Rock – Page 28 – Plainly & Painfully

TRACK | Katy Needs A Life – I’m Going Down

I’m Going Down is a tremendous album closer from Katy Needs A Life off their new record, With Friends Like Bees.

Traditionally my preference is for tracks that tend toward the briefer sort. As a rule, don’t trust anyone over 2 minutes. I like the lyrically and melodically meandering, smash and grab mentality: a series of iconic segmentations and their interplay, interruptions even. And further still, maybe even some concise field recorded embellishments that proffer small clues to the greater whole. Subtlety is underrated. If you want to hear a chorus repeated, loop the track.

But exceptions are emphatically made at the extreme polarity when they’re executed this well.

I’m Going Down is composed of a heartfelt mantra, repeated and recontextualized throughout in a burning incantation of call-without-response. The vocal delivery of this phrase moves initially from matter-of-fact and then builds to an impassioned entreaty, a heroic attempt to overcome the silence that grows in reply.

The synths act as kindling. The frenzy cultivates to a fever pitch. And when the structural reprieve and variance finally comes it’s just another dagger:

What should I do / I’m lost and I have nowhere to run to

TRACK | Bnny – I’m Just Fine

Coming off of 2021s Everything, Bnny moves from strength to strength with this remarkable single, “I’m Just Fine.“

In a few direct lines recounting a brief encounter, swiftly this microcosm extrapolates into wide avenues of longing and of unrealized eventualities. The subtext is immense. This moment, or it’s recollection, acts as a portal to the vast emotional ocean of undercurrent that undergirds our every interaction.

And, yeah, most songs should do this. And most try to, if sort of inadvertently. But rarely do they render this phasing of micro to macro as convincingly, or wed the everyday to eternity in a manner that allows for direct intellectual as well as emotional resonance. Rarely do you feel as though the ground has opened up beneath you. And, better yet, by design.

There is great refinement in the two guitar leads, the quiet chorus of backing vocals that swells late on, and the elegant drumming variance. Where most songs would put the full burden of focus upon one of these individual endearing elements of instrumentation, the glut of quality coalesces here into one hell of a stunning track.

TRACK | La Luz – Call me in the Day

Previously we’ve covered Shana Cleveland’s Night of the Worm Moon.

Call me in the Day is another track of her affiliation that is never skipped when it comes up on the infinite rotation.

There is a lot to learn from it’s construction, in the phrasing and resource distribution of the instrumentation. And the way the lead guitar feeds into the organ solo, when the vocals retire for nearly 90 seconds midway through, but never disrupting the ongoing celebration.

Then, later, the majesty of the slightly staggered cymbal splash on the half beats. The track is reliably, inventively playing with genre forms and templates that are at least half a century old and nevertheless coming up with some new and fresh ways to modify the material.

All that ignores the salient greatness of the core vocals and backing vocals that are the soul of the thing. And the bass that carries everything, always. It’s remarkable stuff.

TRACK | King Tears Mortuary – Crash Report

From King Tears Mortuary’s 2012 Safe Sex 7″, Crash Report is a track on that very fine EP.

There is a somewhat broadly shared Australian sentiment around lo-fi garage and bedroom rock that I find very agreeable. Or did, of a certain era, maybe it has passed. The internet makes all this seem eternal.

But from a population of 25m (15m less than California) there is a pervasive consensus about what guitar-music should prioritize closer to my own predilections. And the quality dispensed by this culture seems disproportionate in the extreme.

Maybe we are both just defective/mutated in a similar manner.

KTM here deliver some undeniably pointed melodic hooks and fun/inventive lyrically playful phrasing such as “light of my life goes on and off.”

TRACK | Video Age – Throwing Knives

One song that I never skip when it appears in the shuffle is Throwing Knives by Video Age. It is so admirably wrought, not overly so, but like iron. I find it hard to get away from, it is undeniably inspired material.

Each melody builds off the last, including the hearty bridge and “It’s all in my head” refrain. The song is an admirable force of nature that covers a lot of ground by the tenable three minute mark; a great and luxurious thing, maybe as elaborate as lo-fi will allow without some sacrifice to coherence.

TRACK | The Mallard – A Form of Mercy

One of the 24 albums I own is The Mallard’s Yes on Blood. But this might be my favorite track that they put out, and it is from the second Castleface Records album Finding meaning in Deference.

In A Form of Mercy there is a good kind of haunted harmony that has been fused together in fuzz. It rides a balance of coherence that endearingly draws one in. It is just decipherable enough to know that you have been warned.

It is a shame they don’t make music anymore but maybe they do under another name I don’t know, or maybe they’re happy in their undoing or otherwise agreeably tasked. We are fortunate to have these two sets.

TRACK | Print Head – Can You Complain

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

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

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 | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.