Kurt Vile, whom I talked about not at all that long ago releases a follow up “Walkin on a Pretty Daze” from earlier this year. “It’s a big world out there (and I’m scared)” comes out today on Matador. You can listen to the breezy track above. This is a 12″ release, but isn’t a full album, instead “It’s a big world…” is an EP with some reworkings and a few new songs. I prefer this way of staying in the spotlight and staying relevant, getting people to pay attention to your music by constantly creating it. I wish that Arcade Fire would get the hint.
“Feel My Pain” sounds like something that could have very easily fit into “Walkin…” with its fingerpicked acoustic guitar and super laid back vocals. This stays completely within Vile’s aesthetic, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially for someone like Vile, who already doesn’t sound like anyone else.
I also wanted to bring your attention to Ty Segall’s new band, or newest…or maybe they aren’t his newest band anymore, because its been a few months and he could very easily have joined a dozen or more bands in the interim. But anyway, his newest project is called Fuzz, and yes, it’s pretty much exactly what one would expect from Ty at this point. Loud garage rock from San Francisco. He pretty much embodies this sound now.
The latest video begins more like a short film than a performance video, with Ty and Fuzz guitarist Charlie Mootheart loading up their van after a set-up shot that featured the clarinet opening from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” We get a sampling of the super distorted rumbling of the band’s sound before the video focuses a bit on non-musical material before we finally get the performance.
The band’s sound lies somewhere between pure punk rock and a latter day Black Sabbath. The classic rock and blues influences are strong in Mootheart’s riffs and harmonizing with the bass, locking down a strong groove, with Ty on drums, no less. Is there anything that dude can’t do?
I was lucky enough to catch these guys back in July, in San Francisco, opening for Thee Oh Sees. Their energy was intense and didn’t fade at all throughout the set. I’m hoping that Ty keeps this around for at least a few minutes and puts out a few albums before moving on to something else. But I guess that only time will tell.
Well, this is the one. This is the album that I start everyone off with. It is their undisputed classic. Daydream Nation. Even the name, to me anyway, is enigmatic. It’s just perfect, flawless in every way. The opening, the close. There is not one bad thing to say about this album. I may be letting my bias show, but I am also the one that wears a toque with “Sonic Youth” sewed into it every day once the temperature goes below 50º.
Anyway, I still remember getting this album on cassette. I like to tell myself (and others) that it is the first album that I ever bought. And though this story isn’t completely accurate (we all had our unfortunate phases when we were too young to know what it meant to listen to good music. Though, I have met some people that really haven’t had one of those phases. I am extremely jealous that those people didn’t have to go through an MC Hammer phase and a whatever the hell else phase. I listened to Top 40 radio a lot until I was like 10. So sue me.) but in a way it is the truth. Buying Daydream Nation was the first album that I ever bought that ever mattered. I never looked back, and I still haven’t. I can’t even imagine how many times I have listened to this album.
I still remember getting the tape and looking through the pictures and the lyrics and just staring at it. Everything was just part of a complete package. The color scheme, the mood of the pictures with their grainy, hazy focus of the band standing in (what I assume is) the Bowery near CBGB’s (totally guessing there, but just going with what I was thinking then) and the cover photo (which I didn’t know at the time was a famous painting, a painting which I have been lucky enough to see in person in Chicago. It was an amazing experience standing in front of that painting, with its meaning sort of reversed in a way that the painting now described the album to me, whereas when I first heard the album, it was, to me, describing the sound of that painting) and just everything seemed to be so focused and purposeful. I can’t be alone in thinking that the sound of Lee’s disintegrating amp throughout “Providence” is meant to sound like a burning candle, giving sound to the cover? And, of course, there is the song “Candle,” but that is too obvious.
And how could those sounds be so purposeful? How could the howling guitars that blasted out of the middle of “Silver Rocket” possibly be directed, or purposeful? I didn’t know the word ‘aleatory’ back then, but I know that I was thinking about how they got those sounds – that sounded so random and scattered and loud and noisy and…great – to do what they wanted them to do? How was it that they were able to tame the wild feedback and static into the form of the songs?
