Reviews

Trouble in Mind

Guardian Singles Guardian Singles LP reissue

Like me and seemingly every other discerning garage and post-punk fan, Trouble in Mind was enthralled by Gonerfest 17’s New Zealand band showcase last year. I bought every release by every one of the bands that I could get my hands on. Trouble in Mind took it further by reissuing this, the debut album by Auckland’s GUARDIAN SINGLES. It was originally released in a tiny 150-copy pressing with only a few copies making it out of New Zealand. Now those who unluckily missed out the first time get another chance at this fabulous record. The music is breezy and jangly with a jagged edge. The singing is tense and determined, earnest and dreamy. The songs swirl around the room and my brain making beautiful patterns. I want and need more. Bonus points to the label for pressing this on heavy vinyl.

Guardian Singles Feed Me to the Doves LP

Raucous alt-rock or witty, angst-driven post-punk are two of the pigeonholes I might jam the latest full-length by GUARDIAN SINGLES into, but either would be a square peg in a round hole scenario. The garage static and fuzz from previous releases is left behind in favor of articulate songwriting and big bop energy. Lyrically, this album navigates our contemporary universal struggles with poetic appeal. Sonically, this album drifts from backcountry rabble-rousers to soft, drifting, emotionally evocative ballads. With all its variation, articulate writing, and relatable material, this album is easy to keep on repeat.

Lithics Tower of Age LP

If you’re familiar with LITHICS from either of their two previous albums, you’re not in for any surprises: they mine similar fields here more or less; usually less, in that if anything, they have stripped their minimalist approach back even further. There are BEEFHEART-ian moments when it seems like someone shuffled the song sheets and each member is playing to a different score. They do allow themselves one third-album stretch goal on “The Symptom”: an extended five-minute jam with Burroughs cut-up speak-sung lyrics. If punk is three chords and the truth, what can we say with one chord? One note? LITHICS’ punk is one note and a question.

Melenas Dias Raros LP

Fuzzed-out jangle from Pamplona, Spain that channels the C86-obsessed late-aughts wave of _____ GIRLS groups (think both DUM DUM and VIVIAN), but thankfully, MELENAS also demonstrate a set of influences beyond what would have been covered in an issue of Vice from last decade. There’s some obvious traces of STEREOLAB and the super-underrated SLUMBER PARTY all over the droning organ, motorik beat, and ethereal, overlapping vocals that run through the opener “Primer Tiempo,” while the melancholic “No Puedo Pensar” could be a modern Spanish translation of ’80s Flying Nun heroines LOOK BLUE GO PURPLE, and “Ya No es Verano” works some subtle FEELIES-inspired tension that builds without ever fully breaking. Over the course of a full album, it all blurs into a soft-focus and slightly hallucinatory pop shimmer, just in time for a socially distant summer spent daydreaming about places we can’t possibly inhabit.

Naked Roommate Do the Duvet LP

Oakland’s NAKED ROOMMATE entered this world as a duo of Amber SermeÁ±o and Andy Jordan, at a point when both were also busy with the WORLD. Although they’ve swelled to a four-piece for Do The Duvet, with extra muscle from members of bands like PREENING and EXIT GROUP, it’s that first-mentioned band which feels like the big sonic clue here. If the WORLD were kinda like YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS as a ska band—minimalist, shivery, but with a very pronounced groove—NAKED ROOMMATE are closer to YMG meets ESG, the most discofied end of early ’80s post-punk rendered extra febrile and delicate. The beats are programmed and synths twinkle and burble blithely, nudging minimal synth territory on “Fill Space,” but Jordan’s guitar and Alejandra Alcaca’s basslines retain meatspace humanity over these ten songs, providing hooks galore as they do so.

