Horrible Houses-Songs Written & Recorded Under the Influence of the Yellow House (2013)

 These tunes are beautiful fragments of melancholy. Like one of his heroes, John Fahey, Daniel is very good at coaxing emotional depth out of a simple series of guitar chords. Clanging off the 4-track hiss, the guitar plays off the lack of other sounds in the mix and gathers strength in the process. They'll never meet each other, but Horrible Houses and Michael Wohl should share a bill, or maybe split an EP. They're the only guys I know of making folk- and blues-based music at this late date that actually fucking matters.

Horrible Houses never fails to surprise: buy the ticket, take the ride, as the good Doctor once said. By now I've come to expect freakfolk* of some sort from this guy, but nothing he's done sounds quite like his previous releases. That's saying a lot, given that anyone who wants to sell records or push downloads can simply cut-and-paste a genre's sound onto blank tape again and again and be guaranteed attention, if not fame 'n' fortune (fancy that).

This is a collection of improv recordings done "under the influence of the Yellow House." I'm guessing that's a new kind of acid the Swedes are keeping to themselves. Hell, us Yankees and Itals probably couldn't afford it anyways, them Scandis always get the best shit with their sizeable welfare checks. Point is, I want some of what this guy's doing so I can make more interesting bad life decisions.

The first five tracks are empty. Not lifeless, but empty, the way Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack sounds hollowed out: stripped of all the dross and over-produced horseshit that hides most bands' lack of talent or passion. Empty the way the best American folk music sounded empty. Arthur Rothstein says at some point in Boardwalk Empire that all of life's problems arise from not being able to sit still in a room. In the same spirit, most music is desperate to fill that silence and stillness. Dismissing such anxiety, Daniel turns off the drum machine and ratchets up the vocal mix on these bedroom recordings.

 Some of his previous work was quirky for the sake of being quirky: certainly more interesting than most of what washes up on my "to review" pile, but not necessarily keepers. This album is nothing if not that. Dude claims that he buried some of these records under a real-existing Yellow House 6 years ago and dug 'em up in May; apparently Swedish dirt is more creative than American dirt, since these songs grew in the mulching. Throughout, it sounds like he's chasing a memory or constellation of images that slip away just at the point of recalling them clearly.

I'll close by encouraging you to CHECK IT, THEN BUY IT, for yourself.

*"Freakfolk" in the sense that this guy uses the forms of American folk music to craft his own sound, NOT in the sense that he is in any way indebted to or aping the driveling mimicrky and contrived jive of shitheads usually associated with this neologism.

Sideasideb-Old Adventures in Lo-Fi EP

Any of you kiddies like doing downers? Lemme tell ya, there's nuthin' like it this side of a major depressive episode. Things just sorta slow down and then (if you're lucky) stop moving altogether. Kinda like a normal day except with all the bad shit (read: most of it) carefully edited out so that it becomes a choose-your-own-adventure.

Of course, if you're operating on a head fulla Xanax, there ain't many adventures happening, but I digress. Sideasideb's second EP is sorta like that: things are indeed moving, out there, somewhere, but it all sort of mushes together in a blur of glacial synthesizer and mumble-whispered vocals in the distance. "Ten Speed" is probably the best track here: cutesy artsyfartsiness gradually gets serious by imploding into drum-guitar spazzfukery worthy of Hella. In fact, the mix of beats and spazziness sort of makes the comparison more apt now that those Hella guys are doing DeathGrips. I think they sped up the drum track at one point but who cares, right? Just let the Xanies guide you through this bit of rambling rattlenhum.

You can demo this bit of downed out weirdness here; hang out with the band here.

Michael Wohl-Eight Pieces for Solo Guitar

This is the sorta album you listen to alone, with a bottle of booze and the stillness of the night to keep you company. Not because it's the sort of misanthropic swill I love so much, but 'cause it's actually worth paying attention to. Occasionally I like to rant about how no one truly listens to music anymore (read my polemic about the last Beach House LP for more info on that front), but instead just goes for a given sound. They then download any and every example of said sound-as imparted to them through SoundCloud or LastFM or whatever website you use to steal music and scam on girls or boys-without ever hearing that noise blurbing outta yr speakers for something other than another example of whatever Pitchfork told you is good shit this week.