I still wonder about these things to this day. It just seems like all of the elements were perfect when they were recording the album. All the mistakes fit perfectly into the aesthetic of the album. The interactions of the guitars, the structure of the songs, the lyrics, the focus, this was an already amazing band making a giant leap forward in their sound. Sure, like I said in previous posts, the sounds on “Sister,” and even as far back as “Bad Moon Rising,” were pointing to this, we all knew that something like this was on the way (well, I mean people at the time that were paying attention knew. I was only 7 when the album came out. I had no clue what was going on, I was home learning to do multiplication or something like that), maybe not something exactly like this, I don’t think that this is the kind of album that anyone completely expects. There is definitely going to be a certain amount of surprise at hearing something this great for the first time. I mean, I know that it caught me off guard.
In a way though, this album is sort of bittersweet. I really don’t think that they ever got any higher than this. This was their last release before they signed to DGC, and though I love some of those albums, most of those albums, I don’t think that they were ever able to keep the magic that was on “Daydream Nation.”
And that is part of the reason why this album is so special. It was a moment in time. It was something that even the band themselves could not replicate, and who knows if they even wanted to. This was Sonic Youth at the peak of their powers, and it has had an immeasurable impact upon my life to this day. I’m still trying to convince students that they want to take my class on post-tonal analysis that uses Sonic Youth’s output as the corpus that we’d analyze. There is just so much here. So many conventions that are shattered, so much individuality and energy and vision. I could go on for days about all the things that I remember when I first heard this album.
I truly hope that another album will come along that even makes me feel 1/10th as good as I felt when I first heard Daydream Nation, and I know that it will come someday, but at the same time I know that I’m going to be waiting for a long time before it happens.
I’ve been keeping a close eye on Buke and Gase for the past few years, ever since I just had to have their +/- EP in 2010. What drove me to them initially was just their timbre. It was one of those rare instances where I had never heard anything like them before. Of course everyone knows (and if you don’t then you’re about to find out) they make their own instruments. So the timbre of the baritone ukulele and guitar/bass hybrid are what first grabbed me, but after listening there was so much more waiting beneath that intriguing surface.
I noticed, on that EP, that there were several layers of rhythmic complexity going on throughout most of their songs. The way that they fluidly shifted from meter to meter and from divisions of the beat, casually coasting from one tuplet to another, causing the overall structure to slide across apparent tempo shifts. Though these shifts are only figments of our imagination, they are actually staying perfectly in tempo but only reorganizing the meter as they go. This is no small feat, as the duo are in control of the percussion while they are playing and singing. It’s like 2 one man bands in one. I think that that is actually part of the reason why there can be so much rhythmic complexity. It has to do with their embodiment of rhythm, and the music in general. Also, of course, adding to their unique sound.
And that isn’t the only thing that shifts around during their tracks, there is no telling how many times they are going to repeat an idea. A comparison can be drawn here to The New Pornographers, another band that tends toward the invention of their own structures, eschewing verse-chorus-verse and repeating everything 2 or 4 times with rigidity. And where those elements were pushed more to the fore on previous efforts like “+/-” and “Riposte”they are drawing less attention to themselves on “General Dome.”
The title track holds steady with a high degree of intensity and a persistent ostinato rhythm, Arone Dyer’s voice soaring high above the bass heavy foundation. Building up multiple layers in a complex fabric is probably most important when approaching a single-form structure such as this one, but it remains surprisingly monotonous throughout, holding onto that intensity and maintaining it at all costs.
The duo has always been reaching out and exploring new harmonies and interesting maneuvers therein, and on this album things are no different. Remarkably protean key shifts to match the rhythmic shifting. For example, “Twisting the Lasso of Truth” can’t settle on a rhythmic structure at all. The meter shifts, the accents change faster than one can grasp the pattern with which they do so, and the harmony resists focusing on a single pitch center. The song is in a constant state of flux, making it, to me, one of the strongest and most interesting on the album.
“Split Like a Lip, No Blood on the Beard” picks up these exact cues. The denial of verse-chorus-verse structure is strong on this track, as is a similar denial of engagement with a steady, regular pulse. Dyer’s vocals vacillate between sweet and soulful, and clipped and tense, sliding from major to minor in alternating phrases, giving an interesting shade to the melody.
