TRACK | Frankie Traandruppel – Ocean Song (featuring bontridders)

5/5 golden merles

We previously celebrated Frankie Traandruppel’s timeless “The Darkness (Comes to town),” and on the strength of that track I am obligated to consider anything else he’s putting forward. On Yadda Yadda the most effective track is the collaboration and closer, “Ocean Song,” featuring Anderlecht’s bontridders. It’s something like unreckonable lo-fi bedroom rock stained with texture and tonal radiance.

The track is warm and refractive, a brightly self-contained geode of a tune. In it the plaintive gliding vocal scales the percussive friction of a looping synth-string sample and the steady bloom of the rhythm guitar. It’s a lot bigger than the sum of these crassly cataloged parts, concave, immense and foggy around the edges of the glittering expanse. For a sense of scale you can, for instance, pretty happily live and die in it.

It motions to you from the beach. It’s intentions aren’t clear but the attention is enough. Music is a tool that can be used for many different things. I don’t know what it does but it seems useful. Yadda Yadda is out now on Ronny Rex for the low, low cost of making up a number.

TRACK | itches – Sticky Fingers

5/5 golden merles

itches’ Kingdom Upstairs bequeaths a new and real solid set of Belgian garage punk tracks. In “Sticky Fingers” frank and oblique guitar lines cut through the mesh crux of the motion, the bass anchoring it to the earth, averting a prompt drifting into the sun. There’s great breadth to the soundscape, faithful to a live performance of the thrashing and full of that life.

There’s a lot of merit to the scorched earth policy on display and its presentation here. The drums delivering a tactful clobbering, indivisible and yet unified. Everything breaks together and twists apart soundly. The pieces of individual segmentation compile harmoniously, each era of accrued influences compatible within the context of the subsequent sectors modular mutations.

It was found on the reputable and upstanding roundup and reliable culling from manierenversagen.de. The general dearth of global infrastructure to produce vinyl has also delayed this disc, a lost technology. But, when reinvented through reverse engineering the artifacts found in our great uncle’s basement, it will be coming from Ronny Rex and Hopvil Records under that beautiful cover graphic. The end.

TRACK | Frankie Traandruppel – The Darkness (comes to town)

5/5 golden merles

A great, soundly built garage rock track, strumming and bashing about over the tapes sturdy hiss. When the organ arrives to accompany the chorus you know you’re in good hands for the remainder.

The vocal and audio peaking is skillfully used for intensity, never overstepping into painful or distracting but instead gracefully bracing itself off of this ceiling.

If I had five golden merles to give I would give it five golden merles.