The Grinning Ghosts – Being Song
Genre: Psychedelic / Freak Folk, Lo-fi Rock, Garage Rock
We rarely seek out music that will tell us new things about the world or about ourselves. Most of the time, if we are being completely honest, we are merely looking for music to confirm our best and worst opinions of ourselves. There’s a market for music that makes one feel good and one for music that makes one feel terrible but rarely is there a market for anything in between.
The fact is that the music stars of the moment aren’t representing you. At least, I really hope that they are not. The current music stars represent happy, rich people without any real concerns or thoughts of their own. It’s as if all of the other millions of people that correspond to this ideal have, once again, become invisible.
Rock n’ roll used to be the sound of weirdos and people who dared to dream big. The Grinning Ghosts’ Being Song is a classic-rock number imbued with the classic weirdness of the people who usually end up making the most compelling music of this kind. You don’t even need to know who the band members are or to speak the English language. There’s something just something in that guitar groove that we’ve come to know and love that tells you that this is music for people like yourself or the ones that you know.
Welcome Strawberry – Harvest Apartments
Genre: Bedroom / Lo-fi Pop, Shoegaze, Indie Pop
Similar artists: My Bloody Valentine
It’s impossible to tell yourself not to think about something and actually be successful. It’s like telling your eyes not to look at an object while actually looking at it. This kind of trick played on the brain drives a lot of people crazy every year, I reckon. But, it’s nothing new.
There have always been people that have driven themselves insane by obsessing over details. There’s this sculptor from Austria that was so tormented by the idea that his equestrian statue was going to, one day, fall on the people beneath it that he eventually had to be put in a loony bin.
Similarly, most of the people that floated around My Bloody Valentine’s orbit went insane from all of the detailed work Kevin Shields put into crafting the band’s brief output.
Well, I’d rather go crazy from trying to make a guitar sound like a buzzsaw than from worrying that a statue of a horse might tilt over. Welcome Strawberry’s Harvest Apartments is a song built around highly intricate guitar sounds that crash into each other like a symphony of smashed windows and troubled screams. It’s a love letter to the potential of guitar-driven music. It’s heavy metal without the lyrics about slaying dragons. And it sounds like it drove someone mad to make this!