None of these elements are allowed to fall into the trap of becoming highly recognizable “tricks” that the band employs liberally in each song. The focus is more upon the structure as a whole and not so much just the parts that make it up. But those parts are really interesting, everything from the unique sound to their individualistic use of rhythm and song form.
You can hear most all of their work (not the +/- EP, unfortunately) on their bandcamp page. All their albums are available on cd, lp or mp3 and all are available from the bandcamp link.
I guess I am about 5 years or more late to the party, but I just recently, maybe within the past month or so, started listening with intent to Neon Indian and Washed Out.
I missed the bus on Neon Indian the first time around for whatever reason. Who knows what phase I was in at that point that prevented me from paying attention to anything that was going on in the world around me. Let’s just blame Lightning Bolt. That was probably what I was listening to so much that prevented me from taking my friend’s advice and listening to Neon Indian.
But, actually, Neon Indian, is not the artist that I want to talk about right now, right now I am focusing on the release that Washed Out put out this year, Paracosm. It’s another album, like so many this year, that fell through the cracks for me and I’m only just now starting to give it the attention that it deserves. My only other experience with Washed Out is through hearing “Feel It All Around” about a million times (by the way, say what you will about the show Portlandia, they could have picked a more perfect song for the intro sequence. The way that the ambience makes complete sense to Portland’s grey and rainy atmosphere as pictured).
And that brings me to my main point, and that is the music of Washed Out (and Neon Indian, and Small Black etc. etc.) places a lot of focus on a visual aspect that runs parallel to the music. Sure, it’s called “chillwave,” and it’s good that this aesthetic has gotten a name pinned to it, it helps us to generalize a little bit, but I think that the music that fits the genre is more impressionist than anything.
The seamless construction, with synth sounds that smear the harmonies, preventing any harshness, or dry attack sounds. Everything on “Paracosm” seems to buff out all the harsh contrasts, swirls the colors together and then takes a few steps back, allowing the picture to slowly fade into focus. It’s music of great emotional depth and music of nostalgia, and it’s also music that depicts light and an aura, a landscape. It does this so well that somehow we are all able to pick up on it, and accept it.
More specifically, the songs on this album are a little bit more danceable than on (my only point of comparison right now) Neon Indian’s “Era Extraña.” Where they are both, in a sense, working toward the same aesthetic, Washed Out tends to, on “Paracosm,” tilt the scales a little more toward radio-friendly pop, or as close to it as chillwave will allow.
“All I know” plays elements against each other to great effect with its bouncing tempo and a soaring, yearning melody over the top, while the title track flutters into view, a bit more somber than some of the other tracks, vocals hiding a bit inside those blurred out colors. The addition of a slide guitar, awash in reverb and delay, is a nice added touch. Layers and layers of atmospherics continue to build, though never crowding the texture. Everything just floats out over top of everything else, there’s a sense of constant elevation that’s created; infinitely open and never claustrophobic, despite the dense fog of sound that grows and grows.
This album, and this music, is more about creating a picture than anything else out there. But that doesn’t preclude there from being great melodies and catchy pop hooks. That label that we are so ready to place on the music is merely a shroud that is draped over the form of the music. It’s the timbre that gives the music its defining characteristic, and I think the thing that I think most about when listening to this album is how good the songs would be if all of the atmospherics and aesthetic concerns were stripped away. I think that that is really the measure of an album, and it’s fair to say that had that happened with this album, it would stand up as a collection of great songs too.
I can’t help but hear “Mercy, Mercy Me” at the beginning of every phrase in the verse of “Great Escape.” And that’s a good comparison to leave you with, as it’s useful in summing up the sound that carries through the album from beginning to end. The soulfulness and attention to all the typical concerns of songwriting; creating a memorable melody, and a solid formal and harmonic structure, evoking a mood – all of those things are present here, and are what make the songs great. That extra layer of atmospherics are really what set them apart and keep me coming back again and again.
