Review: digital americana mixtape
There’s an odd formation of ye olde Green Day grossness within the first strums, throw me a bone slices into a vibrant cocktail of pain, energy and remorse, the lyrics almost undefinable, reminiscent of a chaotic young-adult malaise spent amongst estates of dry grass. At once and all together you begin falling, a youthful freedom tinged with responsibility, deterministic punks.
eviction – entry of the DIY aesthetic ten-fold, crust and sludge combine into a harsh feedback of nausea-noise. Shoulders dislocate and the dancefloor rectangle spirals into a circular alco-chem-mess. The frame of the tracks so far a broken speaker, giving its all to the last, vibrations as formation. Caustic feedback as a musical resolution. Evicted from your ear drum’s expectations. and so damn angry‘s beginnings see reliable sincere angst mutate into something a little more digital, americana falling apart at the seams, becoming only capital-cana within the contemporary. Anger of the 21st century…exhaustion and apathy and the tap of a metal-machine, fractured digital output. There’s a sadness in the loss of the singular and fixed, yet what of an entire generation who knew no different.
happywaiting. A strange assemblage of notes, scrapes and whines, oddly jaunty and forgetful synonymously, the bar its own, its smell putting others off. cold shoulder to cry on quickly understands the subtle escape attempts of punks’ formative years, from the background, encased in a suffocative gauze of drone is the sincerity of a lonely musician attempting to scramble at the scraps, swiftly strummed into place by an faintly upbeat riff.
care, there’s lots of it within this album, a modest, warm and husky-late-night-sesh filled embrace of what went wrong. Withdrawing much of the energy from past artists, too many to name, into an exhausted, sympathetic and yet encouraging voice of a move forward, however bleak the first few steps might be. hellion 1, the digital disallowing true connection, a tinkered flicker and then dudbeats and 404’s spat into a sporadic frenzy. A heart palpitation run through melting vinyl. With bark alone testifying to the neutrality of your decision; western digital and western waste care not for what you do, just move. Post-nasal drip spluttered down strings.
walk with me allows the past to enter more thoroughly, a mid-morning, hot-sun jig with a beer, but everyone here senses that everyone here aint that great; feelin’ rough, hangover tough, dicky belly, foggy skull and over into the next morning, glugging down to bear the pain.
your heart’s too hungry. One of the best tracks I have the pleasure to review. A defiant sigh beaconed to no one, but fuck, why not. Maybe you should stop, maybe you shouldn’t, this album’s as pleasant as a hangover is going to get, your fear’s strange, not tacked to anything really.
Gotta admit, I went into a nostalgic trance for a bit there, :: i love you but, didn’t help, it takes me back somewhere I really can’t put my finger on, somewhere covered in annoyance and disappointment and yet, comfort. You only want to be horizontal right now, face perpendicular to the skies, colour don’t matter, you’re in your head…and you aint getting out for a while. Sorry champ.