Which of course I'm guilty of, so fuck off. The point is that these eight meandering, rambling tunes are meant to be heard. Which is to say, if you give them a cursory listen, everything will sound the same. That's sort of the point, with any band or musician I can think of, from Arvo Part to Lou Reed's best. I couldn't begin to dissect this cassette tape's worth of long-time-rambling blues musicologically, but I'll give you some reasons your equally musically-illiterate ass should like it:
1) There's music for every mood, for every time of day, on here, and Wohl's always been good at writing songs to the tune of Old Man Time, that is to say, the witching hour when shit's weird, there ain't many people around, and you can only focus on one or two things. One of those should be "Poor Boy Long Way from Home Blues," which manages to be complex without ever being boring (if you don't understand that statement, go listen to any Led Zeppelin LP and ask yourself if you felt a single, solitary organic emotion the whole time except sheer disgust at any and all forms of arrogance and misogyny. If you did, you're either 1)a bigger crank and misanthrope than I am, or 2) a lunatic, so get back to listening to this tape!).

2) The "come for the nighttime melancholia, stay for the morning after effect": As best displayed on "Rainin' Sideways". While I'm a cranky jerkoff on the best of days and far worse typically, Wohl's plucking style has forced even me to consider that there may in fact be rays of sunshine poking through the incipient autumnal gloom. Even more impressively, he conveys this plucky mood without words: the best instrumentalists say more without speaking than most singers can get across their whole career.

3) This is just good Americana, kiddies. "Americana" is a loaded term, given that it can include everything from Abner Jay to, well, this.* Americana is also a dying genre, these days: for the most part, assholes buy collections like the Anthology of American Folk Music out of some consumerist sense of obligation ("ugghh my RECORD COLLECTION isn't COMPLETE without this ugghhh) than 'cause they actually wanna hear weird shit from the American backwoods ca. 1920. Well, I happen to dig all that weird caterwaulin', and this dood (Wohl, that is) is one of the only people trying to add something new to the genre (expansive as it is). "Long After We Are Dead" is a fucking great guitar piece, which also strikes a uniquely American chord**: this is music only statiunitese***, white or black, could make, and which we apparently are still decent at playing despite all the dogshit we've been spewing out onto the music scene since Skip James died and Lou Reed, god rest his soul, got clean.

But don't take my word for it, go listen to it, then buy a copy of the tapes before you can't, sucker! Physical copies of the tape come with sweet quotes from revered old American heroes such as John Fahey and Barbeque Bob, while also being way cooler than the mp3 files you're streaming through bandcamp. Party on, Blind Willie McTell; party on, Didier Hebert.

*Truth be told, I love "I'm A Good 'Ole Rebel," moral qualms aside. If any of you want to wade into the historical-ethical-political quicksand on this one, you're welcome to try. Just email me.
**All due respect to denizens of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada for equating "American" with "music produced in the nation-state of the U.S.A."
***Further deepening the waters of political correct bullshit, I'm using this term because English doesn't have an apposite term to denote people and things from the U.S. as opposed to the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

Rat King-Godsend LP (2013)

Big, ballsy blues scuzz noise that overfloweth with all the subtlety of an empty Heineken bottle to the face. Newcastle's Rat King slops together the cretinish sleaze of Birthday Party-era Nick Cave, the off-tone guitar of a No Wave band, and bass lines worthy of Prince Far-I to make something all their own. That mangled description fits the writhing, crawling, obscenely sexual obviousness of the music, I think.

With song titles like "Big Clitty City" and "Tramp Stamp," you can't lose (or absolutely will, depending on who you are). You keep waiting for Rat King's slow-churn blooz stomp to explode into punk firecrackers, but they just keep lurching along through the used condoms and empty bottles littering yr room after a night spent blitzed on Ecstasy and red wine with your boy-and-or-girlfriend. The singer just barely pulls off the chest thumping machismo required of this sorta rock 'n' roll, sorta the way that drunk at the bar in Hollywood managed to convince you he slept with a member of the Go-Gos back in '79, but only 'cause he's got a Germs burn and you've been cadging drinks off him all night. Whole thing reminds me of the much-missed, much-hated Kickboy Face.

Oh, yeah, the moosick. The bass sound is fucking huge and all over the place, closer to the sorta dub I blast when I'm baking my brain into a cake than minimal, retarded Dee Dee Ramone licks. The guitarist shoots off staccato riffs that twinkle as broken glass in the gutter, and the drums pound away like your hangover tomorrow morning.

