write, one tape remains, also, if you’d like it mailed from Valencia.

I know my dear friend Darcy of Ought has found himself with some US Girls in the new band Cola. Firetalk are trawling the talented depths of the freakfolk/art rock scenes and coming up with many gems. But it sounds like maybe he is here as well, at least in spirit, sounding off in the resounding of the caterwaul, the bellow.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – City of Electric Light

5/5 golden merles

In 2008 I was working for Democratic Party as a field organizer on a couple of campaigns for congress and governor, but also in support of one particular presidential candidate that purported to offer hope and/or change.

I had free housing and ~$300 a week in exchange for my labor of 16 hours a day. This comes out to somewhere in the region of $3/hour before taxes. Once I tried to buy one of the regional organizers a beer and he said, “Don’t be insane, I know how much you make.” I was 22 and looked 16, but for an awful, awful beard. I was a terrible public speaker.

Soft Airplane was my reliable soundtrack for driving down from the volunteer-housing mountain-hill every morning, winding off to our shared office in downtown Madison, Indiana. The songs are deeply tied to this moment of relative youth and although I love them they are a little painful to revisit.

We were clearly on the side of good and decency, it seemed to me. The moment appeared full of potential. The technically anti-war, pro-healthcare candidate was about to win a landslide national election.

This was before the military surges, the corporate bailouts, the drone assassinations, the heritage foundation healthcare plan, the squandered supermajority, the absolved Iraq war criminals, and all the other weak-willed incrementalism that damned us and continues to provide momentum for the ongoing backlash.

I didn’t know then what Adolph Reed had accurately assessed in 1996, over a decade prior:

“…a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future… We have to do better.”

I am both somewhat nostalgic for this sense of purpose and opportunity in youth to fulfill it and ashamed of it, the actual legacy and faith in a couple of morally compromised figureheads. I am also ashamed that I made a lot of good friends that I immediately lost contact with after the election. I will hope to do better going forward and continue to relish the capacity for change.

TRACK | Chad Vangaalen – Hangman’s Son

5/5 golden merles

Chad Vangaalen is another one of them on the list of greatest living songwriters that I am aware of and can comprehend. Clinically Dead, Willow Tree, Molten Light, Hangman’s son, are all tracks I will hopefully feature in this pleasant void.

I think of the line “I wake up early in the afternoon, just so I can call ’em as I see ’em comin,” probably once every other day, and additionally at other random intervals, “the priest told the brothers that she could not be killed.”

Hangman’s Son is itself worthy of this treatment, of etching into the gray matter:

Oh, have mercy / on the demons that cursed me, baby.
Oh, Lay it on me / When my time has come /
and I don’t have the sense to run.

TRACK | Mayge – Fried

5/5 golden merles

The literal description of what is happening here is that there are three simple interweaving melodies of synth, guitar and vocals, centering around a minimal drum track, and later accompanied by an additional guitar lead.

But what’s really occurring within this instance of high-grade post-wave sludge pop is a lot more difficult to describe.

It has been intuitively discovered and teased out from a feeling, and yet it remains mostly that, maintaining the richness and texture of that experience, reorganized but largely unadulterated from it’s incipient form. It is itself some kind of dissection of the fractal, framed.

And this experienced can be purchased digitally from the artist at a price of your choosing or bought on tape from Gravity Hill Records.

TRACK | The Cowboys – Hands of Love (Around My Throat)

5/5 golden merles

As I write this there we’re just shy of half a million confirmed daily cases of the virus known as “Covid-19.” Yes, that was technically several days ago, maybe that number has subsided or doubled by now, easily either. This Blog is prepared beforehand though it doesn’t seem like it.

Point is, given the holiday, that’s a lot of loving hands around a lot of throats.

To make this review more about me, I’ve started to collect low-dollar records that I love/find online. Trying to buy them directly from the artist or label is the way to go, 100%.

But sometimes you miss a release by a hundred or so years and everyone related to it are dead. In this case, you must go to discogs and pay several pennies to have your media mail chucked into the holiday delivery truck and driven across the plague ravaged nation to your door.

The Cowboys are from Bloomington, IN, the home of both midwestern crap rock and my alma mater. Hands of Love, Take me back, Prized Pig, Negativity Scene, Like a Man, Say Hello to the Sun (For Me)… there’s no shortage of quality here. It’s easily one of the best records of whatever year it came out, 2017 I guess.

TRACK | Angel Olsen – My Last Date (With You)

5/5 golden merles

This was my first exposure to Angel Olsen and I’m glad at least one track is easily available on bandcamp to still preview. The talent and emotive power was early and obvious.

The EP is a list of covers (Skeeter Davis, here) and not one of them is done poorly. Straight to mic, a handful of layers laid over the top, it is immediately compelling and convincing material.

I’ve been calling this the “Our” Lady of the Water Park EP for the last decade and am surprised to see it has none of the religious connotations to it I’ve ignorantly applied. Woops. The experience itself is still a bit akin to it, I think, but ours no more. and not for a long time. and also never.

TRACK | Wombo – One of These

5/5 golden merles

There is within One of These inventive melodic structure that has made an effort to stand apart from the standard expansion of consonants and vowels within rhyming schemes and octave shifts.

False dichotomies are rife and ravaging all areas of our existence. Pepsi or Royale Crown Cola. Chevron or Texaco. Rule of 3’s or rule of 4’s. Politically, their names aren’t worth mentioning, but let’s just call them ghouls or goblins.

Choosing one hell or the other is presented to you as though they are the solution to anything. And in fact the only available options: A ready-made shortcut to a superficial sacrifice that will show Real Results or at least delay the inevitable while we wait and collect more data in order to reassess and circle back on our way into the tomb.

But mercifully you still have an actual choice. Choosing to be ‘none’ is always an option. Opting out of these irrelevant debates/choices is very often the only way to win in any meaningful sense, in so many aspects.

I don’t know what this song is about but the melody is good.

TRACK | Julia Shapiro – Wrong Time

5/5 golden merles

Some are buoyed by commiseration, while others feel expressions of despondency, however melodic and articulate, an anchor on their otherwise relatively elevated existence. Down to the ‘biggest lie’ tribute, you probably already know which way you feel by now.

I am in the former camp described above and appreciate the well-crafted confessional. There are what seem like eons in which my own attempts at articulation can only occupy the space of “musings and broodings on why it is I can’t create.”

And that contradiction at least keeps things moving or maintains “the act of telling”/creating in some semblance of practiced form.

And this is a superb track that seems to fall into that field of vision. It’s a very good track and I’ll give the album more time when there is more time.


TRACK | Wombo – Dreamsickle

5/5 golden merles

It is unusual to see musicians take from their own influences internal mechanics and pull from them with purpose, to see them take components retooled into new structures as though they are transmittable. Wombo does this.

Whereas, outside of general stylings and instruments, most bands attempt to replicate the feeling, a solipsistic slant drilling at a common reservoir. And I am one of them. I have misunderstood my influences, from an engineering perspective.

It is hard to remember, but you must play the game as it is, not as it appears to be.

Here are bands I love that Wombo reminds me of: The Strokes, Ought, Broadcast, Lower Dens, The Mallard, Television, and so on… That should be enough good things.

Here is a quote from Annie Dillard, promising alternate cores or reservoirs and the mechanisms to get there:

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”