OPM: Gods and Vampires

Dracula Flow – Everything Goes in Circles

Heavy, lo-fi garage psych and swamp boogie, like Hawkwind or Spaceman 3 jamming with the Cramps. The riffs and beats tend toward the heavy but simple. Vocals are buried under effects (especially reverb) and maybe a bit out of tune. The songs are weird, trippy and inscrutable. 

The ingredients are familiar to anyone who loves guitar pedals and frequent drug use, but the specific expression is definitely one of a kind. It’s all quite off kilter: crusty and inscrutable but clearly holding some strange meaning. A bizarre flavor but unique enough to warrant a taste to see if it’s something you’ll love. 

(Listened to songs 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11)

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Dallas Orbiter – “Blue Sky, Chrome White”

Time travel back to the early ‘90s via the mechanism of rock music with this track that captures a distinct vibe tied to that long-ago age. It’s a little Dinosaur Jr., a dash of Screaming Trees, and a healthy dose of long-forgotten-but-once-beloved one-off tracks found on mixtapes, late-night radio recordings and those weird-ass compilations that were everywhere in that era. 

Musically it’s noisy post-punk guitar, bass, drums and a vocal at its core (rock and roll will truly never die) with some timely shots of cosmic synth sounds here and there to sweeten things up. And unlike those hard-to-find-more compilation tracks it puts me in mind of, if you dig it, there’s several albums more to be found just a click away.

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Les Beaux Plastiques – Function

A high concept collection of short, spartan tracks of experimental techno and IDM. Minimal soundscapes of simple, almost chiptunesque timbres build and break around rhythms that are only occasionally dancefloor friendly. Repetition, movement and space are equal partners to the sound design and rhythm programming. 

Ideas enter, show off for a moment or two, then disappear, never to be seen again. Clicks and buzzes, BOMPs and beeps, rumbles and pings come and go in slow progressions against shifty beats. Maximal results with minimal elements. Fascinating.  

(Listened to the entire album)

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hell on hearth – “one hundred and forty one”

Longform experimental sound art with a distinctly unsettling vibe. It starts with a recording of what sounds like someone doing some minor vandalism – chucking rocks at bottles in an open field, perhaps? From there, it slowly evolves, the clanks, bumps and klangs becoming more abstract and weirder as the track progresses. 

The aesthetic on offer here is chains dragging along concrete, heavy thumps and crashes, metallic klangs and washes of noise – nothing straightforwardly musical, much less melodic. There are some rhythmic shapes on offer in the second half, but it’s still very abstract and environmental. Dark, disorienting and somehow dreamlike – a perfect soundtrack to your datura trips.

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Downupright – The Tartarus EP

Greek myth, hard-edged beats and pop collide in an explosion of high-energy dancefloor hijinks and general exuberance. High tempo, intense rhythms pulled from hard house, dubstep and hip hop are paired with rich pop-meets-trance production and vocals, with each tune introduced with a spoken-word snippet about the Greek myth that track is based on. 

It’s all very intense and technicolor and in-your-face – no need for subtlety here, we’re going HAM! It’s multigenre madness on a caffeine high that might be overwhelming to some, but if you like your music to be A LOT, this will please.

(Listened to the entire EP)

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A parting note: If you’d like to support my efforts to expose cool independent music to a wider audience, you can contribute to my year-long fundraiser via Ko-Fi. Alternately, you could always buy some of my music…