The Lacking Permanence

The bewitching chanteuse and the mute production wizard is a pairing that has yielded consistently intriguing results through the ages, and these VideoSong pioneers are still leading today’s pack.

The recipe for Yello’s bass-heavy, rhythmic, mid-tempo groovecake has not changed in forever, and it still makes the ideal soundtrack for putting on your sunglasses and slouching down in your seat.

The mysterious Orville Peck is a modern cowboy marvel, a rare and legendary masked man with a dusty guitar and a lonesome coyote howl.

Someone threw a key party for a bunch of musical genres, and Americana, Rock, and Punk left together. On the dashboard radio on the way to the motel, the Old 97’s were playing.

Swerving wildly between sweetly melodic and audibly unhinged, this carousel of buzzsaw-inflected ditties definitely whirls too fast, and you’ll enjoy every minute of its glitchy post-hardcore pop magic.

This is a heady mix of Tin Pan Alley melodies, lonesome cowboy delivery, and ornate arrangements fit for the most dramatic of the theater kids.

Hissing steam and spitting fire, the Old 97s chew up the rails and cross-ties by playing country music with a punk attitude.

Billy Martin’s drumming makes me think of oxymorons like “precisely sloppy” and “intensely casual” and “red hot chill out”. This album lives within a zone that’s hazily bounded by funk, jazz, and electronic dance music.

The haberdasher heard a light thump and roll, then felt something tap against a shoe. It was a peach pit. Looking up from the stack of brochures, they saw the orthodontist grinning and wiping their mouth with a sleeve, glancing at the gap on the blanket where the fruit was drying in the sun, clearly suggesting that perhaps another one was in order. The tandem moped leaned against the back of the Gate of Hercules, shielded by its bulk from the bright Croatian summer sun. The peaches had hours to go, and they had forgotten to bring a game., having only whatever reading material they had managed to scrape up in the Hotel Pula lobby.

Two very political acts, performing each other’s songs. NOFX is archetypically SoCal snot-nose punk, while Frank Turner is from a proud tradition of left-leaning UK strummers, but the songs fare well in any protester’s hands.