Tag: pop

TRACK | Fili – Tommy

5/5 golden merles

Job For a Cowboy is more tempered fang runoff from Mexico’s Fili, slightly more refined and solemn than Volcom but well within the same anarchic universe of eggpunk and ruthless hooks.

Pleading from a punctured lung, the kind of good ooze you might find emanating among the likes of GEE TEE, Prison Planet, Checkpoint, et al. Look it up if you’ve gladly consumed this discharge, I don’t think your gut biome will reject it.

It’s the brilliant kind of bilge that alienates the right sort, keeping melody in the pocket and pathos near enough to be called upon as needed. Cowboy is a 2022 release that’s definitely competing for the glory and prestige of this humble blogs year end list, cloudy and combustible stuff.

TRACK | Fili – Automatic

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi garage thrash from Mexico, Fili’s “Automatic” is my favored track off a real superb, tarnished and smeary set. Egg punk tones and bedroom recording methods combine to contaminate one another, a resourceful and regenerative dossier.

From the intro we are fed the requisite raving through a grit of vocals so tactile they’re practically percussive. A series of small instrumental melodies combine to make one great net that effectively colludes to capture. And all this lovely melding and mashing affixed to the discursive litany, today / i don’t want to be disturbed. The album art alone should warrant a peak; it’s good & fun.

TRACK | Mustard – Sentirsi inutile

5/5 golden merles

Lo-fi Rock from Rome, extracted partially dissolved, partially preserved in formaldehyde and resurrected one day before retirement. A refreshing mastery of tone on this one, rising to meet the moment of a lot of ongoing dialogs in garage and noise as we attempt to make the preceding epochs palatable without discarding them entirely.

That is the negotiation and dialog on offer here, if you are attuned to it or sympathetic to this. It is a love letter that may alienate some of its recipients but will land well with those of similar predilections. Utilizing a few old flourishes and forms, teasing apart the tropes, using the crutch as a cudgel, breaking and building. It is to me very compelling and a lot of fun.

Out on cassette from Spya Sola in Cologne, Germany, and Face Melter. Spya Sola also putting tapes out in the region from Rude Television and Beta Maximo. New but with an already stellar track record — follow their shit if these align.

I was thinking I was going to write about something he’d love half an hour before Groschi/onetwoxu.de, but then there is his smiling face on the Mustard February EP. If you like this style, follow that blog. He has his finger not so much on the pulse of it but one plugged in the aorta.

TRACK | Hierophants – Hail Stones

5/5 golden merles

From Hierophants’ debut, “Hail Stones” careens and craters, a daydream of destruction and elemental escape from the self. Lo-fi rock from Geelong, Australia, it is appreciably equal parts glittering and gloom.

I like the symmetry and measure throughout. The drums stem off in reserved but significant patterns, steadily alternating in variance, keeping things on the whole goodly deviated during the synth and vocal melodies iterative delineations. That harmony and tension dynamic adds a lot of good depth and proportion to how it all falls precisely together.

The ruminations about transformation are fun and inventive interludes to the core instrumentation. It is refreshing to see the percussive aspect used as the element that is given freer reign to pick apart the structure, an inversion of tradition while all the pieces still combine favorably.

It can be yours for $12.99 as black vinyl from Goner Records, or a buck more for the Yellow mold.

TRACK | Woolen Men – On Cowardice

5/5 golden merles

Speaking of Portland-based tributes to storytellers, here is Woolen Men with one for the late great actor and writer Spalding Gray. There are many killer phrases exclaiming and examining within: even ten thousand hypocrites / is not an invincible army. A good sequence heaping and revising proverbs in a style befitting the man paid tribute.

The style is a deliberate weaving of bass and lead around the era, the tube amps inflecting the post-punk, active-punk and perpetual pop. In the fills and phases, there’s sensible problem solving and strong arrangements throughout, more metered and measured attention to detail from the Oregonians. It’s a careful blend of viscera and philosophizing with much empathy for the listener.

do you want to stay cool forever / or do you want to burn with love? / each choice has its punishments / each choice has its own reward.

$10 for the vinyl of Temporary Monument from Woodsist. I am so far behind, haven’t spent a minute with 2020’s Outta Reach or the other 2020 single’s club releases yet but looking forward to that period of time.

