Tag: Wales

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 | 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 | Cate Le Bon – Puts Me To Work

5/5 golden merles

For my tastes and cultural conditioning, Cate Le Bon is one of the very best songwriters of the common era. We were raised in a relatively similar media swamps, with a few contorted icons on columns rising either side of the Atlantic, propped up by corporate speculation on prospective idolization.

Aside from some worthy ziggurats that punctuate the vista, inescapably, for all to admire or despise, there was a dearth. Subsequently, when these no longer inspired awe or became default elements of the horizon, we ventured out to scavenge from similar ruins.

And in this way she’s built her own effigy, ransacking and extracting, compiling traits over decades of accumulate influence and experimentation.

There’s only so much refining you can do. Looking in a mirror long enough, like repeating a word too many times, deprives it of its meaning. But here, on Cyrk, in the early days, the likeness is not terribly dissimilar to the antediluvian predecessors and the shared idols, but nevertheless still distinct. The track’s a melodic and collagist weaving, with much splendor to its magisterial superfluidity. We’re lucky to have the records.

ALBUM | Cate Le Bon – Mug Museum

5/5 golden merles

The title track off 2013’s Mug Museum is one of my favorites among many. The whole album is intriguingly sonically textured and well written.

One of the two primary reasons my partner responded to my online profile was a reference to Cate Le Bon and another to David Mitchell & Robert Webb’s Peepshow. So I am in it’s/her debt.

Though I have felt slightly distanced from the colder, more abstracted art rock direction she is exploring in the last few releases, it is all still worth looking into. But to my taste, she has not yet returned to this level of melodic and lyrically qualitative consistency since.

On this record, the bridge has yet to be retracted. There is a great effort at precision in the lines and the onus is not put upon the audience to rearrange the fragments of coherence. Which is fine, too. An audience has been built, tediously, over decades. Do what you like. We don’t need the same thing in endlessly mild variations.

All that shit said, I am still very glad Mug Museum exists and it is proudly one of the paltry 19 vinyl records in my collection.