Fashion Bathers From the High Desert cassette
Social media is trying to turn the world into a lifeless monoculture. AI slop and LLMs are trying to do the same to the written word. But it’s not all doom and gloom, because this FASHION BATHERS cassette exists. This is genuinely one of the most refreshing things I’ve heard in forever. If TONY MOLINA moved to Australia and got lost in the eggy scene out there, I suppose the outcome might be similar to From the High Desert. But these 30-second-long earworms hail not from down under, but from the mighty north in Manitoba. Only two of the eighteen tracks here even crack the one-minute mark, with almost half of them not even hitting thirty seconds. And while on paper that sounds like something that might not pull me in, in practice it destroyed my brain. Also, as these tracks come and go so quickly, I didn’t even realize until I finished the entire tape that it was the same nine songs done two different ways to make up the full tracklist—because it felt so fresh, I almost missed the repetition completely. Hell, make it 36 tracks next time.