More 2024 records that I have listened to multiple times.
208 Possession • When it comes to a city where some bands sound as distinctive as the scent of motor oil draining out of a dirt crusty big block engine, Detroit is the obvious winner. And it sounds like this Motor City duo has been breathing in those fumes since childhood. Stripped down to bare essentials: something to bang on for a beat, an amp that sounds like it’s speaker is covered in mildew and mic to holler in. Add tape hiss from the Tascam 4 track! The screamin’ R&B stomp coming out of a blown head gasket which gave the world combos like the MC5, the Gories and (honorary Detroiters) the Oblivians. 208 keep that same greasy dirt all kicked up in the now.
AMBASSADOR HAZY Leaving Here • This could very well be a record of the summer. Not in a way where people are gonna bump it at cookouts or around the pool, though. It’s the type of summer record for waking up at dawn to enjoy the dew on the flora outdoors. It’s a summer record that acknowledges how the midday sun makes you feel like you're melting. It’s the kind of record that makes you weigh staying in a torpid state inside an air-conditioned room versus venturing out to get a big dose of vitamin D, but running the risk of mingling with flared tempers.
I assumed the band took their name from a strain of weed, but it turns out it's from a drum snare head made by Remo. A drummer friend admonished me for not knowing that, noting, “John Bonham used them a lot.”
MIDNIGHT MINES Since My Baby Left Me • We've been hearing for decades now that rock 'n' roll is dead. While many cry and lament its passing, others congregate around the corpse to devour the rotting organs and flesh instead of letting it all go to waste.
Five days a week, I drive a ten-mile strip, which for the most part is woodsy and swampy land. It’s common to see a fallen critter in that strip decaying along the roadway. I say “Awww” when I see one. They were just going about their life. Sucks it ended that way, right? Who’s gonna take care of that mess? Then the turkey vultures show up. Dressed in black. Their infected-looking red skin hanging off their faces. Maybe the sickest-looking gangsta fuckin’ birds on the planet. They gross a lotta people out. I get that. They feast on carrion. They fill their bellies on decay. At times they congregate on light poles and awning at strip malls (usually where the anchor store is a heritage regional supermarket) and expend some gullet gruel on humans below them.
They’re also one of nature’s main janitors. They do a duty no other critter steps up to do.
In their second volume, titled by borrowing a line from an Elvis song, Midnight Mines once again find inspiration in the fragments of a world we once knew—a world we still inhabit, and one that hints at where we're headed. Any fleeting glimpse of what life once was before its decline feels like discovering a strip of photo negatives stored away in a shoebox found in a cellar. The process of restoration involves cleaning them with a scouring pad and projecting them on a wall.
STILL ANIMALS s/t I’ll forever be known as a “a garage rock guy.” I own up to it.
So I’ll also own up to saying a lot of it was and is milk and water pretending to be whiskey and gasoline. There’s a lotta chaff to sift through to find the wheat.
For me to say that is Still Animals have made a super fun garage rock record, it is in all sincerity. It’s brash. It’s nerdy. They have songs about bad times but make them sound like a good time. They dress in a cornbelt classic cool. They’re not playing dress-up. It’s the right balance of trashy lo-fi and hi-fi excitement.
VERITY DEN - s/t • There are a lot of people out there these days waving the word "shoegaze" around. Then when you get around to hearing what the shouting is about, you’re like, “It’s cool and all, but when did sounding like Teenage Fanclub make you shoegaze?” Maybe I’ve never really known what shoegaze was. I always assumed that Ride was part of that initial scene. Both my children have had to rebuke me in the past about this, explaining particular territories and trajectories. Fair game, I’ve insisted the same in a Tuesday afternoon off discussion in a tavern about the Cocteau Twins at least once in my life.
Having experienced a couple of Verity Den sets now, I’ve thought "shoegaze" during some songs. Y’know, like SHOESGAZE! Not just the treble, gain, and echo that seem to get any random jangle band that description these days.
Based out of Carrboro, NC, Verity Den members Trevor Reece and Mike Wallace were in Drag Sounds, an amazing band that wrapped up a bunch of rock 'n' roll fringes and formed them into an odd and interesting ball. The band came together with guitarist/sound engineer Casey Proctor after she and Trevor were part of an audio experimentalist ensemble that gathered occasionally at a local art space.
It’s not just making something that seems like an aural experience of a neon-lit ice storm or an ethereal nightmare. It’s gotta have the swirling, the wobblies, and the bliss. The mystery and the nuances. Verity Den has all that.
Verity Den are also not a shoegaze band. Shoegaze is a dated designation of a sound that was pretty clever in a backhanded rock journalism kinda way decades ago. It sounds a bit dumb to use it still today. Verity Den is their own thing. A thing to let its wave drench and immerse you.
WARM FRAMES Pink Wax • From Orlando, Florida Warm Frames don’t shy away from showing their adoration for Sonic Youth. They even use the band as one of the tags on their Bandcamp page. No time in modern history has Orlando ever resembled NYC, especially EVOL/Sister era NYC this band’s vibe hones in on it. They sound well aware of this fact, so they use it as their reference point for going off on their own trip of discontent.
WORKERS COMP s/t • This is backporch music. Not in the public radio sense where people talk about Mother Maybelle but are thinking Eddie Van Halen. This is backporch music where a few tight folks share jokes and smokes on a backporch and it just so happens some instruments are lying around. Roasted anthems of working too much for too little wrapped around a reckless, lo-fi country rock shamble. Other records I may have speculated as my album of the summer, this one is actually it.