The Sound Station – Things Will Never Be The Same
If you were a collector of rock singles, especially if you found yourself in the U.S. in the late 1960s, you were likely always on the lookout for magnificent garage rock songs, just like a junkie would be looking for a connection in a foreign town.
Anyone that delved into the famous Nuggets albums, a series that celebrated rock music that existed on the very fringes of commercial acceptance, will know that, often, the greatest and most vital sounding-recordings belonged to bands who had not acquired fame, nor the backing of big record labels. It seemed that rock at its most dangerous and exciting was best created by folks that had not been tainted by the allure of fortunes.
The Sound Station’s Things Will Never Be The Same sounds like a track that has accidentally fallen off the tracklist for one of the Nuggets albums and has just managed to finally get released. It’s fuzzed-out, fun, and full of energy. There’s no proper way to explain what makes this great from a musical standpoint, but connaisseurs may find every reason to delve in and experience it for themselves.
Holy Monitor – Blue Whale
Watching a movie made in the 1960s must be weird for those that have been gorging on modern film productions for most of their lives. The old pictures, for one thing, had a lot of silence to them. Without very many special effects to call upon, directors were usually left to fill in the blanks with shots that emphasized sounds, lights, character traits.
The music made during that period was much the same. It emphasized imagination in a slow, deliberate manner. Sure, people still, occasionally, wrote worldwide hits. But, for the most part, the greatest songwriters took their time in developing their ideas.
I feel like Greece’s Holy Monitor share that philosophy. Blue Whale sounds like the work of a movie director who shot dozens of hours of usable footage and had a difficult time merely sticking to the story. What we get instead is an all-encompassing look and feel of a strange world, much different from ourselves. Holy Monitor are not just musicians. They are explorers into undiscovered territory.
