1998 Ford Windstar - Teeyaahkiki (Open country_exposed land_land in open_land exposed to view,)

Give me some atmospheric swells with some pitched down poetry over the top and I’ll be happy. There’s a whole burgeoning scene of this sort of stuff that seemed to start with Run DMT’s tripped out ramblings on last year’s Dreams, but Unlimited Free Milkshakes seems to do it best. Whether on the Cute Boy Kissing Booth LP out earlier this year or on the heroin party demos circulating on tumblr its clear that this aesthetic is something that the label has embraced wholeheartedly.

This unpronounceable cut from their label comp is just about the best stab they’ve had at it yet. Though the focus here seems to be centered on the still obscured vocals, there’s a whole lot of merit to the drones that 1998 Ford Windstar (god, I can’t get over the name) has put into the songs. It’s not like Tim Hecker level drones we’re talking here, but that’s not what he appears to be aiming for. These are warped, cracked barely stitched together threads of reversed sounds and synth stabs paired with a comically—and horrifyingly—pitched down set of vocal samples. It’s the sort of thing that sounds like it could’ve been put together in, like, thirty minutes. Hell, maybe it was, but that doesn’t change the fact that we still have a pretty moving track on our hands. And it might be worth your time to cop the whole compilation from which it’s drawn.

-Colin

Have A Nice Life - Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000

This song, this album, this band. Some of the heaviest shit of all time. I don’t really mean sonically, at least in the primary half of the song. For a song titled “Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000,” it really floats along quite nicely. It’s got tinges of Phil Elverum’s projects, but it’s heavenly swoop really seems more indebted to the shoegaze and dreampop side of things rather than the existential heaviness of the Microphones. I mean for a while. At about three minutes in, the song begins to mirror it’s damaged lyrics. The sentiments encapsulated in phrases like “Just tell me who’s mother I have to kill/I’m fine like I’ve always been, except I don’t remember-when/my conscience didn’t act up again” are expressed through guitars and drums pushed far into the red. But despite all that, despite the heaviness. I can’t help but be reminded of simpler times. Deathconsciousness came into my life at a time where, despite not really ever hanging out with anyone in person, i was able to fully connect to some of the friends that have become nearest and dearest to my heart (some of whom are even part of this blog.) So yeah, despite the gravity of this song, this album, this band, it inspires nothing but good vibes whenever I put it on.

-Colin

Memoryhouse-Radium Girls

It’s not surprising that this song has been buried in obscurity, lost in the whole internet blogosphere, or hype machine or whatever you wanna call it. The dream pop duo of Memoryhouse established their identity mainly off of their acclaimed EP, The Years. From what I can gather, Radium Girls is a rare single of myspace level obscurity that floated around the internet sometime in 2009, shortly before The Years started making waves during the “chillwave summer” of 2010. Once such EP hit and blogs began raving, it seems Radium Girls vanished as nothing more than an early demo. A thorough google search even today shows that Radium Girls has barely registered as a blip on anyone’s musical radar, which is surprising considering how powerful the blogosphere works nowadays. 

For someone like me who has fallen in love and followed these guys for such a long time, this comes as only half a surprise. The real surprise comes from the song’s sound, but I’ll get to that later. If one pays attention enough to their periodically updated Tumblr, one knows the Memoryhouse has developed this niche out of the “experimental” phase before releasing their debut full length LP this year, The Slideshow Effect. It always seemed like they were never going to release anything besides segmented ambient tracks (posted quite often on their tumblr courtesy of Evan Abeele), random guitar swells and a small group of singles. They kept an image of mysticism, as Evan would chug out these ambient snippets and Denise would churn out milky, dreamy film pictures in periodic doses. They’re certainly no Best Coast, a band that spent it’s pre-LP days churning out more EPs than one can count on their hands (don’t quote me on that), but the concept is similar. In my eyes, they’ll always be that stereotypical bedroom blog-level band who spent the majority of it’s lifespan in experimentation, and that’s why the radically different sounding demo of Radium Girls didn’t shock me too much.

It’s hard to listen to Radium Girls and not be astonished from the sound shift. Yeah it’s dreamy, because you know, they’re a dream pop band. But this track is by far their most jamming of anything they’ve ever produced so far (you can argue The Kids Were Wrong comes close). It’s the only occasion that Memoryhouse has driven a song via a fuzzy, dare I say, rocking drum machine beat, which already surprising in itself when you consider how simplistic and tame Memoryhouse usually is percussion-wise. It’s also surprisingly shoegazey. After the band came out with a My Bloody Valentine cover, you can’t help but at least think of them as you listen to this track even if it technically sounds nothing like them. While the instrumentation is vastly different from anything Memoryhouse has come out with following this track, Denise’s vocal style hasn’t changed one bit, so many will feel right at home with Radium Girls.

Also, that outro. 

-Michael 

Lemon Jelly - Page One

Alice: “I see nothing.” 

Cheshire Cat: “My. You have good eyes.” 

When there was nothing at all… Nothingness: it’s tough, isn’t it? The issue of nothingness is one that has confused not only philosophers but normal people ever since they could grasp the concept. If you talk about nothingness on a smaller scale, what is it? If I move my hand, and in the space behind is nothing, then is what’s left behind nothing? Or is it the space where a hand used to be? Or simply space as a distinct separate concept from nothingness? Does the act of moving my hand create that nothingness, that space, or did it already exist when I put my hand there? Was the nothingness there waiting to be filled? Does my hand displace nothingness? Or is nothingness covered by my hand, or is it instead destroyed? Everyone I know gets a bit twitchy if they have to think about the idea of nothingness too hard. To many it brings the implication that your existence is meaningless, that we are infinitesimal in the scope of the universe, but I’ve never seen it as darkly as that. If a box is empty, you could say it is full of nothing, perhaps. Maybe it is full of nothingness only waiting to be filled by something else. Because nothingness is not already-defined, it awaits definition. Therefore, nothingness is the seed of possibility. Nothingness is the potential for being. It is the path to everything, that’s what makes it astounding.  Here, I’ll give you a lovely song to help you think about it. Keep moving ahead, staying mindful of the nothingness which is constantly delivering itself to you the potentials of your every waking moment.