I feel like the more that I look into the albums that were released this year the more I am surprised by the things that I haven’t devoted quite enough attention to. I’ve honestly been listening to as much new stuff as I can, but it’s times like these that make it readily apparent that I have some serious issues with favoritism, especially in a year that saw the release of a new of Montreal album.
Kurt Vile has always seemed like an interesting contradiction to me. I specifically remember seeing him in Chicago a few years back and loving his super noisy, electric guitar driven music. Or maybe I am treating myself to some revisionist history and that isn’t what happened at all, because none of the music that I have heard from him since have been noisy in the way that I remember it being some years ago.
(Also, he pushed me out of the way while trying to get back to the bar at the Subterranean between sets by Zola Jesus and Real Estate, but that is neither here nor there. I just like telling that story.)
Walking on a Pretty Daze is fully of gently lolling melodies, sung and played with a carefree air. The only thing that I am left thinking whenever I listen to the album is that this is what Thurston Moore wants his solo work to sound like, but instead all that we get from him is recycled, boring adult contemporary or something. I don’t even know what the hell he’s doing, and that doesn’t even matter right now.
It’s like everything on “Walking on a Pretty Daze” sits between classic rock like Bad Company or something and singer/songwriter fare. The backbeat is kept simple and low-key, just unobtrusively tapping out time in the background while Vile’s guitar is pushed right to the front, next to his half-snarled singing. If you are at all familiar with the music of Joel Plaskett, that would provide a nice point of comparison. Both artists wear their influences on their sleeves, though Plaskett tends much more toward the obvious in this regard.
Vile’s open string suspended chords and extended harmonies give him a sound that is immediately identifiable as his own. The riff from “Was All Talk” manages to capture the essence of Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” in a single chord. When you hear it you’ll know what I’m talking about. And I think that, again with the points of reference, will give us all (those of you that don’t know the music of Plaskett) something a little more universal to compare it to. That aura and atmosphere that is bottle on the Henley track is the basis for most of these songs, and the overall mood of the album.
It’s that moving though cautious and tentative mood. Even the synths that Vile uses attempt to capture the mood of “The Boys of Summer.” I remember that song being on the radio non-stop when I was younger, and all the same images that it conjured in my head back then are being brought back while listening to Kurt Vile.
Aside from that long aside, Vile’s music is well written and interesting. He creates a solid album and has fun with it. I mean he’d have to be having fun with song titles like “Air Bud,” and lyrics such as “makin’ music is easy….watch me!” Naturally that quote is delivered in a sly deadpan, where one could picture him trying to make you interested, but at the very same time not getting too invested in it. The music just flows out of him, and as I said earlier, it just seems so effortless. Effortless in the way that a Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks album sounds effortless.
Overall, give this one a listen before the end of the year, I’d file it just to the right of any chillwave music that you may have. All around good album, front to back. Deserving of attention well past 2013, and that’s really the point of lists like these, isn’t it? Who will survive and who (or what album) will fade into obscurity forever? Kurt Vile has many more albums in him, I’m sure.
Glenn Branca – “Symphony No. 6: Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven”
Glenn Branca’s 6th Symphony “Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven” has been my go-to large scale work lately. It brings to mind several thoughts that I have about music in general and about a composer’s intentions.
As I listen to a symphony by Branca (and I think that I have listened to most of them, and of the ones that I have listened to I have done so several times) I often find myself wondering what the score looks like. Immediately after trying to imagine the score I ask myself if that even matters. The next thing that comes to mind, especially when listening to this work in particular is how a composer (it can be any composer) can manage to have such a firm hold on their style, where their music is instantly recognizable, like Stravinsky or Webern or Ravel, yet still manages to say different things.
I guess that might be an assumption, that the composer has to be saying different things with each work that is produced. For example, listening to each of Branca’s symphonies, each (for the most part, No. 9 is an anomaly) calls for an army of guitars, and a drummer. There might be some other instruments mixed in there, but the most noticeable thing (and I think that it’s the thing that everyone that has every listened to Branca’s music, or at least knows about his music) are the guitars.
