This here is a clean up Grab Bag, thing I meant to post early, sometimes much earlier yet to do my poor organizational skills on the computer I lost track of completely. I find it ironic that my day job is keeping a warehouse of books, counting somewhere around a million titles, in order and to retrieve them at a moments notice, but ask me to make a logical set of subfolders on my macbook and I fail utterly.
To be had here:
Sadly misplaced this EP in the shuffle of submitted material from the last few months. NO/NO are from Milwaukee and play new wave inspired post-punk. The bandcamp page is full of wonderful tags like coldwave, dark wave and shoegaze which are more or less unexplainable. What I can elucidate on are the eerie singing, done in a near-falsetto at times and suitably subtle enough to let the instruments shine. The guitar, keys and drums are equally the stars of this EP, really swirling into a most excellent coaction of post-punk glamor.
There are but two songs I nearly overlooked on this release but when you listen to it you'll swear there are more. This is due to the shifting tones present in the tracks, which seems to be unified by little more than an awkward bizarreness. The second track is a gloomy folk song that is exceptionally curious after the exceedingly erratic display that is the first song, "Driving Horse (Gluten-Free Listening Guide)." They also wanted to share their EP from last year, Go Exist, that is also very strange and confusingly evocative.
Divine Intervention Now is from Philadelphia and has made a strange EP that is quite suitable after hearing Creature from Dell Pond. It also has some folk aspects, notably acoustic guitar parts, in the mix, and very weird lyrics. All of it is sung in the deep, gravely voice and accompanied by a nice array of guitars, drums, chimes, horns and other wind instruments that make it like a dream one might have after drinking a bunch of coffee, watching old movie clips and passing out. Though the chaotic features appear most obviously, with careful listening there's a firm bedding of distraught cultural catharsis being expressed in the songwriting.
Additionally, there's a little back story as to how I got my hands on this EP. After receiving an email that explain they want to send my a physical copy, which I am totally cool with, but I was surprised to see when I finally got my hands on it that the package had a miniature bible in it with the pages cut out to hold an SD card inside. Of course being a barely functional adult I didn't have a working SD card reader so I hopped in my car and had to ask my friend to tell me what was in this mysterious package. Then I mixed up which of the dozen or so downloads I made there up and could not even recall which came off the SD card, so it was delayed further. How I did so after seeing the album art is beyond me, but I guess better late than never. Sure, I could have hunted it down online from clues and the initial email, but if someone takes a knife to the bible to give you music, you use the fucking SD card.
