Tag: United States

TRACK | MENU – Actually Dreaming

5/5 golden merles

“Actually dreaming” is a thing of lo-fi shoegaze and uninhibited abstraction. It was summoned in or near Philadelphia. It has a great sense of how long to linger in the status, levels with you, offers a stasis of texture and tone, any intent amplified by their deteriorated beauty. Rarely is your patience punished here, cutting content with form in an imminently compelling fashion.

Concentric in form for the most part, each loop banishing another or building off its remains. You can more or less see what you like in its patterns, it’s a foggy mirror with some writing you got to breath on a bit to see. There’s lots of graceful skulking about and premonitions of indeterminate value. Lately, if Eno/Ricky landed, maybe this will too for you; a means and agent for teasing your own ideas out, another kind of catalyst for coherency.

Generally speaking I am suspicious of abstraction as it can be a salve for my enemies. However (!) with this much form/balance and pulse there are always exceptions. Original found on Tremendo Garaje via the intrepid scouting of @u2_is_a_government_drone / Sims / Mesh.

TRACK | Why Bother? – Cut to Pieces

5/5 golden merles

Devolving, sonorous synth punk from Mason City, Iowa. There’s a lot more warmth than seems warranted to these melodic forms, fixated fondly as they are around the horror-themed act, telling of and centered on America’s real past time. The production is agreeably amending the timeless proto garage, a pleasant and productive mutation in the lineage.

There’s sufficient synth warble and echo apportioned gluing all other components together. The drums fan the hammer, everything tuned to the clang. It’s all calibrated to killer sensibilities, stylistically/tonally, and the additional morbidly themed track titles offer heaps of promise for the full release.

The files can be got for $1 preordered or white/black vinyl variations are $20. The full album set is arriving September 16th from the highly reliable plague of contents administered by Feel It Records.

TRACK | Germ House – Gum Up The Works

5/5 golden merles

“Gum Up The Works” is the closing track of a striking set of lo-fi garage rock emanating from Rhode Island (Germ House EP). Parenthetical phrasing, scourge and buzz, the nest of production is a silver lined pit. Transfixed in the ticking over, been savoring this one for awhile and finally got back to the buried thicket of lost tabs it was stranded in.

Stinging drums plonk amongst the wired, rasping guitars and everything feels like a field fogged over; you stagger into its melodic turns, feeling out phenomena. The doubled/repelling vocal lanes are unquestioned in their melded merger, coalescing with force. There’s a really skillful wielding of the lo-fi pallet. These are ideal conditions to steep in and an excellent closer to the set.

At the time of writing there are four clear vinyl EPs left through Chunklet. I first seen it on JohnnySick, a great curator of the youtube ilk.

TRACK | That Hideous Sound – Funny Insides

5/5 golden merles

That Hideous Sound has built a bedroom lo-fi rock track from discarded sunshine, utilizing twisted blood as a propellant. Its alternating sync of garage tone is held aloft and amended with a density of layered backing vocals, their varied trajectories glowingly cascading downward. The whole miscellany is shining and the right kind of sordid.

The fundamentals are nailed and the tonal textures irradiated, slickly building momentum throughout. With that rising, explicating over the expanses as it does, I’d wager most will rejoice to share in it. The final minute of three involves transitioning into some controlled experimentation, concluding in a sundry of cloaked loops at the latter stages. It’s all very good and pleasant, if you ask me.

A digital copy of the track can be downloaded to your personal solid state or hard disc drive for $1 USD. Or, for the wise investor, the album of 10 tracks is aggregated at $7, a savings of 30%. It is to be released October 7th, should the world continue to exist at such a time.

TRACK | The Gobs – Tuffer Than You

5/5 golden merles

Hard to pick a single track off this exceptional Split EP shared between The Gobs and Ex-White. But I’ve settled on the first track of this side, “Tuffer Than You.” It’s exquisite synth accented garage punk, composed of hardened snow scraped out from under the car and built into a brilliant effigy. The production decay is a correcting mechanism, it better represents the environment from which it was derived.

Notably, the reverence is low. The melodies are quality and effortlessly interlocking; it’s bound up nicely in this loaded frame. Free reign is given to some selected tones and the others are curtailed dutifully around the stomp and stagger; together they’re textured/paced to allow the happy suspending of doubt in the murk of it all.

Truly the 4-track split itself will likely end up on the year-end list. The 300 wax pieces have some yet to be disseminated from Germany, $20 to Turbo Discos with shipping is a steal if you have the cash to ship.

TRACK | Goon – Angelnumber 1210

5/5 golden merles

Los Angeles’ Goon has delivered to us more hypnotically drifting, catastrophe cooing psych rock. The band is in a unique place, confidently contorting melodies and multifaceted textures around otherworldly tales. There’s much care and craft to its interlocking layers and marbled phasing.

