The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Leave it to a couple desert kids to make the ideal Pennsylvania album.
If I've never made the case to you why Pine Marten, the trio that produced this woodsy pudding of equally soothing and menacing drones, is the lost Silver Lake band, let me do so here. You'd think coming up in fertile musical soil like The Ship (the collective that birthed Silversun Pickups, Earlimart, and a dozen other fine indie rock projects) would be tough, but on that accessible lattice of indie rock, Pine Marten layer their rubbery guitars, tree root beats, and fixations on dumplings, clouds, cottontails, magnets, and wristwatches in ways no one else in that scene quite managed. This is no straightforward singer-songwriter indie record--it's catchy and warped, handmade and deeply affecting. It's a shame they only left us one.
Mark Wooten's guitars and vocals are what gives Beautiful Stakes so much color. His voice is twangy, his lyrics are elliptical (cue teenage me trying to make them out before I had the lyric sheet), and rarely do his vocal melodies follow the riff; where one drones, the other bounces. Brian Thornell's angular drum parts add to the quirkiness, easily able to make the song seem half as fast or give uncommon time feels to otherwise straight songs. (Future Silversun Joe Lester might seem like the least of the three, but the lo-fi synths and exaggerated bottom end he lends the record on bass aids the creeping, uneasy psychedelic rumble.) A few undercooked songs towards the end keep this from being a Perfect, but damn--damn, damn, imagine what else they could've given us.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Mechanically Separated", "B.B. Guns", "Cottontails" | "Roadkill Collage" | "The Future in Wood" |  |
INDEX | CHANGELOG | CONTACT
ART | MODDING | MUSIC | WRITING
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