Hi friends,
We wanted to share a few tracks that've been swimming in our minds lately.
1) GUNK - "Stay Personable"
In 2021 I went on a musical journey through the various bands associated with one of my favorite rock and roll groups: Spirit of the Beehive. I was shook to my core when I learned that Beehive's frontman Zack Schwartz was once the frontman of another personal favorite rock and roll group: Glocca Morra. In Beehive, he's traded the old Glocca growl for a nearly whispered and often distant voice – sometimes sturdy, always delayed and reverb'ed enough that the lyrics are tough to decipher. But an even bigger surprise came from Glocca's old bassist, Nate Dionne. Before Glocca Morra, Dionne played in the emo group Snowing, and went on to play in the one-off supergroup-of-sorts Dogs on Acid alongside ex-Algernon Cadwallader singer Peter Helmis. The two now perform their lo-fi singer-songwriter slacker tracks as Yankee Bluff. But in between Dogs and Yankee, Dionne put out a great record with GUNK, and then an exceptional solo album under his own name: 'Love is Always Worth It'. I would highly encourage anyone who has read this far to seek out all of these gems, but if you only hear one track from off the beaten path, make it GUNK's "Stay Personable", the perfect sunset-gazing, fake-Pavement B-side concoction. It's careful not too get to ambitious, but the downright simple and repetitive melody is infectious, while tugging at something unseen in the deep halls of longing.
- MLP
2) Swirlies - "San Cristobal de las Casas"
Shoegaze is chiefly remembered as a British-Irish phenomenon, though there were few American acts that could be thrown under that label. Out of this transatlantic contingent, the band that produced the most creative work with the genre’s fairly limited range was Swirlies, who hailed from Boston. The skinny on them initially, and also somewhat in retrospect, was that like many other bands, they resided too much and too long in the shade of My Bloody Valentine. A judgement that might fit for their debut album Blender Tongue Audio Baton, which as far as being a knock-off is concerned, is a fairly good one. Their second album, They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of the Salons, seems to have been a very conscious, definite refutation of this judgement, as not only a transformation but a multi-pronged expansion into other musical zones, past and present, from kosmische musik to 60s psych and pop to cut-up, tape music and danceable electronica. A broadening of their sound enabled by the drafting into synthesizers and samplers to shake up their relatively traditional four-piece, rock set-up, and after recording their previous album and EPs in a lo-fi, homebrewed fashion, they took advantage of the high-end studio laboratory to build a kind of restlessly inventive ‘let’s push this button and see what happens’ range to the album’s palettes and unexpected structural and stylistic shifts.
This adventurism takes many interesting forms. Sounds of Sebring, Pony and Sterling Moss are rock tunes chopped and screwed in very satisfying ways.
Sounds of Sebring with its coterie of squealing and woozy synthlines whipping along and over the guitar work, and the close is heralded with a humongous, pasted in and distorted drum line, which gives way to an electronic drone. Pony is a bright number, buoyed along by a carefree little drum machine sequence, given a slightly ambiguous edge by increasingly prevailing gusts of synthesis and feedback. You Can’t Be Told It, You Must Behold It ditches guitars, bass and live drums all together in a nice and simple ditty, sung sweetly by vocalists Damon Tutunjian and Christina Files over a driving vocoder part and wispy synth work and electronic drums.
Two Girls Kissing and San Cristobal de Las Casas stick more firmly within rock territory, with prominent guitars and a propulsive rhythm engine, though the synths seemed to have encouraged greater complexity in the songwriting. Both are great but San Cristobal de las Casas might be the overall highlight. A tune about the Zapatista uprising, which in its music and lyrics wavers and veers between force and reflection, the obfuscation of abstraction and direct emotional release.
- Ruairí
3) Akofa Akoussah - "I Tcho Tchass"
I’ve only known Akofa Akoussah’s music for about a year now, but her self-titled (one and only) album became a quick favorite and welcome companion throughout the sticky summer quarantine of 2021. Afro-funk tracks are somehow effortlessly fused with ballads, jazz, and Togolese folk music, yet they remain a fresh delight each time I listen. Akoussah’s dynamic vocals begin brightly in “Tango”, take a sensuous turn in “La Lem”, grow wistful in “Kimumbu”, and culminate in the final track of the album which I’ve shared with you. With artists like these, I only wish that there was more to dig through, more music, more writing, but her voice lingers for days on end, and that's as notable and comprehensive a legacy as any.
- Malkah