Tropical Popsicle - The Dawn of Delight (2013)

 

Here's a record from the not too distant past. Now a decade old, this lone full length from a San Diego band called Tropical Popsicle features 13 blissed out tracks that are equal layers psych-pop and garage, with an icing of 80's cold wave.

You've heard it all before, right?

There's something just slightly better about Tropical Popsicle, however, than your average 2000-teens garage revival. The music pushes the nostalgia to include, not just the better parts of 60's psych but also 80's synth pop. The result is both simultaneously recognizable and new... in a different place and time, with the backing of a major label, Tropical Popsicle could have been huge. Maybe the same could be said for anybody. But then, would that anybody also have record artwork nearly as interesting? Ooh-La-La. 

Vinyl also available through Volar Records. $10 frikin' bucks!

HUSHPUPPY - Singles Club (Remastered) (2021)

Ok here we go. Sorry for the silence folks. Something something baby, yada yada grad school...

I am also sorry for forgetting how to format these damn Blogger posts. I pray subsequent posts will look more normal.

Phew! With all that awkwardness out of the way, let's talk music.

This release by NYC musician Zoë Brecher is essential listening for anyone keen on the output of 90's K Records or lo-fi indie bedroom pop in general. Her songs are beautiful for their simplicity of melody and humility of voice; overall familiar but fresh. Upon first listen, you may notice what appears to be Ms. Brecher's novice musicianship (she plays all instruments herself) but it's a deception. A five minute browsing of her Instagram page shows that she is an extremely accomplished drummer, playing for several bands such as Kalbells, Oberhoffer, Sad13, and most recently with NYC band Bachelor. 

Why, then, is this HUSHPUPPY release full of drum machine songs, you ask? Because she's crafting an aesthetic and doing it remarkably well. These songs, most of which don't break the 2 minute mark, will be stuck in your damn head until you breakdown and buy the cassette tape. At least, that's what happened to me. 

**UPDATE: limited vinyl now available through Bandcamp link below!

12 songs.

Link: HUSHPUPPY - Singles Club (Remastered)

Loud Sun - Sea Grave (2017)

Loud Sun's Andrew Jansen and I have something in common: we both recently moved away from the west coast.

Making a new home for ourselves defines chapters in our lives. Death and birth. There are the big things we leave behind, like friends, which me mourn the loss of most immediately. And as time progresses, a deeper nostalgia for lost things awakens: yawning and stretching into fringe details, we begin missing the way the air felt in the morning, the sounds of a Baptist church choir practicing on Wednesday nights, the smells of nearby restaurants.

This melancholia can quickly become morose, especially if one allows the dust to settle.

Sea Grave is the second release from Jansen's Loud Sun project, and it feels like a love letter to the west coast in a lot of ways. Jansen is a keen student of mellow, sun-bleached, shimmering pop with wisps of psychedelia, though his bio suggests he may actually be a student of the natural sciences. Perhaps that's why he seems so adept at combining the feel of a place with his music.

From beginning to end, Sea Grave is a beautiful record, and you can purchase a cassette tape through his Bandcamp page. For myself, having moved from a more ideal scenario to a less ideal scenario, the music here feels penetrating and concise... an ode to a memory. The impeccable song "Teen Pyramids" has become my anthem of the autumn.



Link to Loud Sun Bandcamp page for Sea Grave, 10 songs:

Loud Sun - Sea Grave

Lìo Dominguez - Cine Bar Club (2014)

I'm convinced that time of day, temperature, and precipitation all play a role in what we want to listen to. Take today, for example: in Portland it is a typically cold and sopping wet December day, just like weeks worth of days before and days worth of weeks to follow...  and this release by Lìo Dominguez, a singer-songwriter from Haedo, a city about 40 minutes driving distance outside of Buenos Aires proper, is providing the perfect soundtrack to an unabashedly lazy afternoon.

The band has got a severely cool melancholia going on, like a Spanish Velvet Underground. Simple two chord progressions drift effortlessly back and forth, like a pendulum made of feathers and cotton. The vocals give off a similar affectation, but it's simultaneously a honest and natural delivery.  This isn't a sleepy-time listen by any means, but sort of a laze around on the couch drinking coffee because it's shitty outside kind of listen. If Olympia, Washington's K Records had existed in Argentina, Lìo Dominguez would have fit nicely into that seen... somewhere between Beat Happening and Some Velvet Sidewalk.

10 songs, name your price.

