REVIEW: Max Gowan - Far Corners

Kelly Kirwan

You take in Max Gowan’s delicate alternative rock by virtue of easy osmosis. It’s an effortless absorption, a soundtrack for pensive moods that have just a hint of melancholy. Its light touch lingers, your mind subconsciously committing the chords to memory, stowing away the lyrics, as a subtle sort of magnetism draws you in. Gowan proves that being subdued doesn’t equate to being overlooked. His latest eight-track tape, Far Corners, (out via Quinton’s Fun Records) is marked by Gowan’s understated vocals and calm, indie-rock melodies. The artist recorded, mixed, and mastered each song himself, and there’s a relaxed intimacy throughout—Far Corners is made for moments of reflection.

The opening track, "Bad Breeze," begins with closely-stacked acoustic percussion, a quick succession reminiscent of a shuffling deck of cards with richer resonance. Gowan’s voice is a featherweight murmur, nearly lost in the gleam of guitar strings and rolling staccato beat. If daydreams had a voiceover, Gowan’s voice would be it. It’s a pitch that may just float away in a faint gust of wind, his lyrics rising and falling with the breeze.

The shortest song on the album, "All of the Time," is filled with slow slides of the guitar, its bright disposition offset by an echoing ambiance, as if we were listening to the echoes that permeate the ocean floor. It seeps in gradually, soon filling the forefront of the song as those last few strokes of the guitar fade.

The remnants of these notes from "All of the Time" bleed into the following track, "Washed Up," which then breaks into a much faster pace. There’s a hint of Gowan’s whispering timbre under the melody as it skips along, holding its head high, marked by a few introspective interludes. It ebbs and flows, a rush of rich instrumentals and stripped-down guitar plucks, whose notes wash across the track. Strings are a prominent feature in Max Gowan's music, and they often add an idiosyncratic twang or vaguely forlorn touch.

Far Corners is an album that flows so smoothly from one song to the other. As listeners, we coast along on air, trying to carve out the lyrics that Gowan offers like a secret, spoken under his breath. His music is like a smile that with the slightest inkling of sadness, and we want to know everything about it.

PREMIERE: God Tiny - Revolution Run

Laura Kerry

Most of the band God Tiny plays guitar. Of the five members, three—Jeremy Kolker, Benjamin Lomei, and Peter Spengeman—combine the instrument with vocals. The remaining two, Maximillion Lubis and Jordan Smith, play drums and bass respectively.

Their latest single, “Revolution Run,” at points sounds like it contains at least three guitars. At first, though, it starts small with a jaunty and fuzzy strumming pattern that sounds like a garage-rock descendent of surf music. But the song soon reveals its occult leanings with lyrics like, “In the winds the stardust blooms / Death was mighty angry / But life was angry, too,” and just like God Tiny’s mystical rock predecessors such as Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and others, the band soon adopts the more driving tone of hard rock. Starting small, the chorus repeats, “If you look deep inside you / You can see a cosmos,” before exploding into noise. For the remainder of the song, vocals wail, drums smash, and guitars shriek. By the end of “Revolution Road,” the original strumming pattern is nowhere to be found.

Building and changing in the course of a single song, God Tiny make no guarantees about what’s to come on their new LP, The Space Inside Your Head, due out on May 26. If “Revolution Road” is any indication, though, it will certainly rock.

You can catch God Tiny's record release show at Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, 5/26 at 8 p.m. with Stuyedeyed, Ghost King, and Greasy Hearts.

PREMIERE: Walktell - Nonsense

Laura Kerry

Jake Wachtel’s home, he says, is The Open Road. In this spirit, he has adopted the word “walk” in his stage name and many of the sounds he has encountered on his travels into his music. As Walktell, the artist plays kaleidoscopic psych pop that incorporates a wide array of instruments familiar and unfamiliar to most in a Western audience: ukulele, mandolin, sarangi, hulusi, tro, sueng, baglamas, and gunbri, to name a few.

If that list of instruments has left you feeling a little disoriented, you’re now in the right frame of mind to watch Walktell’s new video for his song “Nonsense.” Written in Mumbai and shot in Guangzhou, China, it illustrates the feeling of trying to process the volume of people in the foreign cities around him. Made up of one continuous, lo-fi shot, the video places the viewer in the perspective of the artist as he walks through the masses of commuters in the 14-million-person city. Wachtel’s face dips in and out of the frame, singing listlessly as forges on; the camera pans dizzyingly; and unsuspecting strangers dodge the camera and the tall, curly-haired American man headed their way.

Also disorienting is the Walktell’s version of a lyric video. Though it includes all the lyrics in the right order and timing, the words do more to confuse than guide. This partially results from the words themselves, whose chorus—”Is there any value to nonsense / I couldn't float a flock of fidgeting fibers / But I'll try to assign meaning once again”—might be the most comprehensible string in a song that take great pleasure in playing with the sounds of syllables (“irascible bullies bellowing,” “I can’t keep my cortex courting lies”). The text itself doesn’t help, though; highly stylized in translucent neon, its Ts curl into Bs in lines that dart out of order across the screen. A song about the futility of discovering meaning, “Nonsense” and its video are delightfully bewildering. As Walktell would probably agree, though, there’s joy in the journey.