From the first moments of the field recordings discordant rumble, then the turning into a steady spine of percussion, it carries itself forward into being with great assurance. The piece feels sculptural and fills the audible void by pushing in many directions. There’s plenty of subtle sequences and attention to detail, each caringly extracted from the aether and melded into the elaborated structure.

The language is casually cryptic or explicitly ambiguous: environmental, a gathering, on earth, belated or in dream. The point is the feeling and the sense of collaborating within a stunning phenomenon and in a world of possibility.

The vinyl is delayed a few months from shipping due to manufacturing shortages but there are digital, tapes, and assorted articles of clothing if you would like to affiliate your physical body with their audible output, all coordinated at the bandcamp.

TRACK | No Knuckle – HALO

5/5 golden merles

No Knuckle’s “HALO” is richly textured, guttural Oregonian rock n’ roll and proto-punk. The track is a record of loss and lament, processed with the much escalating style that warrants your attention. It is equal parts sharp, wrought and fraying over the four primary phases of amorphous hooks, all combining in elaborate invention.

The subject is an examination of the death and decline of those in your immediate periphery, of family, both lost and those left sharing in the loss. It is processing grief and making a difficult event into a beautiful record of the occurrence, an act that reconfigures its presence in your life. Our lives are made up of such moments: some recollected in fixation, while all the others obliviate, the artistry allowing for reframing.

The repetition of the chorus is earned, after digging into the details: your brothers wayward gaze, the apparent untethered presence of the recently departed. There’s a great weighting to the variations and their sequence before and after in the differing methods of narration. It is valuable to have this darkness told and healthier than the disassociation and derealization we mostly pass through these passages under the veil of. And, regardless of all that, it rocks. Digital’s $3, Vinyl is out now on LA’s Tomothy Records.

TRACK | The Drin – Reach Through the Midnight

5/5 golden merles

“Reach Through the Midnight” is substantive and transportive proto/post-punk, a strong prelude and segue into the larger album which releases from Mangel Records (EU) / Future Shock (US) on the 21st of September. Forecasting, slightly sickly, resting on the border between worlds, both marking and blocking the portal. You’d do well to study its habits. The phrasing and motion gives one the impression of basking in the warmth of the pyre.

A sound melodic refrain is coupled with the expression of unnerving/foreboding visions; immense texture and instrumentation rise to meet the mood, ardently rattling before burning out. These are things I can relate to. The recitations involved will either manifest or undermine their impending summoning. We’ll just have to wait and find out which. The album is primed to deliver.

The sluice of culture that I’ve cut into the mountain face of the void, the one responsible for draining all content toward me, has determined that I should hear this track a couple times. And it was right, it has won me over. All hail the sluice of culture dug out by hand from the mountain of void to deliver tonal sustenance. Particularly, Snooping The Bandcamp, OneTwoxu.de and Manierenversagen. Look to them for more if you like this.

TRACK | Trauma Harness – Megasilmax

5/5 golden merles

“Megasilmax” is electric St. Louis post-punk and garage rock, scalding and salving and adequately seditious. It is also the beautiful death knell of Lumpy Records. After a litany of shared releases, Ten Years of Trauma is a compilation adroitly made up of selections from Trauma Harness’ digital or limited cassette runs.

The whole set of tracks is electric, radiating the joy of making art with chums. What at first seems tangled –synths dissecting the channels, askance percussive melodic phrasing, momentum shifting slightly ahead of the BPM in a manner which defies the space–on closer inspection is ornately structured behind a fever.

After and before “Megasilmax” it carries on evincing and delivering, and then a compilation built across a decade feels like a solid record, built to be collectively perceived. The sound is established throughout with a kind of unified vision and purpose. The standards are set and then met in each attempt, goalposts not so much as swaying in the breeze. The digital is $6 and vinyl in a set of 500 for $17.

TRACK | Girl – Pavement

5/5 golden merles

Girl makes New Jersey-based alt rock with elements of avant and experimentation, holed up in the basement/garage and dispatched from a wave of reverence. Coming amidst much invention, “Pavement” is the fermented earworm closer of the Ghost EP, the best entry point, and that rarer sort of ephemera made up of mental models trained on tunes that seems to have a half-life of several generations.

In the breadth of thrash and strum there is a slow burn that accumulates with interest, rending late back into the chorus before extinguishing. There’s a stalking melody under arouras of reverb, all punctuated by formidable cymbals rides that orient and direct. The slates so well set by the time it degrades the scale one final time it is a relief.

I was introduced to the track by James’ reliably aligned scouting over at Kick Out The James (WZBC) mixcloud, in the very good August 19th set. Ghost EP as a digital album is $8 or more at bandcamp.