Tired of all the metaphors and analogies? Ok, lemme tell ya a story, kiddies, that this album brings to mind. Well, no, it's too shameful to relate in all its detail. Suffice to say it involves this Drug Punk, too much booze, and his significant other in a hostel bathroom in Europe. 'Nuff said, Rat King is just that grimy.

Keep leering at that cutie at the other end of the bar, then go buy this LP at Rat King's bandcamp page. Hurry up, they only pressed 100 of these fuckers so I'm guessing it comes with sexual tips straight from the band isself. Rock out, fuck out, pass out, folks.

The Feeling of Love-So Chocolate CS (2012)

The fact that a man is making out with a cat on the cover of this cassette tells you a lot about Metz's The Feeling of Love. Well, not that much, in fact, although it hints at the perversity lurking beneath the harsh red-and-black cover.

The Feeling of Love's sound has three components: shrill, scrollsaw guitar; arrhythmic, off-kilter drumming; and a singer who howls in what sounds to me like the male version of the woman from AIDS Wolf. Being a Frenchman, The Feeling of Love's singer is a lot snottier, in a punk sorta way.

This album might be a bit too long-noiserock terrorism is, after all, a delicate proposition for most audiences-but I dig it. "Because He's the Singer" is just an almost-tuneful guitar line that the singer bounces, howls, mewls, and talks around. Most of the time he seems to be discussing Jon Spencer Blues Explosion(?). "Jordan's Rules" sounds like it's gonna be the cathartic release after the first two miserably drudging tunes, but the opening guitar riff just keeps riffing: sorta like Plastic Crimewave Sound, there's no release to found here. The singer lectures/rants/stalks over this guitar in French.

"Hand Clap Girls" unravels the blooz punk roots of The Feeling: go figure, electronic handclaps feature heavily. The music is moronically simple in the same way that the best songs on The Stooges' first album was:intentionally boring, it sucks you into a hypnotized fixation. Hell, it almost makes ya bounce! Really, though, the gold gots ta go to "I'm Nothing but a Drunk Pussy": it's a blues stomp filtered through people who've listened to the No New York comp a few too many times. The whole thing blows up in a hissing, staticy mess halfway through: it's the brilliant core of the album. Hell, I liked it so much it's on the most recent installment of Alone and Forsaken.

Listen to the tape and then buy it here. Read an interview with the frontman, Guillaume, Marietta, qua.Follow The Feeling of Love and their shenanigans on facebook. Brought to you care of Schmalzgrub Audiokassetten label.

Solar Snake-s/t EP (2012)

 * Bands/musicians: if I take a long time to respond to you or post yr stuff, it's not indifference but the fact that I have to act like an adult in between bouts of imitating Lester Bangs.*

Solar Snake is from Murmansk, Russia, a lovely port fronting on the White Sea. This drug punk in chief ain't no dummy, and knows where Murmansk is! It was a major shipment point for military hardware goin' to Crazy Uncle Joe during The Big One (World War II), and was also where Elizabeth I of England's emissaries landed when initiating diplomatic contacts with Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.

Historical geography lessons aside, Solar Snake gushes through some sloppy, noisy, distortion-overloaded blues-meets-shitgaze on what I assume is their debut EP. This falls somewhere between the tuneful end of drone and the harsh, anti-social end of lofi indie: there's a thick, muddy layer of guitar fuzz slathered over everything like peanut butter covering mouldy bread. Deep beneath the guitar squall, the singer intones in what could be Russian or English (honestly the vocals are mixed too low for me to tell) while the rhythm sections plods through their sections. "Rumble" brilliantly plagiarizes the riff of "Yr Gonna Miss Me" by 13th Floor Elevators, but slows it down and strips it to a savage, naked howl. Definitely the best track here. Instead of shredding, like the Roky original, it slithers along, draggin' you in its oil-slicked wake. Nod out to this after guzzling a bottle of robitussin and downing some acid.

I just got home, wasted and alone, and Solar Snake is shaping up to be a good accompaniment to a July evening where the sun doesn't go down til 9 pm: the noisy guitar licks are my companion in isolation, and there's a chilly, frigid feel to the whole thing that has something to do either with the guitar-domination nature of the recording, or the fact that this band is recording in the most populated city north of the Arctic Circle. Either way, keep on keepin' on, Solar Snakes!

Listen to the Snakes here. ROCK ON, RUSSIA!