garbologist – heading back from the shore
Genre: Lo-fi Rock
Everything is a little too perfect nowadays and slowly, insidiously, it’s tearing us apart. The computers won’t have to do much fighting to take over the world, as the news outlets keep telling us that they will. We’ve already used them to create a world that is more comfortable for them to understand than for us.
It’s not very inspiring, and this has become the standard we are growing accustomed to. Music is done to a click track by excellent musicians paid by the hour, and the popstars’ vocals are pitched to perfection. The movies are lighted perfectly, written by bored professional scriptwriters, and directed efficiently and without much love.
There are some, however, that are not falling for the whole trap laid out by perfectionism. garbologist’s “heading back from the shore” is a proud piece of lo-fi rock that sounds like it was made in someone’s bedroom by a real person with the ability to express real human emotion.
Take the guitar riffs, for example. They’re memorable and a bit sloppy played just like the very best in the classic rock canon are. Maybe we need lo-fi music to remind us of why we liked to appreciate or make art in the first place. And it wasn’t because of the perfect lines or the expertly tuned vocals.
Club 8 – Sunny
Genre: Lo-fi Rock, Indie Pop
The opportunity to get in front of people, share with them your message and, most likely, make them applaud you is, naturally, very seductive. It’s why billionaires buy social media apps. Why millionaires donate money to charity, and, its most would-be rockstars joining a band and climbing on stage. We all want to be loved, and that’s a problem.
The issue is that with so many plain, predictable characters around us, there are few surprises left. And, without those, art, modern music, in particular, gets awfully boring awfully fast. What we need are the weirdos, the people with unshakable quirks, those who live lives that are often unpredictable.
Club 8’s “Sunny” is a tune purposely designed with lo-fi production in mind. It’s a choice that works to the duo’s advantage as their back-and-forth style of singing and storytelling reveals the Swedish duo to be strange, interesting characters that you may well want to know more about. The song itself might bring to mind the efforts of bands like The Jesus & Mary Chain, and serves as a reminder that when bands find the essence of a song, no other fancy studio tricks are needed.
