
Tribes – Hard Pill
Similar artists: D.I.D, Spector, The Crookes
Genre: Grunge. Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
Guitar music is at its best when the songs created in this style attempt to reveal some kind of universal truth. There are a few things we all have in common. Love, bills, food, fears. Those all sound simple enough topics but try writing a song about them without sounding stupid.
Modern wisdom suggests that bands ought to retreat into a niche. The more you can please a particular audience, the higher your chances of ensuring long-lasting success. This, however, means that the songwriters cover only a limited amount of ground.
Tribes takes on the pleasantly melancholy-filled sounds of 90s Britpop for their single “Hard Pill.” It’s a song designed to speak to, as Lou Reed would put it, “anyone who ever had a heart.” The guitars wash over the speakers like waves on a gentle summer morning while the melodies echo the millions of broken hearts across the ages.
Paul Bergmann – Piss in My Hand
Genre: Folk rock, Lo-fi Rock
People always talk about wanting to meet their heroes. Not me. I wouldn’t want to meet most of the musicians that I write about. They scare me! That’s the point. It’s not that they’re unapproachable in a Grace Kelly-like way. Most of them are unapproachable in a Hunchback of Notre Dame-type way.
They’re characters in a strange play that they’ve written for themselves. They’re blessed with talent and cursed to wreck it all. Most of their music sounds like someone picking a fight. If you end up having a drink with any of those people that you admire so much, you’ll end up punching them out or getting stabbed on your way to the bathroom.
Paul Bergmann’s “Piss in My Hand” sound like the work of an academic filled with drink and let loose in a cold seaport town. The vocal delivery is that of a merciless in-law berating you for your failures.
It’s the poetry of bitterness arranged to a groove that sounds like drunken sailors swinging giant beer mugs in unison. Glad to hear it, but wouldn’t want to be there when the bill gets paid.