Tag: Sydney

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 | Aloha Units – Mate’s Machine

5/5 golden merles

From Sydney at some point in the last decade, Aloha Units “Mates Machine” is off a 4 track tape of the same name. It is post-punk/diy/lo-fi, and a bit of all the things that are nice according to my subjective yammering and murmuring.

It would be hard to find a better example of a phrase I use as a mantra for both the making and assessing: control achieved through a willing proximity to its loss. Guitars scritch in heaping variables of concerted noise and two drum lanes pace the undertone. The squashy sprawl of the track is composed of a gentle thundering.

If you’re acclimated or accustomed to it, there’s a great deal of nuance to the edifice and its architectonics. It’s one a hell of a Hans Sprungfeld of a tune. And what I want to say, what I’m telling you now, is that Jebediah is really great.

In the petty amount of google searching I did for this post I was very excited to find Finley’s more recent work in anti-folk form as VIPP and, alternatively, synthwave focused with Sex Tourists. And really look forward to diving in when there is a moment to breath or look.

TRACK | Daughter Bat and the Lip Stings – chrissy dins

5/5 golden merles

More Love Songs was released on New Years Eve, maybe to spite the compulsive year-end-listers, maybe not. I think it’ll still make its way onto my 2022 set because it is deserving of praise. And, though it may try, the Gregorian calendar alone doesn’t dictate when or what we listen to.

Lots of formidable flux here, and it’s a little unnerving in it’s unfaltering shimmer.

Melody and tone are of paramount importance. But also up there in import is the character of the tones themselves, vocally and the instrumental accompaniment, which envelop a delirious kind of defiance, defiant but grotesque.

You can have it both ways, transformative between each line, the grave seriousness and the severed irreverence. It’s more fun that way, in fact, and richer. There’s a lot of value in taking either of these divergent impulses and honing them into a few heightened hooks which share a purpose. In that stylistic choice is a brighter/weirder future that maintains its sense of humor throughout the collapse.

TRACK | King Tears Mortuary – Crash Report

5/5 golden merles

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.”