The Weekend Fuzz: I wish my garage were heated
Welcome once again to the concurrently biannual edition of The Weekend Fuzz! What’s the weekend fuzz you might ask? Well, it’s the cumulative collection of a flurry of lights and colors, usually incomprehensible when conceived as a singular moment. A blur, if you will. If you were to attempt to convert such an amalgamation of sensuous experience in to auditory vibrations, the end result might bear something like the following.
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Alvvays
I’ve spent what you could classify as an “obsessive” amount of time swooning over Weezer’s Blue Album, and consequently have spent an inconceivable swath of energy searching for the spiritual successor, so to speak, of an album that largely surmounted to the idea: “love is impossible, who cares?”. Such an idea becomes infinitely more appealing when you consider yourself basket-full of stress bread. A doughy ball of worry-paste. As if gluten itself is amalgamous with the anxiety holding your life together. But you’re a celiac. And not because it’s trending.
But enough wheat-speak. Alvvays is a Canadian rock band, presumably featuring a number of people playing a handful of complementary instruments in a fashion that reminds me fondly of the 90’s. A simpler time, when our music libraries largely consisted of CD’s (by Christ they were exciting) and whatever we taped directly from the radio. Only a vague knowledge of the band could be surmised from the album artwork, school-yard rumor, or the back-half of an interview you caught on MTV. The track “Marry Me Archie” is a throwback, certainly, but not in the rather limiting sense that it seeks to “copy” the emotional resonance of earlier music. In fact, it’s simply an amazing song, and not outside the boundaries of conventional music production in 2015. Albeit, I remain poisonously frustrated it took over 20 years to actually hear something COMPARABLE to “The World Has Turned” in terms of subtle emotional dissonance.
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Twerps
Proliferating the rather absurdist notion that you can be a “band”, make music for half a decade, disappear a while and then release a beautifully crafted album on an incredibly renowned label (what kind of sick strange world do these people live in?: That answer is Australia, where everything is upside-down and the points don’t matter). Twerps is making fantastic, simplistic, beautiful mellow-rock, and their brand new LP “Range Anxiety” is brimming with sunshine, slapstick optimism and a physical aura of half-melted popsicle stains. You can stream the whole thing over at Merge, and if I had to recommend purchasing a single album in the month of January, I’d get my sticky fingers all over this popsicle stand.
You can just taste the palpable notion that these people all truly like eachother, can’t you?
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The Lucid Dream
UK. Buried under a wall of reverb, choking on synthetic fog and throbbing from the hypnotically blinding flashes of strobe, I bring to you The Lucid Dream. You don’t need a lot of introductory fluff for psychedelia; the sensation is almost entirely visual. Crunch and crash. “Cold Killer” has a tendency to send small ancillary shockwaves. PING. It’s an incredible experience, and these gents are masters of pace. Crack the volume. See the sound.
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And that wraps up the Weekend Fuzz. I hope we stimulated your senses; the auditory nostalgic allusions of the ear, the sweet aftertaste of blissful optimism, and the frenetic electricity of the eye. Music feels.
