Another Calender year behind us>>>>>>>>

Year end lists are in many ways a benchmark of our fleeting and disposable relationship with music. Despite this general objectionability, I hope the following provides some summation and closure or a playlist. I probably spent about 50% of the time I wanted to listening to new records this year, hence the half fulfillment that follows. Focus is on long playing vinyl records that stuck to my ears, ink spilled thusly:

Ace of Spit-S/T (Sophmore Lounge)

File this next to your King Bee reissue, despite the alphabetic despondency implied. Maybe you should bookend those 2 records with some Link Wray and Saddle Lake Drifting Cowboys. Yes this is the distilled and pure stuff, to invoke but another in a slew of record review cliches and colloquialisms, “not for the faint of heart!”. Where 4 instruments take no precedence over each other, but all hold an abundance of weight. No ornamentation. A raspy holler graces the ear now and again, with soul and conviction. “Lonedell Wildflower” is the best song of the year. Always groovy but never lackadaisicle, never background. The playing has the energy and take-no-prisoners attitude of the best garage/basement rock, the kind not so burdened by revivalism or aesthetic consistency and only retaining genre allegiance through devout spiritual commune. Wilting at times, driving at others, always interesting.

David Nance-Pulverized and Slightly Peaced (Petty Bunco)

*See Ace of Spit blurb and vice versa…

Best DNG full length I’ve been exposed to by a mile. Just the type of driving, wild and ravaging guitar/bass/drums rock that will move you and remind you that you can be moved, both physically and emotionally. This raw batch is a document of the finesse, abandon and restrain this unit maintains equal measures of in their collective joints. Also, cannot gloss over the timeliness of recordings that sound this live. Be transported to the center of a room populated with ramshackle sound like its 2019. The B side sees them stretch out and the results are spellbinding. Dead Moon comes to mind in describing the deep chemistry on display here, as well as the infidels responsible for Ohio’s most notorious and damaged folk rock basement tapes. A reminder that the roots of middle Americana are dirty and frayed, not the glistening nu country din provided by the overground entertainment biz.

Puppet Wipes-The Stones Are Watching & They Can Be A Handful (Siltbreeze)

Dastardly joyous reinvention of fucking around. High concept ineptitude and no-brow noise-niking by a team of bonafide art damaged primates. Verbose ramblings on themes of salacious office scandals, the various cavities found in the human skull, piano leg humping and other worldly topics prove intellectual investment. Perfectly dialled in visual and audio spewing that eschews every convention in favour of baffling bemusement. Dave E. And his Cool Marriage Counsellors’ bowl-of-jelly hooks and morbid appeal do seem to be one potential analog to the PW direction, as referenced in the “literature”(and in a round about way, the OH in their name). Always a wink at punk iconoclasm with this lot, an ode as well as a chuckle I think, in the vein of Canuck mysteriosos Da Royal Canadian Slyme. Possibly the “punkest” record of the year, but I’m almost certainly not a punk, so who’s to say.

Submissives-Wanna Be Your Thing (Bruit Direct)

This just in: Submissives craft a brilliantly lilting left field bummer record. A coy inversion of the usual machismo associated with noisy rock thematics, Deb Edison paints a sedate portrait of the male gaze from the other side of the looking glass. boldly tumultuous and sophisticatedly melodic, sweetly microtonal. Puzzling, woozy affect raises arm hair and arms altogether. Post-Shaggs abandon, yada, yada really = unfiltered personality, it’s not rocket science, get on the level. Sung in the key of Nico, spun in the shadow of Bill Fay and Marine Girls both. Behind every human expression of beauty there is menace stabbing it’s way to the surface. Melancholic country and western CAN be enjoyed while sporting a cowboy hat, leathers, tie die, tracksuit, raincoat or any number of garments. A concept band for the ages. And do watch out for Sesame Snaps and The Wrong Sky soon.

Straw Man Army-SOS (D4MTLabs)

Adventurous/virtuous post-punk with poetic/political lyrics that surpass the usual sloganistic fare. Circling the axis of Anarcho outre-punk and US indie/post-hardcore bests. Think Fugazi meets Poison Girls meets 100 Flowers for a ballpark. And with it, the dramatic flare as well as the sober and structured reconfiguration of the rules and ingredients commonly found in popular music. All this and more taking place in an empty space where post-micro-genre and unfractured creators come to prosper. Militaristic rhythms and frosty melodies cement the skyscraper alienation of the big apple…juxtapose: a cement wall, a lone blade of grass, a smokestack and a philosophic teardrop. Also a sullen/monastic sibling to Chronophage on some level. When it’s bleak, it is so in a way that counters the ambivalence of dark-, cold-, goth-, whatever. There is an objectivity and persistence to this record’s power.

XV- Basement Tapes (Half A Million)

Brash basement bash of the highest order. Produced in a manor that exudes both charm and the feeling of freedom. Likely the kind of document that could nary be created with too much foreboding intent and that can only be enjoyed with the same penchant for impulsive creativity. Maybe shares some DNA with Memphians the Klitz (minus their geographicabilly bent) in its abundant personality. Woozy then barrelling then broken then iron-clad. Be sure to leave in the laughing and banter because, as if I need to remind you, taking it away is a choice. Originally a small scale cassette, released in a little larger vinyl run this year by West Mass champs, this record lives on it’s own undecorated and billowing, raw, tapped-in and timeless plane. Unmediated and immediate rock music is not a dead art or a backward looking pursuit, it’s more open wide than ever and the proof is here for you today.

