The Mutilations – Snake Charmer
Similar artists: Combo Chimbita, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Queens of the Stone Age, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets
Genre: Lo-fi Rock Garage Rock
Music fans talk about what happened during the 1960s as if recalling miracles that occurred before their very ears. But once you go back and really investigate the fabled decade, you are treated to never-endless loops of feedback noise, blues solos that last for +20 minutes and jazz musicians trying to get in with the hippie crowd.
What you’ll also notice is that those people, by and large, really worked to change music. Most of them had too few resources to really make a difference. Still, the goal of most musicians was to find something wholly unique by means of experimenting, cutting and pasting things together that oughtn’t to have been brought together, and daring to believe they could make a new art form.
The Mutilations’s “Snake Charmer” is, first and foremost, a wildly daring musical experiment. It’s not the kind that merely quotes the 1960s, as many of their contemporaries do, or an atonal drift meant to please fans of avant-rock. When it gets cooking, it really boils up and makes you believe that there are still folks who want and can change things. A bit of change would do us good, eh?
New Polarities – Here Right Now/There Somehow
Similar artists: Bumblebees, Tame Impala, The War On Drugs, Mac DeMarco, Beck
Genre: Psychedelic Rock
New Polarities sound like a mystical radio broadcast beaming through from the 1980s. The fact that musical trends arrive, depart, and return in a circular way is nothing new to most observers of pop music. The only trick is that these ideas don’t just arrive in the way that they were once fashionable.
No style of music is truly bad or uncool. It takes a masterful artist to know just what to extract and how to innovate enough to make it sound good. The kind of 80s pop music designed for long, nighttime drives achieved immense success at the time of its release. It fell out of favour for a long time but has returned in recent years, having been given a nice indie-rock sheen.
New Polarities’ “Here Right Now/There Somehow” is a slow-burning, meditative sound that fits extensive road trips and post-yoga-session comfort. It is designed to work similarly to a slow neck rub. It cleverly takes pop ideas and moves them into a strange environment where mysteries are set free, and anything can happen.
