
Goblin Daycare – Boss Man
Similar artists: Hav Hav!, POWER PANTS, Hiçamahiç, The Gobs
Genre: Punk
How do artists live their lives? Well, if you trust your main media channels, they live in luxury. They get away with murder. And they have people employed to clean up their mess. That’s a mighty nice image to have of your Keith Richards and Jean-Michel Basquiats, but it’s also untrue for the most part and a dangerous notion to have for creative people.
Most artists are stuck with jobs they hate. Their work is created despite this, not because of it. Franz Kafka, the most influential modern writer, learned German and was a pencil pusher. Charles Bukowski, the notorious drunken storyteller, collected his payslip from the post office. And most of my friends work dead-end office jobs and run to their rehearsal rooms in the evening, working on music that most people won’t hear.
It’s brutal! Thankfully, you can still laugh and write about it. Goblin Daycare’s “Boss Man” sounds about as tense and anxiety-filled as a job taking orders from bored and bitter supervisors. The song itself mixes theatrical vocals, daring production ideas and interesting use of rhythm. The folks from Goblin Daycare have been in the trenches and still have the power to smile about it. That’s something!
ICHIWAWA – Cottage Disco
Genre: Post-Punk, Gothic / Dark Wave
I’ve read a lot of rockstar biographies, and I’m never proud to admit it. And, while I am aware that, at least, some of the stories in most of these are made up with the sole purpose of rivaling Keith Richards’ own oeuvre, they still provide the cheap shocks that lifelong music fan craves.
If there is one thing that I’ve learned from these books is that if you’re going to be a stupidly happy rockstar, you must employ people to cover for you. These folks have to be opposite. They shouldn’t like going on; they ought to possess a wonderful working memory, and they need to be able to tune their guitar when the assigned guitar pedal breaks down.
Cranky people with a bit of knowledge of how a guitar functions are the ones that, usually, write the memorable songs. They’re the ones who have the most to say about the world around them and how they distrust it. And, occasionally, they’re funny too.
ICHIWAWA’s “Cottage Disco” is a strange fantasy of a night spent out against one’s better judgment in a kind of primitive, makeshift dancehall. It’s led by equally baritone vocals that ought to belong to a goth-rock song, and the instrumentation ought to be kept for a Lo-Fi indie-rock song. Just imagine what this would’ve sounded like had the songwriters enjoyed themselves.