REVIEW: Laser Background - Dark Nuclear Bogs

Laura Kerry

One of the songs on Laser Background’s new album is called “Slubberdeguillion.” Appearing, at first, to be a collection of nonsense syllables, it reveals itself to be a real word with one easy Google search. According to Infoplease.com and a late 19th-century dictionary, a “slubber-deguillion” is a “nasty, paltry fellow.”

This single word seems to expose a lot about the way that Laser Background—the project of now Philadelphia-based Andy Molholt—functions. His music works on a few different levels: first, from the pleasure of strange and intriguing sounds, and second, from the realm of thoughtful and calculated meaning. Also, it is a little nasty and paltry.

Take, for an example of the last point, the album name, Dark Nuclear Bogs, which brings to mind a green-hued, post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s a nasty and enigmatic phrase that sets the tone for what’s to come in Laser Background’s collection of psych-pop. In the opener, “Mostly Water,” a sweet guitar melody is tinged with a screeching edge, and the instrumental parts subsume the filtered vocals. When Molholt sings, “I want excitement / … / I want everything at once,” it sounds like a dangerous set of desires. “Mostly Water,” Molholt has said, is a song about birth, and the world that the artist subsequently ushers us into is woozy, kaleidoscopic, and dense with contradictions.

Laser Background wastes no time in proving that. From one perspective, the second track, “Hymnals,” is a fuzzy pop song with a delightfully bouncy bass and catchy melody. Take a step closer, though, and you find that the composition is littered with buzzing effects, accents of an eery purr, and a sinister, marching rhythm. Its refrain includes the phrase, “The devil in your soul is singing hymnals underwater in the swamp.”

If a song called “Hymnals” is mired in this sentiment, the next song, “Drink the Dirt,” certainly must be, too. And it is, but in a different way. Brighter and more energetic, it sounds like bossa nova played on ‘80s retro-futuristic synths. As with most of the songs, though, Laser Background suffuses it with dark undertones, as instrumental voices slide into tune and drone with effects. The combination of sounds, along with its oddly sardonic tone, make it sound like a contemporary update to Terry Gilliam’s funny dystopian sci-fi thriller, Brazil.

But Dark Nuclear Bogs isn’t all sweetness threaded with ominousness; some of it is genuinely sweet. “Francine,” which begins, “Francine / Let’s dream,” follows its own invitation into a dreamy, gentle song with sunny guitar and pretty harmonies. Harmonies return in “Soothsaying” and “Climb the Hill,” where in moments, their dizzying effects recall Fall Be Kind–era Animal Collective. “Half-life” is also pretty, comprised of acoustic guitar laced with the blues, and its lyrics sing an updated version of that genre: “The human condition is a bitch.” Some of the album, on the other hand, is all wickedness. “Slubberdeguillion” screeches with noise tossed around in a way that feels tired and lazy (but, as with the rest of the album, is probably rigorously calculated), and “Tiny Jumpers,” which alternates between suspenseful high synth on the verses and a driving chorus.

Take a step back, and all of this—the nastiness, sweetness, dense, screeching noise and delicate, deliberate lines—crystallizes into a cohesive album that is easy to get lost in or hover around at its playful edges. Delightfully weird and deliciously catchy, Laser Background's new LP is one to spend some time with.

REVIEW: Wendy Eisenberg - Time Machine

Kelly Kirwan

“Wendy has smelted these fine alloys for you; to build a skyscraper with a new kind of scaffold.”

The last line of Wendy Esienberg’s short bio is both a description and a riddle. She seems to balance on a polarity between the abstract and the pragmatic, referencing geometric lines, the neat collision of mathematics, and coyly teasing out an equation that we’ve yet to see (or understand) in full. And with that air of mystery, there’s intrigue. Enter Time Machine.

The cover of her ten-track, limited-edition cassette features a blueprint-style diagram of the so-captioned “Amazing and Beautiful Space Cube.” It’s a spot-on representation of her style and ambiance, a near-incomprehensible roadmap to bending space and time, laid out with a tidy arrangement of lines and vectors. Wendy Eisenberg layers experiments on top of experiments, and the result is mind-bending.

The eponymous track on her album doubles as its introduction, finishing just a second shy of a minute. Her voice is paper-thin, a wavering trill that seems on the cusp of cracking as she skims high octaves. "Time Machine" begins with a soft, sighing pitch, her lyrics delivered in misleading sentences. She tacks suffixes onto her words after pausing, changing the direction we were so sure she was headed. But Eisenberg sets us down a swerving path, always staying just ahead of the curve. “Even though the thoughtfulness has ended / I still pretend the years will stretch out long-er” she sings, her voice a nearly weightless murmur.

"Forty Words" opens with a sweet strumming, which feels like the lovechild of a folk song and a childhood lullaby. It’s as if Eisenberg is speaking her passing thoughts, and there's a certain intimacy to how she delivers each line. “Take a friend / Reinvent and resent / Resent who they come to be / You’ll walk when you try to run,” we hear in Eisenberg’s unique and delicate pitch, and as her words suggest, there’s something sadly reflective embedded in this song’s infrastructure.

Nest is "Oval," whose fuzzy synth has straight-up '80s pop vibes. Deft string work weaves in and out of these influences that feel, at times, like a nod to retro sci-fi or the neon-tinged ballads of three decades past. It’s a delightfully unexpected patchwork that shows Eisenberg’s willingness to turn the mismatched into something that makes sense.

Eisenberg may have a lo-fi aesthetic, but her music doesn't fade into the background. Her visions soar into the avant-garde within a bold, angular architecture. And we're enjoying the view.