Tag: Brainiac

For a quarter century, Deerhoof have been a benchmark for the contrasting dynamics of sweet and sour, spiked and pillowy, and all manner of sounds that should not get along but quite obviously do.

This aggregation of aggressive sounds does not differentiate between rock and electro, juicing thick synth leads with military drumming and a lyrical delivery that wavers delicately between completely disaffected and about to punch your lights out.

There are many bands named Ghoulies, or something like it, but let it be known that we’re talking about the Australian outfit that can deliver an hour’s worth of mosh-pit worthy punk sprinkled with spastic organ warbles in just about ten minutes.

You know I have a weakness for pitch-perfect harmonies and razor-sharp hooks, and The Rare Occasions deliver both in voluminous quantities. Also noteworthy tonight is back to back tracks from The Who Sell Out, only one of which is performed by The Who!

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.

Jade Hairpins don’t care about your repetitive song structures, man. That’s not how you cram five albums’ worth of material into less than forty minutes.

Born Ruffians hail from the Great White North, and they have an innate ability to craft razor-sharp hooks out of the simplest of riffs.

It was a peaceful suburban street, and they had taken great care to select a vehicle that would not stand out when parked along its sidewalks, a gold Taurus wagon. The very familiar nature of the setting — the shading trees, the mottled but well-kept asphalt, the toys scattered on lawns — made it feel like one of the most exotic places they’d been to in a while. The cartographer checked the coordinates on the fancy device strapped to their wrist, but any web search could have found them Brewster, New York. The ethnomusicologist leaned against the mailbox, labeled “Marie”, and scanned the canopy of the tremendous spreading oak planted square in the middle of the lawn, eyes peeled for that squirrel.

The pair powered down the sand-skis as they approached the slight concavity in the beach that had been described by the vendor in the spice market. The cliffs of Levera National Park did not seem to be an ideal place for smugglers to congregate, but the actuary would be the first to admit they did not know the first thing about smugglers and their habits of congregation. The blacksmith was better versed in these things, and they didn’t seem to be bothered by where the assignment was taking them. As the morning fog absorbed the last echoes of the recently-killed engines, they marveled at the conical shape of Sugar Loaf rising above the azure Caribbean water.

The Sasha river was running dry, and the aerialist maneuvered his craft to take advantage of the fact. As they moved swiftly along the crumbling banks, exoskeletal legs easily scrabbling over the terrain in an unearthly three-limbed gait, they encountered sun-baked sections where a trickle fed a series of pools on the cracking river bottom, animals congregated around them in a temporary truce. They hadn’t seen a human since Saturday, a fact that concerned the actuary more than the dry river, and the attempted distraction of some Guatemalan gamelan techno was not working. In its steel box, the package of Peanut Butter Crunch patiently rustled and awaited its delivery.