A Feature Friday Bandcamp Friday Special
This week, we all get to choose something each to highlight for your listening pleasure.
Uneasy Listening
by Wandering Whispers
This will not be a normal review, since this piece did something more interesting to me: it managed to transport me to an exact time and place of my past. January 1st 2005, roughly at 1 am, to be exact. I spent New Year’s Eve at a party, during a particularly depressive period in my life. To say that I was not feeling very social would be a massive understatement, so I left as soon as I was able to get away with. I got to my apartment, with my mind circling the darkest thoughts constantly. To get my mind off of things and not do something drastic, I turned on my computer and started the game I was playing at the time; Vampire The Masquerade – Bloodlines.
Not being able to concentrate, I was just wandering around the set pieces of the game’s version of LA, until I ended up in a club right at the start. The music in this place was a single song on repeat; dark, industrial and endlessly driving. I sat in my chair, closed my eyes and felt how the beat drowned out my thoughts. It was one of the few instances where music made me forget my surroundings, my memories, even my depression. Fast forward about 20 years: I hear Marionette’s music and my mind doesn’t really hear it, but feels it. I hear the almost whispered vocals and the driving beat, and I remember how I felt at that night. But now I don’t experience the music the same way as I did back then, but I feel at peace, nostalgic for a horrible time in my life, and I realize that I left something behind on that virtual dance floor. Brains are weird.
Do I recommend this album? Yes, I do! Even without the emotional attachment, the songs are more than solid, well-produced and performed. For someone who likes industrial, gothic dance music with a thick atmosphere, there is a lot in this to enjoy!
Fuzzy Organ EP
by Funpark Fugitives
@funparkfugitives.bsky.social
For me, this week it’s two EPs by the same artist because they feel like two sides of the same lo-fi coin.
“Fuzzy Organ” is a lounge, whoozy, Death in Vegas/Fuzz Townshend style EP of four instrumentals and “On Four Track” is a Buzzcocks meets The Saints style punk. Both EPs are really well performed and the lo-finess really adds to the aesthetic. Both EPs start with the same chord sequence, and it’s a good one.
“On Four Track” has some excellent garage rock fizz to it. Each song has a real life to it. They bristle and they pop. Melodic and driven, they really evoke memories of a time in my life where I would just sit with my headphones, feeding my tinnitus with latest Powercuts* find.
“Fuzzy Organ” is cool. It still has that lo-fi edge, but is much more laid-back. A 70s soundtrack style, and it has that fuzzy organ heard in the “On Four Track” EP. It’s got dirt for days, dirt is good. It’s goo goo muck. Slippery green slime, under the fingernails. Just filthy. And it’s filthy good.
Get them both. It’s £4, Come on
*Powercuts was a record shop in Manchester in the late 80s that sold bargain basement records and imports. It was a treasure trove of musical goodness. Cheap as chips and just as tasty.
Previously
The Nirvana Fallacy (or, Mania and Her Sophomore Slump) – Saint Louie
- Beginings Revisted by Jim France
- Recording in Progress by Aaron Smith
- Believer, a.k.a. The Last Shall Be the First
- Scrapyard Boyz: Ultra Despair Duo – Grizzly, Slogan
- The Nirvana Fallacy (or, Mania and Her Sophomore Slump) – Saint Louie
- The Cocker Spaniels Are Still Alive, And So Are You
- X by Everything’s a Crime
- Take to The Streets by Eparapo
- Ashenheart – Faded Gold
- Underground by Trina Chakrabarti
- Happy New Year #Feature Friday
- Adrift by Angry Blue Planet
- Hells Bells – Dallas Orbiter’s Spaceman Things