The cloud of noise that is created throughout the 6th symphony accomplishes different goals in each of the movements, yet it still (on the surface) remains just that – a cloud of noise. Of course, we can get into the argument about what noise is or what is considered noise, for days. For my purposes I’m going to say that noise in Branca’s symphonies is that cloud of sound. It’s so pitch saturated that it becomes pitchless and there are so many performers on stage, each of whom are attacking their instruments in a wild tremolo, that the intense, dense layers of rhythm become rhythmless. The music is recursive, and in being so creates a situation where everything that is becomes nothing, and everything that seems like nothing on the surface is what the piece is all about.
This might sound a little too vague, or faux-philosophical and lofty, but allow me explain. Let’s go back to how the cloud of noise is used in a couple of the different movements. Take the opening of the symphony: it starts quiet enough, but as the movement begins to take off the strummed guitars’ monotony severs itself into two different layers where one layer forms a consistent harmonic backdrop while the other layer allies itself with the percussion, providing sharp stabs of accent every so often. That “every so often” becomes more and more often as the movement progresses, yet the layer of harmonic noise continues underneath. It is steady and omnipresent. The growth of the movement occurs via the interplay of these two layers. So we could say that the cloud of noise, as it pertains to this movement, provides the backdrop. It is the base of sound, the music has no choice but to grow continually louder. By the end of the movement the layers come together again, combining their pitch and rhythm material into a dense haze.
As with all minimalist music the more that the piece repeats the material the more that the listener is allowed to search “inside” the sounds that they are hearing. Lines start to peak out from the cloud, some interplay comes into focus.
In the second movement an infinitely ascending line continues for the first four and a half minutes. The pitch material exists on its own, and there is no evidence of any guitar strings being attacked, or any strumming of any kind going on. All there is is pitch, and at the same time there really is no pitch. As soon as you are able to put your finger on it it is gone. There are some tones buried within that remain constant, while the upper limit continues to expand. It is music that describes infinity in many ways. Infinite space, infinite time (timelessness). Listening to this ever ascending line that seems like it is never going to reach its destination, it simply floats there, hanging in space. But there is motion, there is motion without direction. Sure it is ascending infinitely, but we have no idea as to the ultimate destination of that ascending line. The listener is left with no frame of reference, and that is exciting. There is a tension that is built up throughout the movement that is the result of all of this uncertainty. We begin to start listening for something specific to happen, we want there to be a great big arrival point. The longer that this ascent continues the more that we want to hear it and the greater our expectations become of something increasingly spectacular. It’s the same experience of needing to have a leading tone resolved, only this leading tone goes on for almost 5 minutes. When it settles down, and we decide that we have indeed reached a point of arrival there is an immediate release of all the tension that has been building up.
I feel that this is something that more traditional composers aren’t able to harness. That tension. The ever growing intensity. Branca is able to create such a high degree of it here without any change in dynamic (it remains fairly loud consistently throughout the movement) and once again there are several other things that he is doing “without.” There still isn’t a clear statement of pitch. Instead we are presented with all of the pitches at once. That mass of pitch becomes, once again, cloudy and formless. The shape, however, changes and moves through time. The movement is more about an idea and a depiction than it is about pitch relations. It’s the development of one idea that fits into the work.
The third movement uses more monotony than anything else. Consistent chords ringing out with a steady pulse. Everything sounds like a downbeat. Again, as with minimalism, we have rhythm that is so persistent that it becomes anything but a rhythm. Our ear treats all the repetition as if it is something that can be ignored. This movement is also maybe the most abrasive of the symphony, and the most exciting, in my opinion. The final cadence brings us to the loudest caterwaul of sound that we have so far experience.
There is some dizzying contrapuntal work during the opening of the fourth movement, and finally we have some shifting layers of sound, where there was pretty much none in the first 3 movements. Two different lines bounce back and forth, a constant blanket of activity over which haunting and thin ephemera passing in and out of each channel in turn.
That there can be such contradictions in a single work is interesting enough to think about. That they can be achieved in exactly the opposite way that one would first think is another thing altogether. Creating a work with no discernible use of pitch, by using all pitches all the time; and a work with formless rhythm while having a persistent rhythm throughout. As I’ve said a million times before, it’s about learning to hear differently, it’s about making sense of the apparent contradictions that are presented to us in a piece of music, the things that we never thought were possible, ideas that can not be expressed in any other way. Listening to music, such as a symphony by Glenn Branca, requires the listener to consider something that they have not only never considered before, but never thought about considering before.
