@@@ Goat Girl: Pest (Rough Trade, 2021) Some post punk weirdness I got to via the online UK music magazine Crack. This is the first track on the record and it opens with a slow building drawliing singer led, strummed electric guitar, etc, more vocals, some ambient clouds. That’s more a crumble of a sentence than a formally correct one there. I expect this is the calm before the storm but I could be wrong, I’m wrong a lot. It does build but to a more sustained tambourine influenced rock section that bumps along underneath the layer of slack vocals. There’s also a synth arpeggiator which helps to cancel the energy drain of the vocals. I’ll hang for a bit of the second track to see if the formula has flexibility or if this is the formula. Yeah, this is the formula, cheerful rhythm section with a downer vocal component, people love it the slack shit, I’ve always never been quite able to accept it. Also periodic synth which changes up the grunge vibe.
@@@ x/o: Chrysalis Wrath (Precious Metals, 2022) I got to this via the Vancouver radio station CFUV. This is the opening track of an electronic record and by the sounds of the reverbed out female vocalist, I’m not sure this is going to work for me. It’s spacious and occasionally interrupted, no wait more and more interrupted by a cymbal driven drum and groove type beat. Also some dreamy keyboards and a very aggro synth bass. Overall it’s a sci fi type of impression or at least that’s how I hear it. On the like side, I dig the bass sound and the aggressiveness of it. Agnostic on the beats, agnostic on the keyboards, and I don’t like the framing or the presentation of the vocals. There is an interesting contrast between that smoothed out space vibe of the vocals and the splash of the cymbals and the buzzy bass but my disdain for this vocal approach outweighs that.
Deep In the Music 