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Hey gang. It’s really cold out, and even if it weren’t, it still would be. Let the tense music within regulate your metabolism so you can endure life in the modern vortex. Im kalten Polar.
Two freebs this week, more where that came from after the jump. Priming the pump.
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SMIRK “Domestic Dog” b/w “Manhunt in Paradise” 7” (Industry Standard)
First new Smirk in a couple years from the looks of it – output has slowed, but quality has remained. Nick Vicario (last seen here a week or two back with that great deathrock LP by Cemento, on Iron Lung) brings it back with sunglasses. “Domestic Dog” does notes-on-a-rope gtr lead/chord changes through some simmering self-awareness in the lyrics and a rhythm section that drives as if they’re roadieing for Agent Orange, kinda almost like Total Control recording for Dangerhouse but we’ll never know about that. Flip it and we get one of the slowest Smirk tracks to date, and maybe a course corrective. Vicario’s deadpan, breathy vocals over this moody broiler nail his jade straight into the amp, burning on an outsider state of mind that is definitely a lot warmer than where I am now, but no less anxious than if it’s seven below.
URLAUB IN POLEN Objects, Beings & Parrots LP (Tapete)
Fuckin’ kismet, as the very thing I played after that Smirk single is this second reunion album from Köln’s Urlaub in Polen, a group from the 2000s that’s psychically picked up on the presence of Smirk’s sound and fleshed it out more. Somehow all new to me, I cracked into some earlier releases to see how this straight-line, impossibly cool postpunk group had flown outta my radar, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying; I wouldn’t have known unless I lived in Germany (which, let’s be honest, would be GREAT). Apart from being couched between The Books and The Oh Sees on the Tomlab label’s gestalt (closest I woulda come to discovering them), their influences of synthy cruise and batterie de Teuton were a little blockier and less digested then. Twenty years out and they’ve taken an iron to it, “Mother Sky” vocalizing behind Clinic’s surgical masks (prescient, those), together as a duo, at dusk, the neon lights turn on along the edges of the marquees. Also kinda plays like an organized take on something particularly American and bad-boy, like Girls Against Boys, and I needed a little of that more than I really wanted to admit. Couple loose ones towards the end, but this one just goes for the first 2/3 and the finale. Go with ‘em.
More beyond the wall…