This one is epic. I mean, I love all the albums that came before Sister, but I feel like this is the beginning of something really great. I mean, I think you all know what is going to come after this album. Now, I know that “Evol” is really great too, and I do love “Bad Moon Rising,” and even more so “Confusion is Sex,” but “Sister” is one of the albums that has been getting constant plays on my stereo since I first heard it.
There are so many classic SY tracks on this one that’s it’s hard to know where I should begin, so I guess that I should just start at the beginning of the album and work through it from there. And this album has a great album opener with “Schizophrenia.” I specifically remember coming to “Sister” around the same time that I first picked up a guitar and started bashing away at it, trying to learn every song that I could, which usually just meant me playing every note every second and trying to listen for when they matched what was coming through the stereo and then trying to memorize what I was doing so that I could maybe, possibly, replicate that at a later point.
Well, when I tried to learn how to play “Schizophrenia” I found that my usual strategy really wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t figure out why none of open string major or minor chords that I knew weren’t fitting any of the sounds that were coming out of my stereo. I mean, I think I played every chord up there on that poster of 24 or so chords. I even tried the ones with the number 7 next to them, those are the weird jazz chords, right? At least that was what I was thinking at the time. Anyway, all that I remember from trying to figure out the song was that I thought it was in the key of B. Now that I’m much older I know that, yes, there is a B in that chord, but I would have to sit down to the piano to figure out what the other pitches are, because lo and behold, I was not aware, at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever, that one could tune the guitar to anything other than EADGBE.
Oh, Sonic Youth. You have taught me so many things. And maybe this is the point of discover, or attempted discovery that has set me on the path that I am still on today. I’m still the same person, trying to figure out what is going on in all of the things that he hears. I’m still forever sitting at a piano trying to pick apart tone clusters and writing them out.
But, “Schizophrenia” into “(I got a) Catholic Block”? Don’t even try to pretend that that isn’t one hell of a way to open an album. Things are pulled back a little for Kim’s entrance, with “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” a song that has always reminded me of Evol. It just captures a very similar atmosphere as Evol. There is something creepy about the cavernous sound of the percussion and the aimlessly strummed guitar in the background combined with Kim’s half spoken half breathily sung vocal.
Oh, but “Stereo Sanctity.” How that song will forever remain as my answer to “Oh, you’ve never heard Sonic Youth before?” It will always end up on any mixtape that I make for anyone that needs an introduction to the band. I can play this song on repeat for a day and not even get sick of it ever. The way that it opens with just a cloud of noise and then Lee coming in with his own wall of distortion a 1/2 step above Thurston and not resolving it, or even trying, and the way that you can hear Thurston laugh a little bit about it if you listen closely. The dynamic of the band is perfect throughout this song. I still can’t even describe what it is that is happening in the chorus of the song. The guitar sounds so wobbily, like it is going to fall apart at any moment. It’s as if the song is hanging on by a thread throughout, but somehow they manage to keep it together, at least until the exact midpoint of the song where everything starts to go haywire.
The classic tracks keep coming with “Tuff Gnarl.” One song after another is memorable, but “Tuff Gnarl” finally gives us a song that is immediately recognizable upon the first few notes. That one’s also got the noisy breakdown that sounds like the beginnings of what we’ll get to hear on “Eric’s Trip” or “Total Trash” coming up on “Daydream Nation.”
The constant back and forth between Thurston and Lee’s straight ahead tunes, where it sounds like they are literally fighting their guitars off their bodies, against Kim’s moodier, sometimes somber material that comes out of “Evol,” creates a good pacing throughout. But, I remember sort of skipping past those slower tunes when I was listening to the album for the first few years. I’d skip right to “Hot Wire My Hearth,” then fast-forward through “Cotton Crown” so that I could get straight to “White Cross” and “Master-Dik.”