TRACK | GEE TEE – Mutant World

5/5 golden merles

More common era essential lo-fi punk rock by Kel Mason (DRAGGS), “Mutant World” has all the essential vitamins: it is blown out but remarkably to a more ideal proportion, the synths are sampled from a Godzilla mouth beam, and it contains the unmistakable reflection of your face reflected back in a pool of your own blood.

The track’s a well worked clobbering. Over 81 seconds, ascendant minor melodies combine to accent the the nebulous bulk and vividly this breach is annexed and incorporated into the spiraling form. At the chorus the vocal channels rend apart, tearing across the sound scape. It’s sensed then plotted out with a lot of care and calculation.

It’s a good week for new media. After the JWST release today, there’s a new GEE TEE 7″ out Friday on Goner Records.

TRACK | Cindy Lee – I Don’t Want To Fall In Love Again

5/5 golden merles

“I Don’t Want To Fall In Love Again” is yet more Flegel, one of the great living builders of audible notes in aether. Sparkling, it is lo-fi rock with some experimental aspects. There is Reverb, tremolo and the metallic ash of drums, their coordinates coalescing in improbable simplicity and phases.

The work is well modified tradition, timeless infliction of temporality and texture. Not waiting, but hesitating at the start, the world holds off for about a minute, collecting itself prior to forming, knowing all that entails. Deceptively simple, attuned to the eternal, in so far as I understand it within our shared cultural conditioning, in the relative terms of our existence.

What Flegel has done throughout, in Women and Cindy Lee, is forge the familiar with the foreign, survey the zeitgeist and collective comprehension and reflect it back in a manner that is uniquely compelling, catchy and memorable. That’s what any artist is doing, to some extent: building out from the established, branching as far as is possible. But this is a level of fluency that speaks with uncanny accuracy and conviction. It’s good and to be admired.

TRACK | Violent Change – Unit A

5/5 golden merles

“Unit A” is the easiest point of entry to a great experimental lo-fi rock set, VC3. Awash in fuzz and form, the rampant melody augments and deviates in plenty of soaring and delicate ways. There’s enough feinting at traditional form coinciding with the stylistic subversion to keep it fresh and engaging.

There’s a lot in the way of texture and the weighting thereof: the processing all around, the vocal layers elevating at the chorus and a sparingly employed harmonica stretching the tactile wave. All of this is solidly plating the hooks, enshrining and embracing the more established elements.

Within the genre and particularly to those acclimated, there’s a lot of admirable gradation and nuance to the discernible creative problem solving. This refinement pulls some aspects of the abstraction away from suspicion, provides a benefit of the doubt in areas that lack explicit mechanisms of conveying meaning.

See also the Chunklet Industries Honey Radar/VC split from 2021 for some complimentary schemes.

TRACK | Yumbo – A House

5/5 golden merles

“A House” is determinedly and reverently assembling influence from what’s left of the world into remarkable folk and experimental pop. From the compilation The Fruit of Errata, itself derived from 4 albums appearing from ’98 to the present, the track is composed of inventively paced through orthogonal backing vocals and angular instrumentation.

The patterns are established and subverted, populating the soundscape with many recursions amidst the collapse. That sense of newly cut paths amidst familiar ground feels like exploring amidst friends, like adventuring in good company. It’s absorbing and convincingly arranged.

There are many finely detailed asides within. The Double LP by Morr Music and Alien Transistor can be got for €29.99 with some shipping.

TRACK | The Woolen Men – Head On The Ground

5/5 golden merles

The Woolen Men are Portland-based Oregonians who remind us that pop + punk need not be anything kitsch, that one can take some of the redeeming qualities of either and make a tremendous, infectious thing. Venerable and vacillating, the stakes are kept high, the form is relished, and it only seems intent on inflicting a moderate amount of damage.

The sirens of the synth gild everything, disintegrating it, opening the lane elegantly for when we’re cut back to bass and drum alone. And then the pronouncement: i hit a wall / but it wasn’t hard at all. It’s a convincing consultation or induction to the rumination, unadorned but substantive; blunt but never dull, a great and graceful cudgel.

Why do these two genres, pop and punk, so often combine to such supremely reprehensible results? Possibly, it’s the noxious hypocrisy of their purported intentions: one includes the implicit ideology of rebellion and the other has a cloyingly myopic fixation on the interpersonal or at-best abstraction. Not here, however. There’s a balance struck. An assembly of influences filtered through a prism of good intentions. It all comes across as earnest, a frank and alluring synthesis.

The vinyl is $10 from Woodsist.