No Pain In Pop

Sore Boys

After the tender swoon of Ancient Crux comes the second Murrieta bust-out. Brent Mitzner’s Trudgers (”gothic/gothic/gothic”) swing more bitten and aggrieved than his hometown compadres, guitars bright as home-polished shrapnel glinting in the gloom of a plagued mind, dropping like small fortunes lost through the entirety of ‘Brother Boogie’’s mantric plea. ‘Catholic Candles’ is darker still; sick, lunatic and glum, and though Mitzner’s work makes no explicit reference to California, it seems to exist in Lynchian limbo between light and dark, macabre and mundane.



MP3: Trudgers - Brother Boogie



MP3: Trudgers - Catholic Candles

Tags: brent mitzner, hi shadow, rapid youth, trudgers, twin lion

bEA_cHc_OMa

Photography by Hannah Elisabeth.

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Tags: hannah elisabeth

Tight

Here lies West Coaster Jeans Wilder. Sad and glad, ‘Tough Guys’ is plucked from his forthcoming self-released LP; ‘Mosquito’ from the soon to be dropped split with London’s A Gal on the Bathetic label.

Weird that, as the last thing it is is bathetic. Sounds more to me like all the worries in the world just washed right up somewhere down at Big Sur, spat around and sung out in true Technicolor lo-fi. Surf’s down, dudes.



MP3: Jeans Wilder - Tough Guys



MP3: Jeans Wilder - Mosquito

Tags: a gal, bathetic, jeans wilder, lo-fi

Pop Vidz

Directed by Katherine Nolfi

The track that pulls the invisible, second pair of lids from your eyes so that you might gaze in proper awe upon the shimmering gleam of Telepathe’s Dance Mother, ‘So Fine’ juts up imposing and steep, Sitek’s production on the album (marrying bass to dirt, treble to sky) mirrored by Nolfi’s direction here, which starts hungover and ends back in the club, by way of food porn and street dance.

Tags: katherine nolfi, telepathe

Five imaginary musical futures: alternatives to 2009

Photography by the inordinately talented Hannah Elisabeth

2009’s already been talked out, so halt your tongues and tuck in cheeks for five sights of music running on splintered time, rails leading most to bass-weight and rhythm.

Article originally published at DrownedinSound.

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Tags: 14-0848 mimosa, ben adams, beyonce, bhangra niche, black flag, bradford cox, burial, busy signal, calvin klein, dancehall, darkstar, dc hardcore, deerhunter, empire of the sun, felix's machines, fen and ramsey, flying lotus, funky, futurist, george russell, gregory's girl, harry partch, hudson mohawke, james bulley, jg ballard, kode 9, leprosy, luigi russolo, mad max, madlib, moondog, motown, myths of the near future, philip k. dick, pierre bastien, psychedelic horseshit, rick rubin, rustie, sasha fierce, siltbreeze, simon sellars, situationist, soca, soul jazz, t2, telepathe, the bug, timbaland

Corner Boys

Photography by Stephane Guisard

In 1980, 2,200 people lived in the town of Murrieta, California. By 1991 it was a city that held 24,000 bodies and last year’s estimates put the population at approximately 100,173. While fresh faces swell all about them, “dreamy pop punx” trio Rapid Youth seem happier to play amongst themselves; Tyler Haran attracting ears as Twin Lion, Brent Mitzner as Trudgers and Travis von Sydow with his Ancient Crux. All three solo projects wound up with Family Time Records, all three are awesome and all three will be featured here at some point this week.

von Sydow leads the boomtown charge, ‘Teen Dreams’ sauntering along trapped in one of those moments that are so acutely alive with possibility and resonance they get beneath the thick skin of cliches about eyes being oceans and seeing girls in your sleep, doo-wop swallowing this bitter punk whole before spitting him at the moon. ‘Coupling’ is more downbeaten, matter-of-fact vocals following synths that blur von Sydow’s lo-fi junket like continual streetlights peered at from behind crudely de-misted windows.

Both these tracks feature on the exquisitely named Interracial Coupling, recorded by Haran in his bedroom and available through Family Time now.



MP3: Ancient Crux - In Teen Dreams



MP3: Ancient Crux - Coupling

Tags: ancient crux, family time records, rapid youth, travis von sydow, trudgers, twin lion