Lìo Dominguez - Cine Bar Club

Invisible Things - Time AS One Axis (2015)

I'm so damn stressed about being back in school. I remember, years ago, when I first went to college ... there was almost always that one much older person in the class. Well, that's me now. And I can't fuck around like I did 15 years ago when I was first a student. People look at me like I know something they don't ... like if they look closely enough at the grey in my hair they'll see fucking algebraic equations etched in the cuticles. The Beliebers in my psychology class can try to sniff answers out of my wrinkles all they want, but they'll be disappointed to find they're only smelling the black licorice deodorant I drunkenly purchased off Etsy last week.

Age rarely means wisdom, as we are only as wise as we fool people into "beliebing" we are.

Mark Shippy must be an exception to this rule. Once a guitarist for the famed deconstructionist rock pioneers, U.S. Maple, he's just released this explosive record along with drummer Jim Sykes from noise rock band, Parts & Labor. Shippy's guitar work brings to mind his atonal mindfuck style from the 90s, where your preeettttyyy sure whatever he's doing to that guitar is highly illegal. But the chaos is reigned in, somewhat. These songs do feel like songs... nothing one could dance to, but there is structure in here, somehow. The end result is a really engaging experimental rock record. For fans of the above mentioned bands, and for anyone who remembers the heyday of Touch And Go and Skin Graft. Maybe Marnie Stern and Deerhoof, also.

8 songs. Also available on vinyl.

Invisible Things - Time AS One Axis

Nive Nielsen & The Deer Children - Nive Sings! (2010)

Found this album in a backwards fashion. Well, sort of, ever since we've been geographic-based 'Scenes of a City' posts, it has become a bit of a habit of mine to throw locations into bandcamp and see what pops out. Even if it is somewhere remote and/or culturally removed from the majority of bandcamp users. Anyhow, as you may have put together I was reading about Greenland (lolling around with a cold, I seem to get little done other than read wikipedia). In particular I was learning about the only locality that passes as for urban in the arctic country, it's capital, Nuuk. As you might imagine a city of some seventeen thousand doesn't have all that much going on musical, but then again, it is the center of Greenlandic culture. So, I poked around and found something to share.

Nive Neilsen is the Greenlandic singer that this so aptly titled refers to. However, without the fact that she's from Greenland being pointed it out at such length by yours truly already, it would be easy to never even consider this coming from the United States or Canada. The music is rooted in American folk, though very much through the lens of modern indie pop, maybe the best comparison I can summon is Benni Hemm Hemm. Like most of the albums I have been praising most highly lately, the style isn't fixed throughout. Sure, there are folksy indie pop tunes that do an wonderful job as showing of Neilsen's elegant singing talent like "Good for You" and "My Coffee Boy." Just these would have earned enough of my interest for me to post Nive Sings! And yet there's more to this release. For an album that's title implies the showcasing of a singer, the instrumentation is damned remarkable. The roster of musicians that worked as the Deer Children is lengthy and they played all sorts of things from weird folk favorites like the saw and banjo to the ever-adorable ukulele and kazoo. There's even a song called "Autoharps!" You can guess what may happen in that one. So while Nive Sings! was put out five years ago, yet this is the first I've heard of her. Once I looked around it seems she's still active, including getting some attention from Daytrotter. I'll finish by saying I think she's been overlooked and certainly merits attention.

To be had here:
Nive Nielsen & The Deer Children - Nive Sings!

Basic Printer - Moon Gear (2012)

Here we have a submission from Jesse Gillenwalters of Binghamton, NY, who makes creative electronic pop songs under the moniker of Basic Printer. "Moon Gear" is one of an impressive 9 releases, and is a concept record where the music serves as soundtrack to a fictional game about the planet of Platonia. It's easy to imagine, at least if the game is a video game, as this is synth-heavy music lending immediately lush, warm and colorful tones to these 10 songs.

While "Moon Gear" is a very accessible listen, it's not a straight-up pop record by most stretches of the imagination. There are stringed instruments throughout steering this toward the realm of chamber pop but the warped synth tones, of which there are many, keep that tag at a long arm's length. The record overall also stretches into the progressive and weird, especially on "Flora Aetus" and my favorite track "Knockout Mouse". But Gillenwalters' voice maintains a pop timbre when not heavily effected, giving some songs a Max Tundra meets Har Mar Superstar sort of vibe.

This is the second record I've heard out of Binghamton, NY that I've really dug (the first being Underground River). I'll have to put Binghamton on the short list for a possible Scenes Of A City post (check out previous posts for Guayaquil, Ecuador and Vilnius, Lithuania).