If I was ever in doubt about how much I loved Sonic Youth when I was a kid, this was the album that solidified it. Song after song after song of just everything that Sonic Youth has to offer. As a kid I was completely unaware of the social context in which these songs were produced, or what time (I guess I had a little bit of a clue, but I don’t remember thinking of it too much) they were made. The point is, now that I think about it, this album is pretty close to timeless. There really isn’t anything about the sound of the album that screams 1987.
Next up, “Daydream Nation.” I’m going to have to prepare myself for this one. I have a feeling it will be quite long. Wouldn’t be surprised if I have to split that one into 2 posts.
Continuing with my trend of posting streams of gritty garage rock, now we’ve arrived at Scraper.
This is the first full length release from the San Francisco garage punks. What makes this even more exciting is that the LP has been released in a super limited run of only 500 copies, through Cut-Rate Records. Unfortunately the bandcamp page only allows us to listen to 30 or so seconds of each track, but it is more than enough to let us know what kind of jams we can expect from the album.
The singer is clearly taking some cues from Joey Ramone (not at all anything wrong with that), and the guitars are coming through loud (maybe too loud?) and clear. Everything in the mix is overdriven to the point of distortion, and I actually had to check more than once to see if it was just some coincidence that both of my speakers blew as I was listening. (They hadn’t).
For those of you paying attention, it seems like San Francisco is the place to be right now, for the music scene alone. There’s Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees throwin’ down copious amounts of punk thrash, then there is White Fence, somehow lumped into the whole mess with his retro tape-noise laden Left Banke reminiscent tunes, and then there are the even grittier, unpolished acts that make all the aforementioned sound down right radio-friendly like Terry Malts and these guys, Scraper.
Head over to the Cut-Rate Records bandcamp page to listen to the samples and then grab the super limited album. You can also find Cut-Rate Records on Facebook.
The Switchable Kid is a band from Memphis that creates low(-ish)-fi, moody rock with a retro tinge. In a few words their sound can be described as sounding like a toned-down A Place To Bury Strangers, with a little Joy Division and The Cure thrown into the mix with its brooding vocal, driving and mechanical rhythms and phased-out and delayed guitar textures.
“For All the Sad Bastards” might lack a bit in the continuity department, with variances of recording technique from song to song. The album, released this past October 8 on Miss Molly Records, is actually a collection of previously (incredibly difficult to find) rarities and unreleased tracks. From the band’s bancdamp page: “For All The Sad Bastards-Songs I’ve passed around on CDRs and cassettes to friends from 2002-2012. A collection of unreleased 7″ singles compiled for an album. A real Bonadrag!”
I am going to need to find ways to fit “bonadrag” into my everyday conversations now. It’s only natural.
The collection is available as a download (of course) as well as 12″ vinyl, and CD. Head over to the bandcamp page, or listen above, to all of the tracks in full. Skip to the catchy and dark “Hey Beauty,” and “The Young Don’t Cry;” and then move to the punk attitude of “Sore Subjects.” And, despite some of the continuity concerns that I raised above, this collection actually does still span a range of sounds that transcend the garage and punk influences. “Blue,” which closes out the album, is slow and thoughtful, with an extra touch added by the use of some brass and the jangling of acoustic guitar strings.
If dark and gritty rock with vocals awash in reverb is as much your thing as it is mine, you won’t be disappointed here.
Endless Bummer are comin’ at you with 4 tracks of gritty, garage punk mayhem on their “Ripper Current EP.“
Lance and Liz, proprietors of Chicago and Los Angeles’ “Permanent Records” recorded this 4 track burner with Ty Segall and was released on In The Red Records (home to Ty’s ten million bands and some albums by Thee Oh Sees) at the end of October.
Being a fan of their podcast when it was going strong, this album delivers exactly what I expected it to. Short blasts of raw energy that sound like everything that I know they love thrown in a blender and blasted out all over the place in one cathartic heave. There’s not much more to say other than take a listen and bask in its glory. Equal parts noise and surf rock.
Check it out above or on their bandcamp page. Also, two other tracks not included on the EP are up on their soundcloud page. Head over there to listen to “B Movie” and “Runaround.”
