Tag: Singer-Songwriter

TRACK | Aldous Harding – Beast

5/5 golden merles

“Beast” is a prized prophesy of a track from Harding, lightly picked, all mysticism, scattershot and scorched earth. The slow accumulate crushing is combined with an intricate immediacy of language, using intrigue of veiled prescience to keep your attention. It contains one of my favorite lines of any era:

Why breed a boy for his meat /
To teach the child cruel rituals of ruin to repeat?

My greatest affection is for the early Aldous Hardling project output, like Beast here and the early live Horizon performances, although it remains inventive and interesting in all guises. The language hits on something larger, older, something like in Epic of Gilgamesh:

The gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor, and collected like flies over the sacrifice

There are mechanics properly employed, like preying on our propensity for favoring the augural. But in a fun way that respects the audience enough, doesn’t get lost believing its own lies, material made of savoring the act without taking itself too seriously at the same time. There’s a world tour going on right now if you’re interested.

TRACK | The Mountain Goats – Aulon Raid

5/5 golden merles

A wonderful project, series of songs, and example of adapting material between mediums to appeal to a different audience. Life is brief and it’s a gift when two fine storytellers combine in collaboration. Also it’s the first set recorded straight to boombox since All Hail West Texas.

From the mouth of the horse:

“I WROTE A SONG EVERY DAY for the next ten days while reading A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, starting with “Aulon Raid” and working in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like; write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately.”

I was late to this one and maybe you missed it as well, but a nice reminder Darnielle and goats are on tour.

TRACK | Cotton Jones – Blood Red Sentimental Blues

5/5 golden merles

Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw have always had a great sense of production, properly documenting the smoke in the air, the curving and crashing that elevates the storytelling. This is still firmly in that tradition but a bit bigger.

When they gradually grew away from the charmed lo-fi folk of Page France, the goal seems to be to create a warm ambiance of fertile soil in which to grow their melodies.

“Blood Red Sentimental Blues” would work as a title alone. But there’s a lot more to it than that. The organ cements the foundation of the thing. The dual vocals route a pincer maneuver on the heart. When the tambourine track clicks the drum into a richer stereo around 1:23, all of this gets more tactile. It is eminently lovely stuff.

TRACK | Long Neck – Gardener

5/5 golden merles

“Gardener” is a track which dwells upon dichotomy, the contrasting duality of both the sheer wonder and staggering fatigue of being. This is a report from the doldrums accompanied by a concerted reaching for the will and hope to continue. Not only that but to move one step further, to inspire the self and others, and to reassure among great doubts.

Music is a tool that can serve many purposes. I’ve used the term “commiseration” a good amount recently, but it is well suited and applicable here. I’ve listened to this track probably 100 times over the last couple of days. I need and appreciate the commiserating. The twist toward the track’s conclusion, after the recounting, to rally in concerted effort at contorting fate to good, is comforting.

The song is not solely a faithful account, which has value in itself and the act of ‘making’ is an implicit means of acknowledging this. But the lyric pushes further, and conscious of the subsequent self, appreciates explicitly its own agency and capacity for altering or influence. The strings help elaborate upon this ascending. There is a breadth of backing vocals, their intermittent choral convalescing the community referenced within.

There is some cutting humor and much truth in the contrast of lines like: “mornings are unbearable,” I said to no one / and they responded, “but won’t you miss it when it’s gone? And it reminds you of the old joke, “The food here is terrible.” / “Yes, and such small portions.”

In any case, I found it from Jon Doyle’s beautiful writing about it at VariousSmallFlames.co.uk, and you should read that assessment.

TRACK | Maggie Carson – From Here To Anywhere

5/5 golden merles

Second single off the up-coming The Dark Was Aglow (June 24th, Open Ocean), “From Here To Anywhere” is Americana full of vibrant twang and vengeance. A fanged and full-throated track which demonstrates that anguish is the engine of revival.

How do I leave / if the road’s just a halo?

There is a remarkable rising to it. With much might and lightly mangled, a strong and rousing performance has been captured. There’s great range and effect as the vocal rises to meet the instrumentation, the swelling synth and glittering banjo elevating alongside. It’s part commiseration, part rallying cry.

Having toured and performed with acts like Sharon Jones, Dr. Dog, and Nana Grizol, there seems to be a quality and breadth of first-hand and collaborative influences to pull from. It is a small spectacle, drawing on some subtle genre fusions while at heart remaining in the folk-traditional realm.

Open Ocean is not-for-profit record label with a donation and gift contribution model of acquiring both the vinyl and digital editions, suggested at $30/$10 respectively. I have seen plenty of pay-what-you-want digi releases, but none yet in the physical form, so please consider supporting these Rockaway Beach based operators.