Nightshift Zöe LP

Glasgow’s NIGHTSHIFT recorded their debut LP in lockdown with each member of the group independently layering their contributions on top of what was added before them, but the end result as presented on Zöe has a warmth and organic sensibility that seems relatively at odds with that creation process. Spindly, hypnagogic post-punk full of sprawling beats, spectral vocal harmonies, humming keyboards and winding woodwinds, equally suited to zoning out in the tall grass of a pastoral Scottish countryside as they are to soundtracking a late-night art school exhibition opening in some inner city loft. There’s hints of ELECTRELANE (and by transitive properties, STEREOLAB) in the slow-motion drone of “Piece Together,” and the haunting, otherworldly rhythms and overlapping chants of the RAINCOATS circa Odyshape/Moving are summoned in “Outta Place” and “Infinity Winner,” but the knockout here is the ominous and slowly crashing contempo-No Wave of “Make Kin,” with its deadpan spoken vocals, tom-only drums, borderline-skronky clarinet, and dark, staccato bass rumble all taking the shape of a less willfully antagonistic UT—the sound of falling down the rabbit hole of your mind.

Onyon Last Days on Earth LP

This four-piece out of Leipzig turned quite a few heads last year with their debut cassette. Among the folks wowed by their odd mix of primitive post-punk, drippy garage (think Help-era THEE OH SEES),  kitschy sci-fi timbres, and goth-adjacent art-punk were the good folks over at Trouble in Mind, who reissued that cassette in the US and are now here with the group’s debut LP. In her review of their last release, MRR’s Erika Elizabeth expressed hope that on their next record they might “lean even harder into the wild electro-art-punk impulses,” a sentiment I would have echoed at the time. The band, however, has leaned garage-ward. I think it still works, and fans of their debut should still find plenty to love across the twelve tracks on this LP. Any disappointment that I have stems from some potential I imagined from chalking the band’s initial sound up to a choice on their part, rather than something necessitated by their amateurism. In any event, they seem to be playing with more confidence now, the record has a beefier sound, and they really manage to craft a unique atmosphere, even if some of the songwriting is a little blander than I’d hoped.  Overall, I think it’s a cool record, and it contains some absolute bangers—“Alien Alien,” with its detuned extraterrestrial beach party vibe, is one of my favorite tracks of the year. At the very least, give that a listen!

Parsnip When the Tree Bears Fruit LP

When I heard this band for the first time I almost got evangelical! Their first EP is a perfect meetup of the PANDORAS and MELODY DOG that I had no idea was possible, a true and total dream… Cool Australian mod girls making sounds that seem like something K would have put out in 1985 or 1993! This LP is definitely more towards that dreamy MELODY DOG meets raucous SWELL MAPS style though, so if you want the feeling of the first PANDORAS 45 played from memory from another room go straight to “Rip It Off.” What a song! So yes, this is twee. if you don’t have a dubbed copy of DOLLY MIXTURE Demonstration Tapes, you might not be able to swing to a full-length of this sound. To my ears, it’s true utopian possibility though; scrappy and playful like those Messthetics comps and Rupert Preaching at a Picnic. A record that creates its own world.

Possible Humans Everybody Split LP

Debut offering from this Melbourne lot. Everybody Split collects a few varied takes on pop/rock, not terribly far removed from now-sounds like THIGH MASTER or SALAD BOYS, but more indebted to moody practitioners from decades past—something more along the lines of the BATS, the FEELIES or even (ahem) US “college rock” from the ’80s & ’90s. The guitars somehow always seem to merge chime and crunch, which I’m comfy tagging as this gang’s bread/butter (not a bad thing!). Next to nothing resembling a two-fingers punk sound here, but as DIY pop music, it ably scratches the itch.

The Tubs Names EP

I’d call this a lot of things before I’d call this punk. I don’t say that as a criticism, just to set the mood for what we’ve got here. I’d call this jangly, catchy pop that’s doused with a helping of melancholy. Four songs, all pretty catchy, and while they’re mid-tempo in pace, the mood slows it down a little. At times, they’ve got an XTC thing going.