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.

Michael Wohl-Moonfeeder/Songs of Impermanence 7" (2013)

 As the Valdarno heats up, a nocturnal lifestyle is becoming more and more appealing: the daytime here is so hot it's like walking into an oven when I go out to buy a beer, so the day's become night and nighttime, like Fogerty said, is the right time.

Just in time for the Tuscan summer comes this bit of spartan folk from Seattle. As on Wohl's 2012 demo, this is barebones, standalone guitar music. In many ways, the demo was a tribute  to the blues and Americana influences that Wohl proudly wears on his sleeve. These two songs, however, find him starting to work out his own idiom within that tradition. His playing is thoroughly indebted to Fahey, still, but "Moonfeeder" is more measured than Fahey's spry, even effusive, plucking. The guitar is almost melancholic at times, without being heavy-handed. Wohl ends the tune with a flourish of upbeat plucking, though; an overnight train journey and not an all-night bender, perhaps, is the setting.
"Song of Impermanence" sounds like a tighter, more coherent reworking of the loose, improvised "Melatonin Blues," my favorite tune from the 2012 demo. The piece is a bit of lonesome midnight solitude crafted in a jaunty form. Around 4:21 the song soars off into ethereal heights, closing on a note of perfect, spacy elegance.

The musos among my readers will enjoy this two-song EP for the masterful guitarwork. The rest of us can get into it for the mood. Either way, give this a spin next time it's 5 am and you're too wired to sleep. Also, the cover is gorgeous and it's fun staring at it when you're stoned stupid.

Physical copies of the EP will be available in August, stay tuned. 

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!

Pink Reason-By a Thread 7" (2007[?])

 "Dope is just pot for people who wanna be hardcore"-Kevin Failure

've you ever had one of those nights where you go to bed at 5 am and wake up at 8 am 'cause you're still so drunk that you not only can't get to bed, but can't even lie on your back without getting the 'spins?
  This little three-song baby is the soundtrack to the day following that night. The first song, "by a thread," is tinny, relentless, and catatonic to the point that the only appropriate response is to sit there in a drunken stupor, numbly nodding along to the bangclang in yer brain.

"The Devil Always Wins" is pretty much our anthem over here at Drug Punk. For a guy whose work ostensibly owes so much to Russian punk, Kevin Failure fucking nails the sort of acapella Delta Blues stomp you'd expect to hear on one of those Smithsonian Angola Work Camp comps. Play this one when noon strikes and you're just sober enough to start piecing together how many friendships you destroyed last night.
   "Down on Me" returns to the abject, thudding spiral of "By a Thread." There's an element of warmth to this song though-maybe its the Vicodin inertia of Kevin Failure's voice. Then around 2:45 the whole song temporarily shifts into scroll-saw hell before settling back down into its static haze.
    So if you're having one of those Sunday mornings where you don't even want to be able to put together a coherent thought for fear of what you'll remember, throw "By a Thread" on and revel in your own slime.

A cheap holiday in other peoples' misery.

*EDIT, 9.15.12: I reup'd the file. Download BAT HERE. *

This thing is long out of print. But check out this interview! 

Then, mosey on over to the good folks at Siltbreeze, and buy Pink Reason's magnum opus, Cleaning the Mirror.