Some Reviews of Current Records, July 2024
I had a hankering to put out a new print issue of Dynamite Hemorrhage fanzine recently, and to that end, even got the thing started before it fizzled out under the weight of my ambition. These things happen. However! I wrote some record reviews of some interesting new releases, and I thought there’s a chance you might be interested in looking at them. This is part one of three:
BLUES AMBUSH Blues Ambush tape/DL
Utterly monstrous trio from Philadelphia who have now presented us with several tapes of side-long, heavily zonked-out guitar “jammers” that are the embodiment of just about everything I’m looking for when I’m looking for psych in its heaviest form. This s/t tape has got two instrumental squalls, both live, one called “Wide Open Road > Jam” and the other “Ife”. The bass in Blues Ambush numbers generally locks onto some minimalist, crunching pattern; the drums then crash and bash around it, and the guitar feeds back and screams howls from a dimensional vortex somewhere far, far away from the one that governs daily life. It goes on for ten minutes, minimum, and when it’s over you’re wishing you could re-up for another ten, twenty or thirty.
If I could pick an ear-shredding wah-wah precedent, it’d probably be something Japanese – Les Razilles Denudes or what High Rise and Mainliner were doing on PSF in the 1980s and 90s – but I’ll go far as to say Blues Ambush have been more consistently great in their young career than any of those fine bands. Let me bring one band to my town to help me party down so it can be this one.(bluesambush.bandcamp.com)
WORKERS COMP Workers Comp LP
There’s an initial reaction one might have to the early cuts on this LP – because I had it – that the one fake-accented funny country song and the one with the why-be-normal “party guy” vocals just might torpedo the whole album. On the contrary, this collection of this NYC (DC? Omaha?) band’s earlier tape and 45s is one of my no-doubt picks of the season, and a big 2024 favorite to date. Workers Comp is a rollicking, garagey left-field Americana record that sounds like it emanated from a Midwestern 80s college town and was picked up by OKra Records. There’s actually a lone track with unadorned, simple female vocals (“Never Have I Ever”) that gives off a real Gibson Bros/Ellen Hoover/”Skull and Crossbones” vibe, and that’s a vibe I’ll happily soak in six ways from Sunday.
Other tracks – the ones that aren’t the cuckoo ones – sometimes muscle through with Like Flies on Sherbert swagger and use both their brevity and unpredictability as major selling points. Alex Chilton might’ve asked to produce them. Everything’s a little off balance, a couple beers have been drunk, and the good times and the tape recorder are both rolling along. (Ever/Never)
MORDECAI Seeds From The Furthest Vine LP
You might reckon that the Bodish brothers who make up two-thirds of Mordecai, Elijah and Holt, have traveled far from their DIY sub-underground roots since we first met them in this guise in 2011, but that really wouldn’t be the case. They’ve just sharpened their sound in thirteen years, without actually sharpening anything at all. They’re just much better at making a loose, strange, everything’s-askew textural racket sound like rocknroll music – especially after the long layoff since their last LP in 2020. I’ll have to really bone back up on the previous five to be sure, but from where I sit today, Seeds From The Furthest Vine is their best, on par with Holt Bodish’s outstanding solo Build Yourself a Space from a couple years back.
Each individual song is a beautiful mess, in the literal sense of both words. Vocals can sometimes be a strangely disembodied voice with no mic singing across the room, as on “When You Know Them As”, which is particularly enjoyable to try and piece together & understand whilst listening on headphones. Percussion is equally slapdash: it’s just as likely to be fingers tapping on Tupperware as it is to be a tambourine or truly rhythmic drumming (of a sort). The song “Seeds From the Furthest Vine”, inexplicably broken into two parts, comes off like a backyard cookout/peacepipe jam conducted by Mike Rep, with a pile of Dead C records waiting inside. And textured bursts of crazed guitar pop in and out, something in the most inopportune of places, which of course in Mordecai’s world makes them highly opportune. Let me emphasize for the record that this is no free-form freak jumble; this is a rocknroll record, and rocknroll in 2024 is all the better for it being around. (Petty Bunco)
AGONY SHORTHAND 