Hello, all. I am crumbling by the minute, but here's another blog. Taking a break very soon. Posting some cool stuff tomorrow. Send music shit to [ fosterhildingmusic@gmail.com ] or DM me on Instagram.
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| photos courtesy of you can tell i was here. |
This one slowly snuck up on me... a fucking incredible, winding, twisting, wrenching, and all around dense and lengthy album by resident Mouths Made Wordless-er, Nick, under the name you can tell i was here. North Sea Texas is a monster, a collage of genre-exploring homages built on inspiration and pure will. Incredible stuff and I'm stoked to review it (although a little daunted by its one hour and ten minute runtime).
hours i throws us into waves of bliss in ambient pads and soft passages ripped straight from Blade Runner--perhaps a little more compositionally interesting, though. Digital strings doused in reverb line the patterned changes and give them new meaning on every repetition. It does little to prepare us for our journey apart from relaxing our ears before whiplash.
Now Is The Only Time I Like It Here thumps against its own delay and reverb like a clouded portrait of a death. "I come back too late / Like wood flakes from a grave," maybe drove that image into my head. After the 24 reference in here, I feel like I need to analyze these lyrics for other allusions... A diner slide guitar lines our peripheral, just out of sight and just present enough to be felt. They burst like a soft halo of light in its ending, a collapse into delays and feedback.
Jeromey subverts all that we know, screeching guitars and bombastic drums come blaring through hard enough to tear through steel. Nick's screams still belt out, fighting against their layers of effects and struggling under the weight of distortion. Some superb doomgaze forms from the ashes of their feedbacking ancestors before returning to some post-rock primordial soup, squirming and sizzling in an ancient sun. And we are back to where we started. The arrangement of this song is so deceivingly dense. As the drums force us to bolt faster and faster like a tailgating Dodge Ram in Phoenix, Arizona, a dreaming melody slowly consumes any and all remnants of song. Thank fuck that doom part came back. Sick shit.
I Don't Want To Be Alone turns into a slowcore homage to Have A Nice Life. Digital drums jangle in their fuzzy beds under crushed vocals and guitars slowly disintegrated by their own electrocuted mass. This one feels so meditative to me. You can melt into its far away strings and disappear. The slow burning shoegaze jam we fall into by the end is just so fucking sick.
Meter Maid strums on open strings like Alex G's Gretel. It is slowcore at its finest--these fragile, plucked melodies pulsing with the weight of a heavy kick. Man, this fucking post-chorus or whatever you call it is just incredible--guitars and wisps of noise sucking in and out of a vacuum, alone and splayed across dimensions. "No one told me it would be so hard..." Cricket trap beats and whooshing saws scrape us to a sunlit end lined with a bittersweet hope in the promise of a new day.
She's Irresponsible With Her Words echoes indistinguishably behind rooms of soupy fuzz and negative space before industrial basses crunch us into position. Vocals here are pure rip-off in the best way, these absolutely booming gothic bursts of thunder in repetitive mantras call us back from new wave and into 80s house nostalgia. With every song, Nick proves that this is more of an exercise in covering every base, leaving nothing untouched, and mastering every intricate nuance of every genre and venture. The blend of alternative, near-techno, gothic rock, and soupy post-rock is superb here. Alright, Trent Reznor...
Anasazi thins out into overblown metal riffage and unintelligible lyrics, guitars taking up any and all space we have left to give over. I love the use of feedback and noise as a songwriting tool rather than a transitionary measure. We blip and blop into this sexy groove with far away drums, carpeting over any previous expectations. The production on this is so creative, so out of there, and such an integral part of the song creation, itself.
As Night Turns To Day At The Circle K... hands us back over to meditation, synths making our soft beds and calloused hands a haven for the weary. A piano melody appears--at first lonesome, and slowly built on with delays and friends bending backwards, as if after that first word, all else became distorted memory. We transcend density as we float from one chord to the next in flux and tranquility for infinity.
Selflessness liquidates tone and phases vocals out from the ether. We waltz amongst their echoing obscurity and a repeating melody made warm and welcomed by its dancing companions. "Teach me things," pulls through indistinguishability and introduces a spacey, cyclic solo to close us out.
North Sea Texas is some western take on Giles Corey's aching folk songscapes, painfully lucid and reflective in ways most refuse. Nick's take is more light for the first half, though. A brittle harmonica and a short guitar buddy up between choruses like new friends on a field trip. Enormous, endlessly reverbed drums take us on like rhinos against a 3/4 folk jam and a pair of solos that fit just right. A witch trial on a Friday night?
Agony bubbles and cracks over shuffling drums, a crushed synth and its fluttering companions being our only anchor in their stormed waters and esoteric, cosmic spoken words from origins unknown and unclear. Here comes a funky little bass like an underdog hero with its crowd of whispering spectators and staccato strings. These drums are so nasty for a moment, like DJ Shadow meets Nine Inch Nails. Then Goreshit worship hardcore jungle absurdity and fusiony bass solo sweetness wrapped into an under two minute little present. This is the climax, the pinnacle of, "What can I fit in this song?" that perfectly encapsulates the album. Music for chronically online music nerds.
Forever just gets lost in its own waves of distorted reverb and pulsing layers. I don't have much to say about this song, other than it is absolutely beautiful. It is concluding and final and creamy. A mouthful of warm sugar. The snooze button. A clammy hand to hold. A promise. Real love.
slowcorehero turns fuzzy and hazy for a final refrain, a slow dance to a warped record in a crumbling temple. I think this title is perfect--on the nose and cheeky but damningly accurate and harboring some melancholic edge. It's the only way it all could've ended.
This album is a fucking feat. So long, yet so dense and magical in its journey through various spaces. It is just such a pleasure to listen through. Great stuff. Check it out. I'm going to sleep now. Thanks for reading.
8/10
Stream North Sea Texas.
-Foster
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