Street Screamer – Such Wonders
What exactly was the longest-lasting hippie commune, and what happened to all of the rows of tomatoes that they’d planted once that was also gone? The fact is that not all of them ended with people being forced to drink poison Kool-Aid.
The vast majority of these places, you would assume, just ended when enough people figured out that they needed a warm shower and a proper job. In the end, I suppose, it was all that positive energy that killed the hippies. Go figure!
That’s precisely why I propose, and I’m willing to mail letters in support of this cause, that communes and retirement spaces for bad vibe hippies start being created now. They’ll need to be placed up in the hills where nobody can complain about all the noise. The people there will need to learn to break bread with their bare hands because we won’t be dumb enough to leave sharp objects on hand. And, they’ll play Street Screamer in the little shop where you can buy organically sourced flour using seashells.
There’s no mistaking it. Scream Screamer sound like a bunch of marauding desert rockers turned guerrilla fighters. And that’s even as the band contemplates the inevitability of boring, respectable middle age. The riffs are crushing, and the production knows just how much to push this sound. Yeah, this is a savage sound, and it deserves to be honoured in a stoner rocker commune the way it was God’s plan all along.
almost a.m. – CAT AND DOG
Most people treat the whole business of being in a band and delivering music to audiences like someone who got a job by mistake, or used some well-positioned connection to get the recruitment office to look their way.
Once in the office, naturally, they begin to feel awkward. They start doubting that they can actually do the work. In fact, the more that they think about it, the more they realise that it wasn’t made exactly clear to them what the work was supposed to be.
almost a.m. don’t have those doubts, but to the group’s credit, nurture many other anxieties besides. Most other people in bands, on the other hand, fake their way through their work by all playing at the same time, doing it as loudly as possible, and singing lyrics about how great it is to be confident and have it all.
“CAT AND DOG” arrives on the speaker like an alarm set up, by mistake, in the middle of the night that you just can’t work yourself to turn off. It’s the nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that there’s danger at every turn, even if you choose to ignore it. And to achieve all of this, almost a.m. employs techniques that involve great restraint interlaced with spurts of virtuosity, along with a production that brings to mind moody industrial rock. All of this originality and marching to your own beat might get them in trouble, but it’s better than fretting about having done the right thing.
