Mixtape 253 • Lotsapoppa
Mestizo Beat is cooking with lots of spices and high heat.
Mestizo Beat is cooking with lots of spices and high heat.

Some of us are lucky. Some of us get to sit in a comfortable broadcasting studio and play Orville Peck, while others are hacking their way through a couple of gloomstalkers with nothing but the barely-magical weaponry a fifth-level figher can afford.

It doesn’t get more mid-century Goth than The Raveonettes picking up on the Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs”. Besides that, the tenor of the night tended to lean towards the acoustic, with a handful of sets exploring the pluckier side of things.
Another batch of duplicates and substitutes!

Boston’s Sleepyhead have been successfully dodging full wakefulness for a couple decades now, putting out an intriguing type of bedroom pop filled with subtle complexities, and their new album is filled to the brim with such. In other news we kick off with a Fugazi cover from quintessential NYC band BODEGA, whose lineage clearly traces back to legions of posterized grit punks.

The world that deliberately-lowercased beabadoobee presents in her new album Beatopia is pastel neon colors, soothing howls, bright shadows, and all manner of psychedelic oxymorons. Tonight’s show features its introduction of sorts, and closes with the unexpected krautrock drone of my current favorite discovery, Japan’s deliberately-uppercased MASS OF THE FERMENTING DREGS, whose all-over-the-placeness manages to live up to its intriguing name.

Ty’s arsenal of instrumentation continues to grow, as he fills out his domain of prog-rock, stoner drones, glam trash, and other Seventies detritus with keyboards, more keyboards, and an evolving sense of studio wizardry.
Rock and roll is absent from the charts, and you’d hardly know there is a serious revival going on, this slab of shimmering paisley from the Fogerty kids being a prime example. Get your riffs, hooks, choruses, and more right here.

Some bands are obscure, others are sporadic, but The Mabuses are downright enigmatic. Their music is hard to describe, and while the word "psychedelic" has become a commonplace and devalued label to put on something these days, in this case it would apply as a feeling of existing in a disjointed but entirely fascinating musical reality rather than a genre.

Australian Ben Lee broke through as the singer for the teen outfit Noise Addict, but has since made quite a solo career for himself. He kicks off this edition of Version Control — all covers, all night long.