Get it here:

Basic Printer - Moon Gear 

Caterwaulrus - eNVy yoU (2013)

Texas has an unfortunate stigma associated with it. To some, it's a state full of conservative, gun-toting, Christians... and to people like my mother, not to mention most of my family, friends, fellow Portlanders, etc...  that's akin to being a criminal or an alien or worse.

But, preconceptions aside, Texas also has a history of being a breeding ground for some great psychedelic music. Roky Erikson and the 13th Floor Elevators were out of Austin, a city that The Black Angels still call home. Red Krayola were from Houston, and so is the outsider musician, Jandek. The Butthole Surfers came out of San Antonio. Those are some severely psychedelic acts, and I'm thrilled to say that Caterwaulrus, which is the solo work of one John Michael Sherry, fits that lineage quite nicely.

"eNVy yoU" is not a rock record by any means. It's not a throwback 60's psych record either. If anything, it's like lo-fi bedroom pop but with broad stripes of psychedelic production. A fair comparison would be Animal Collective, but this is a bit stranger. Voices pan from left to right speaker and almost every track is drenched in delay, making this a good headphones record. It's got a drum machine at times, and is mostly acoustic, but with all the weird shit happening it escapes a "folk" categorization. I suppose if you could take what was happening in Daniel Johnston's head during his psychotic break and set it to music, it would sound like Austin's Caterwaulrus.

9 songs, name your price.

Caterwaulrus - eNVy yoU

EP Grab Bag vol. 39

fydhws – 9 (2013)

Macedonia is about as far away from the rock epicenter as you can get, which explains this great piece of music. There is little rock here, much more of a film score using very creepy atmospheric tones and sounds. I played this while I was reading the morning paper and it provided perfect accompaniment to the horrors presented in those pages. 

RAAF – KRA! (2013)

This band’s name perfectly sums up their sound. Not sure how, but it does. This group form the Netherlands put together a short little single that takes equally from Shoegaze and foot-stomping rock anthems.  It is big, scary, and rocking. The group is playing a bunch of shows around Dutch speaking lands, and will hopefully drop a full EP on us soon. 

Velttenz – Live or Die (2013)

Jumping down to Brazil we get a fist full of garage dynamite from these lovely lads. Everything you want and nothing you don’t from your punk infused garage rock. It gets to the point, kicks in your eardrums, and tries to fuck your girlfriend. You might have to punch one of the group’s members during their set, but that’s half their charm. 

Remedies – Inanimate EP (2013)

After getting my ass kicked in, I need to take things down a notch and nurse my sore bum. I pop in Remedies and it does the trick. Chill electronic jams that could still scare your local yoga instructor away from using them as meditation tools. When the reverb soaked vocals come in to Dyybuk (the strongest track on this EP), it just about pushes everything else out of my mind. Sure, they are from Alabama, but I won’t hold that against them. If they are playing music like this in bedrooms across the state, I will have to fly in sometime.

The Woolen Men - Pavilion (2009)

There's no debate that a tomato straight off the vine tastes monumentally better than those from the supermarket produce aisle. In the same vain, music straight from the "bedroom" carries with it something you can't get from mainstream music. There's an intimacy that escapes the refined output from major label studios... low budget recordings are more authentic. It's easier to attach humanness to it and, for that reason, it's more palpable. You can close your eyes while listening to a Guided By Voices record and almost smell the musty basement they recorded it in, because you've been in basements before. Few of us have ever been in a recording studio... who knows what one smells like? 

The Woolen Men are a prolific Portland 3-piece whose lo-fi recordings are all recorded live. They've been around for about four years and, during that time, have played over 70 shows and released 5 cassettes, most of which have been released through member Raf Spielman's well-established tape/vinyl label, Eggy Records. Each member takes turns writing songs and singing, akin to Sebadoh, but here the end product sounds like power-pop meets garage. Guided By Voices comes to mind, as does Camper Van Beethoven. In interviews the band sites the 80's-90's New Zealand band, The Clean, as being a big influence... which is evident in the immediate appeal of their songs. David Kilgour's pop prowess isn't lost on The Woolen Men, and you can be sure that the songs on this, their first tape, will get you hooked.


"Land of Laughs" and "Today" sound like power-pop classics from some band that time forgot. 

This video is for a great cut from a later release.


Music straight off the vine ...probably my favorite band in Portland right now. If you like what you hear, be sure to visit Eggy Records or their bandcamp page and toss them a few dollars. Three songwriters who share that knack for writing melodies that make you immediately nostalgic for certain times, places, and/or people.


The Woolen Men - Pavilion