TRACK | thanks for coming – losing touch (nyc)

5/5 golden merles

Direct and daunting in its indexes, “losing touch (nyc)” is a track about friends idly assuming divergent trajectories and how relationships either require continual maintenance or they stagnate, starve, or dissolve into thin air. It is a great conversational pop song about a lack of communication.

I wasn’t sure whether to feature the demo variation or the latter above with its assured layers of instrumentation, usually favoring the former for its sincerity and getting a bit closer to the moment the track takes shape. But nothing seems lost in the interim, and, alternatively in the latter, some phrasing is refined and the bass glows underneath.

There is an inspired octave shift that hones the verse and particularly the chorus hook. The modular orbit of the verse-chorus-verse syncs up solidly. It’s a heartrending and elegant track; it’s great.

TRACK | Christian Fitness – Kill the Bored

5/5 golden merles

Finding a bit of humor in the proverbial hemorrhage, Christian Fitness is equipped to reframe the general malaise in a way that may bring you amusement. Striking synths and string-approximations hammer tones into shapely assemblages, with much invention in the language, its phrasing of fine hooks.

Would you say you are a timebomb ticking / or just a normal person dealing badly with change?

There’s a great deal of care put into the honing of textures and lines. Blatantly tactful, manifesting the mess but with levity, it’s truly a nice state of mind to get trapped in. Not a band I know well. It didn’t stick on first exposure but the tab was still open in the rancid nest of endless windows, and now I realize I’m about a 100 tracks behind on something quite special and good.

TRACK | Simon Joyner – Joy Division

5/5 golden merles

Shattered in the heart and scattered in the brain... you asked for a chorus but you got a refrain.

Such is the quality of the storytelling that I’m hearing it for the some-hundredth time and still unearthing new lines or implications within couplets.

It probably gets a bit tiring being called a songwriter’s songwriter. But I have no time and I refuse to look into it. It’s a great compliment. Please just take the compliment, Simon.

The track is full of wonder, much compelling musing and brooding. It hosts a novella of characters conveyed in rapid sequence, their dialogs interleaved and exposed in momentary visions. The pastiche is formed from a scattershot of misgivings, commiserations granted a ceremonial quality, and articulated in a structured sequence that captures a larger feeling chronically an era of impressions. The thread is maintained in a consistent tone from a narrator that endears throughout by the beauty of his phrasing.

It is a testament. And it is beautifully balanced to captivate. If it wasn’t immediately apparent from the tremolo and distortion off that early strumming, when the instrumentation hits around the four minute mark, and the wailing rises to meet it, there is created a small clearing. You can escape for a couple minutes into it.

TRACK | Tender Prey – Time Will Steal

5/5 golden merles

“Time Will Steal” is some foreboding and explosive Welsh garage pop from Cardiff-based Tender Prey. Echoing and incisive, it’s part incantation, part tempestuous alt-rock anthem.

The track really feels as though it was recorded at the ideal moment: somewhere nearing the end of the creative refinement but before the melodies stales from performance and repetition. The result is some soaring and mesmeric lo-fi rock.

The ephemeral and forceful vocal core, it’s delivery and production, is formidable. When the refrain hits and the gears shift again, interleaved harmonies coalesce and something good becomes great.

For more check out the Bandcamp for Tender Prey’s additional EPs and LPs, including the 2017 release “Falling Off Chairs.”

TRACK | Gus Englehorn – Exercise Your Demons

5/5 golden merles

Gus Englehorn’s “Exercise Your Demons” is solid, spectral pop. The Alaska by-way-of Montreal singer-songwriter has bottled a sample of corrosion and blood in this one, a cocktail forged from the extraction of the heart and its subsequent erosion.

The tissue sample of a track is a pleasantly scalding synthesis of lo-fi garage and folk-pop confessional. It is impassioned and it is earnest, and it quickly endears you to its progenitors.

22 to 25 / I don’t know how I survived / yet I did survive

The song concerns the literal and figurative action of sunlight as the best disinfectant, how with concerted motion the body and the brain release their chemical excretions, and how these mend or mire us. It is a very literal call to action, and that in exercise you sometimes also find an adjacent exorcism.

Visceral and vehement, the elemental and orchestral waves of textured conveyance are spellbinding stuff. There is sentiment, fever and a tangible fervor tied to the recollecting. It is a welcome missive and highly relatable to those among us who have survived the rigors of youth or are presently experiencing them.

Please see also the wonderfully rendered vid and buy the tape, vinyl, cd and album zine constructed with great craft and intention from artist, director and drummer Estée Preda over at Secret City Records.