Tag: punk rock

TRACK | The Kerosene Hours – Who’s That In My Room

5/5 golden merles

The perfect slice of alt rock paranoia, The Kerosene Hours’ “Who’s That in my Room” explores an inordinately compelling post-punk impostor self-diagnosis. The hooks are immense. The intensity of the lead drives forward the reckoning, while archival samples introduce a series of eerie phantasmal pedagogues emerging as deficient and outmoded council. It all combines to convincingly attest that the observed double life is worth leading.

Octave shifts and echo in the choral arrangements probably foremost, the tune’s construction is extremely carefully designed. Silverstein’s wailing, its range and melodic fervor, is simply gorgeous. The negative space employed and the phasing of discrete components throughout the soundscape is something to really appreciate in headphones.

During the push into the final chorus the modulated synth pulses apply a counterweighted melody after the field loop, adding a welcome variance to the crescendo, escalating the final advance, and precisely taking its own advice (“try to modify the stimulus”).

It’s a great repeater, hard to exhaust on successive listens. Pay what you will at the bandcamp, it is available at the price that you determine. For complimenting media, maybe also check out Bastie, Dehghani, Nkondo et al’s criminally underrated Gobelins short “Lonely Dogs.”

TRACK | O.R.F. – wie schön

5/5 golden merles

What can be learned from this? Its direct and graceful descent. Its puncture and pulse. The relaxed raving of the narrations, the chosen selection of attributes as illustrative pastiche. The contents holding enough detail to endear as a sort of half stripped down, functional ruin. And the adequate melodic curvature to facilitate an ease of entry into the canal. Why does it work within the genre when so much else seems to flail about helplessly or sicken or combust when exposed to oxygen?

Probably for some to succeed others have to fail, and en mass; some sad blighted aspect of human perception and consumption: if too many find a balance they become unremarkable and we sharpen the point at which the balancing is possible. And whatever gets caught on that spear is called progress or best of the year, the reward of which is to be impaled and left atrophying in the sun. Also, it’s a nice pop tune and fun!

The track responds to a feeling, irreverence and care balanced out in one coherent, self-contained, 83 seconds of media. It tolerates enough elements of the antithesis to overcome intellectual opposition through instinct. Or maybe it curtails instinct sufficiently in order to compose a pleasing and compatible story.  It is the same game as always. But this is a good attempt. According to me, a man who can just about afford to pay for webhosting.

Either you’ve heard this song 20,000 times before or you’ve never heard it. The limits are in place: lung capacity, coincident rhyming forms of language, melodic coherence processing tolerance, range of audible tone and transmittable frequency, mass production, and a hundred other great filters of pop music. Eventually the plaque of nostalgia will harden entirely around your heart. You can use this as a test to see if the barricade is complete or if some gaps remain for admission. $0 on the bandcamp.



TRACK | FEN FEN – Insect

5/5 golden merles

Detroit’s FEN FEN have been building a steady stack solid garage punk singles in this year of our absent lord 2022, intimating a great record is forthcoming. “Insect” has hooks you’ll be required to gnaw your own foot to get free of and a gold plated vocal delivery that seems destined to vomit up in harried yelp and shriek prognostications.

It’s ably and faithfully routing the riffs into a sequence while gently blurring and warping the edges of historical precedent for the genre. Otherwise the bulk is hearty fundamentals flailing in the common era, an addendum to the accursed pleas stretching back a generation; the act of devotedly keeping the nightmare alive.

Detroit is experimenting and deconstructing the form, there’s so much good pouring out of those damn lakes around Chicago and Cleveland. Tremendo Garaje has the video. Name your price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | OUZO! – State of Affairs

5/5 golden merles

Australian Garage punk that has become sentient and aware of the existential threats which are damning us to an arbitrary and relatively abrupt end. A dangerous prospect, hopefully. The track contains a litany of discontents, each censure delivered with savor. Racing through the excess offenses of the era, OUZO! continues smashing and grabbing back at the daily gauntlet of inadequate empathy.

And, of course, rightfully so. God damn the status quo, the complacency which empowers it, and the fervor with which its defenders somehow manage to live with themselves. In the fine form the critique holds up and is elevated. Tradition is presently the cancer of culture, by and large, we just hope for the benign kinds cluttering up our chest cavities.

But, also, contradictorily, ritual can reinforce behavior, and maybe with nice, catchy, scathing, fun, fiery tracks like these that tradition can be reinvented, with some small part played as a salving commiseration, consensus building catalyst, or soundtrack for direct action. I don’t know. Adam Curtis would politely laugh in my face for discussing tracks in these terms. But he provides no practical alternative and is himself caught in the indefinite arts feedback loop.

The 7″ is sold out from Weather Vane Records (AU), Polaks Records (EU) but some remain for €7 on the French Wine Records (EU) bandcamp. Or $3 AUD for the digital remains straight from the horses’ mouth.

TRACK | GLUER – The Double

5/5 golden merles

Swedish hardcore garage punk from Stockholm, “The Double” offers some agreeable scourge. It has a highly refined and nuanced wrath of instrumentation with motion itself as the prime mover. The screed concerns the nightly death addendum, an insufficiently examined phenomenon of working the full day in dreams only to then rise the next morning into doing it all over again. Relentless and calculated rock.

Bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free. At least in this humble interpretation, so far as I am able to determine. Maybe form is favored. Then what. The saturation of the vocals is skillfully melded into the accompaniment, cohesive in the assaulting, producing a unified front that can be learned from for anyone looking for a scale to calibrate a balance.

There is a vinyl edition forthcoming on Push My Buttons & Svart Ljud Rekords, stay tuned to those channels. For the time being, €5 will get you the whole digital kit and caboodle.

TRACK | CLAMM – Something New

5/5 golden merles

Melbourne’s CLAMM offer “Something New,” fangs bared, among a set of impassioned punk and garage rock tracks. The works are ruminating and requesting assistance, an allegiance at the threat of annihilation. The direct language and reiteration of themes insist that this is real seeking/beseeching, decidedly not posture or play on the scales of invest or escape.

The production cracks, daunting and declarative. An authoritative and aggrieved vocal at the core of the track holds court: in a time of mass disillusionment and a growing desperation for reinvention, what can be salvaged and what must be discarded? A reason, a sign. something new. Backing vocals collude with some horns that act as a wax seal on the exit and work to elevate the scope.

Vinyl’s are out from Meat Machine (UK, Europe and Asia) and Chapter Music (rest of world -> this means you, USA) — if you’re off planet or shedding all material possessions in anticipation of the end, digitally it’s $13 AUD worth of audio.