Reviews

Chrüsimüsi

Dom Sensitive Leather Trim cassette

DOM SENSITIVE, a new studio project from Adelaide musician Dom Trimboli of WIREHEADS, is a late-night, psych-heavy pastiche of synth swells, boom-bap drum machine patterns, and viiibes. “Digital Random Hat” opens the tape with a loping beat, accordion-aping synth, and laconic vocals that sound like KING KRULE reciting cough syrup poetry. This leads to a surprisingly earnest bar-room piano bridge complete with synthesized trumpet backing, like a bizarre BILLY JOEL D-side. Slow-moving, but oddly propulsive, the sound follows its own odd logic and tricked me into thinking, “Yeah, music sounds like this sometimes,” when it doesn’t. “The Second Day of Spring” is an eleven-minute journey of hip hop piano production with funky synth sax solo breaks that details an autobiographical tale of seeing a man about a horse. Or something. Picture the nerve of sending MRR an eleven-minute dad-psych jam! In this economy of short attention spans?! It’s actually quite listenable, and I can picture this record spinning on turntables in hip parties that I probably wouldn’t be invited to. “Weather Maps” takes a folky guitar trip reminiscent of BECK’s early K records days, and as a whole, the carefree and laid-back feel of the album is recommended to fans of slightly off-center indie like MAC DEMARCO.

Easy Goat Zehr Goat! cassette

I don’t want to say you owe me one, but I listened to this so you don’t have to. EASY GOAT is a lounge jazz/post-punk group from Stasbourg, and this tape is fucking annoying. Opening track “I Want a Dyke for President” has falsetto singing like children attempting opera, laser gun sound effects, and a honking clarinet as backing to spoken word poetry about presidential candidates. It doesn’t come across as edgy or as fun as the band seems to think and is a tedious five minutes. There is a rousing disco beat and sequencer pattern on “White Cis Het Nightmare Song” that is immediately ruined by more sing-song falsetto. Did you ever want to hear “Money (That’s What I Want)” played with too much cowbell? Me neither, but it’s on here. Maybe (and it’s a big maybe), if you like the RESIDENTS or want to get out of an apartment lease really quickly, check this out. Everyone else, steer clear.

Leopardo Side A / Side B LP

This album starts off with a beautiful, bizarro warble of a song that could have been a lost track from SWELL MAPS’ 1979 opus A Trip to Marineville. The album takes off from there with experimental looping tape sounds, off-kilter timing, mesmerizing Dean Wareham-esque vocals, and plinky melodies reminiscent of the VASELINES. Hints of TELEVISION PERSONALITIES and PERE UBU pop in and out. I’m sure the band could and probably has drawn VELVET UNDERGROUND comparisons, but in a more focused sense, it’s the vision and spirit of JOHN CALE that shines out from this unique body of work.

Moleskine Affective Experience of Urban Space cassette

Economical art-punk from Nantes, France that’s constructed like matchstick architecture, simultaneously precarious and precise. Spacious but taut mutant funk rhythms provide the grounding for short, scratchy shocks of guitar, blasé guy/girl spoken word vocal trade-offs, and on tracks like the gyrating, 99 Records-styled “Adjoining Wall,” some emphatic punctuation from a skronking saxophone. “Some Trivial Task” echoes the bass-forward, Euro neo-no-wave minimalism of bands like DUDS and HANDLE from the past decade or so, as “Non Sense” hits a slinky, all-night LIZZY MERCIER DESCLOUX-ish beat. “A Leak” and “Neurotic Pressure” lead off the back half of the tape with smoldering, dubbed-out grooves occupying a similar headspace as modern practitioners NON PLUS TEMPS, but any release of tension they might signal is then quickly interrupted by “No More Guests” sounding the FIRE ENGINES’ anxiety-disco klaxon call. I’m sold!

S.G.A.T.V. Collected Recordings 2020–2023 cassette

Complete discography cassette of a solo new wave project from Frauenfeld, Switzerland. Killer songwriting, mostly driven by synth and drum machine. Stylistically S.G.A.T.V. is all over the map. Spastic, eggy punk riffs, catchy dreamy synth pop, danceable club music licks somehow tastefully crafted into driving synth-heavy disco punk songs. Is that a damn thing? Well, it is now thanks to S.G.A.T.V. There’s a slow progression to these songs that reads like storyline-driven songwriting. It adds an epic feeling to these songs, as if they were written to be in some sort of new wave freaker musical. Apparently this discography cassette was released for this solo recording project to do a two-week Euro tour as a full six-piece band. Holy hell, I would absolutely have loved to see how these songs were recreated live. The fine folks over at Chrüsimüsi Records really pulled out all the stops with this release. In my thirty-some years of listening to music on cassettes, I have never seen one with printing in this manner. Black-and-white artwork printed on both sides of the shell of the tape itself in a way that I can’t quite tell how it was done. Intriguing and awesome, which are also adjectives I would use to describe S.G.A.T.V.