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Ruminations on audible time

(9 choices in the spirit of coming up short).

Year’s end is a heavy symbol for death. I’d rather wither than read another. If my heart is in music then it has to drift and I always come back to the unifying features of things that read as separate. The scene is at the bar near my house on the slow nights and in the monetized and monitored pages of the web. The winter is pouring in over the fall-time dried up veg. Top of the pops more than punx but i tried to give back what could conceivably be worthwhile to the here and then of the last rotation.

Silicone Prairie “My Life on the Silicone Prairie” (Feel It Records)

It’s common knowledge that the wicked witch of the west is warm and well, at home in Kansas City. I think it’s a kinda singular study of a world gone mad. It’s sardonic as it is sincere; as volatile as it is tender. Speed and rubber limbs are the fuel, dime store theatrix and papier-mâché poetix the architecture. Just imagine these actions like a book that preceded the reality tv show of the simulation for the time being.

Lewsberg “In Your Hands” (12XU)

Lewsberg does not disappoint with their newest oeuvre. Velvets comparisons keep relevance but leaning further into their passive restraint, they create tension with space in a way that makes fast and loud seem superfluous. It’s more of an anxious slow meltdown. When I’m reflective and busy with repetition, “All Things” 1 and 2 ease me up and down the ladder and back and forth on the water-activated tape dispenser, cooling my nerves with their psynching pulse.

Famous Mammals-S/T (Self released)

Ultimate ramshackle urgency, cataclysmic parameter shuffling and brash disregard for your enjoyment, art-lurkers trading in round about and tunneled in rock. TVP, GBV, THC.. light emanating in the depths of the tunnel. And if you opt for the Golden Gate then find yourself on the rainiest side of the bay. Rays and Reptoids and French beatniks for the avant-minded, of a solitary breed of timeless popsters peering on through the space time continuum.

Emily Robb-How to Moonwalk (Petty Bunco)

Known guitar traipser takes a long walk on that extraterrestrial brick o’ cheese. Axe wielding starting points tangled with guttural beauty. Lilting melodic shards engulfed in extended tonal battery. Chucky B and Poison Ivy rear their heads like gasping cartoon characters coming up for air after being dropped in a bubbling vat! Form free, pitched and pillaged, a plugged in box played like the chump you had it panned out as. Motor city speedway, driving and careening alternately, electric earthiness and improvised certitude.

Exek “Good Thing They Ripped Up the Carpet” (LSD club)

Coagulated lysergic liquids intermingling in a warped Petri dish. DUBious racket and clanging reverberations with silky licks tucked between. Disjointed shuffling and time-lapse dance moves penetrate like stuttering clockwork with insidious ease. 2 parts band, 1 part hypnotist, but hucksters they are not. This is the mental medicinal that keeps you coming back to the well with an ear to ear smile and a crooked brow. Maybe you’ve never been so happy as drowning in this syrupy broth, provided the buoyancy of a brick and the will of a microbe. To cannucks Freak Heat Waves tread similar simmering tides.

Myriam Gendron “Ma Délire- Songs of Love, Lost and Found” (Feeding Tube)

Hélène and I got to see this album performed, a rare treat for this era. All power in unassuming forms. All levels and dynamics and breathy lingering transitions. Folkloric revelations. Spiritual assertions. Tradition, perspective, liminal, hermetic. Spent time and it’s paralytic effect. If the weather has you down or trodden, here you’ll find a blanket and a dimmed candle. Your darkness is universal and the truths behind it are comfort. You are a visitor here and tea is served to remedy existential melancholy. 

Sex Tide “Ohio” (Feeding Tube)

Mourning the geographic truths of their existence, these barricaded melters chisel at the bone of their instruments ravenously. Seeking & destroying till a noisy kingdom cometh. Sax and guitar squall colliding with agonizing vocal scree in a hollow and narrow chasm, just like your husk of a thought chamber. The space in which these sounds were captured has been conquered, it’s walls are dripping with defeat. This is what you make instead of keeling over and what YOU make of it is YOUR threshold for pain. Sex Tide is Certified, bonafide and 2 parts  formaldehyde.

Julie Doiron “I Thought of You” (You’ve Changed Records)

Almost a decade later, ruminations given time to stretch and then reigned in over a week in a studio as a band, a way that has been made needlessly complicated for how direct it is in theory. Songs with feeling and emotions laid bare. Vulnerability moves mountains and tenderness is a weapon in this age. Pitchfork and other fux reminisce but the message still belongs here, at the heart of the heart, from the heart. Julie is a siren bent on bad blood and the sweet along with the bitter and wilting dynamics, a scribe of the uncomfortable and rawness too.

Pink Noise “Economy of Love” (Celluloid Lunch)

On the CL label, but under appreciated nonetheless. Salty, barfly wiseacre and his suitcase of synthetic sounds re-humanize computer linguistics with unflinching imperfection and impolite attitude. A cast of talented characters add and subtract where needed, from the comfortable shadows on the outskirts of their brazen leader’s trip. Neon shmaltz and cocktail lounge sweepings invigorate through a dusty chemical fog that you’ll metabolize in jagged specks. When your eyes start bleeding, you’ll get it.