
Rum Buffalo – Slumtown Nightmare
Premiere
Genre: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Did Mark E. Smith or Howard S. Rowland go to school to learn to make the kind of music they ended up creating? Did they spend a lot of time prior to their groups analyzing their future steps forward? Unlikely.
They were bright folks, you know. But, one can’t help but feel that it took them a lifetime of acquiring discomfort and rage before they could get going. They are the proof that machine-learning has no hope of working on post-punk. It is, after all, the distillation of the DYI spirit and genuine joylessness.
In the same way that it takes a lifetime of training and dieting to create a gold-medalist at the Olympics, so it takes a lifetime to create the characters responsible for Rum Buffalo’s Slumtown Nightmare. It’s the poetry of likely overachievers who’ve chosen little or none of what the world has to offer them.
He Sleeps – MinMax
Genre: Progressive Rock, Art Rock, Math Rock
People’s imagination doesn’t work in one steady, dependable manner. Some make sense of their lives and surroundings through images painted by their brain that they can see as clearly as the summer sun. Some hear sounds as if an orchestra was playing in their minds. Others do not possess any of this and have to make logical deductions.
I am no expert on meditation, a craze that seems to come and go in Western society. However, I gather that its potentially potent effect comes as a result of the fact that a sound, or phrase that is repeated enough times, finally, glues to the synapses, to the breathing, and to one’s imagination, until it becomes a part of them and, potentially, changes them for the better.
He Sleeps’ MinMax sounds like a computer meditating. It’s what 80s Rush was aiming for. It spins calming, colorful patterns for a while before those become changed. And, much like meditation itself, it is occasionally bothered and interrupted by the annoying influence of the outside world. An expressive, well-controlled exercise by He Sleeps.