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Salvador Dali ~ “Tarot Universal Dali”

Blact.

Dante Aligheri. The Divine Comedy. The Passport, Crossing and Commitments, The Cultural Other, What’s Love Got to Do with It, The City, Aristotle (Where We Do Not Expect Him), Virgilio’s Limitations, At The Gates of Dis, One Heresy (Epicureanism) Dramatized in Two Florentines (Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti), Our Bodies Our Selves (top to bottom). Brescia, Boninus de Boninis, de Ragusia. 1487.

GERM HOUSE - “Showing Symptoms” LP/CD

Even in my most cynical lifecycle stages, I’ve usually found ways to make common cause with the wider world of “indie rock”. I have gladly spent real cash money seeing milquetoast all-dude bands from Matador Records play lightly “angular” guitar, and in the 80s and 90s I felt as though I had a pretty good grasp on the innocuous and sometimes halfway-decent music being put out on most indie labels. This likely sprang from an overly robust fanzine collection, and many Sunday afternoon hangovers spent poring through them.

Sure, I had my time making fun of the shit bands in that world, but it was always more of a gas to needle some overly serious wallet-on-a-chain garage punk clown or a dress-up horrorcore band than it was a pack of earnest young men trying to sound like, I don’t know, Robyn Hitchcock or Superchunk. In short, “indie rock” writ large may have been musically tepid, but it was controlled and fairly isolated to college campuses and bespectacled fellow travelers.

I’ll sometimes look at the best-of-the-year lists on massively popular indie rock blogs now, where every record’s on a micro-label, and I’ll half-wonder if I’m missing anything in my willed ignorance and start clicking links. It might sound like some old guy complainin’, but some of the watered-down drivel the kids are chawing about these days makes Pavement and Polvo sound like Poison Idea.

The thought of spending an afternoon at an outdoor festival watching bearded barefoots leap around to Sugar Bear, the Sleepybeds & Beaches and Summerhouses (faux names just minted via my 2015 indie rock band generator machine™) sounds about as tasty as a Jello Biafra spoken word all-nighter. So when something rises from the mire of the indie-rock swamps and give me pause to reconsider my “stance”, it’s gotta be remarkable.

Germ House may be that indie rock band. Granted, they’d likely find their common cause less with the aforementioned than with GBV or Wire, but they have a straightforward earnestness and song construction that’s medium-sized-label indie rock to the max. Turns out they’re a one-couple show, more or less, a Las Cruces, New Mexico husband/wife project that grew from a Boston band you might have heard called Turpentine Brothers.

I’ve played this album nearly weekly since I got it, and I’m not done yet. It has a well-crafted, lo-fidelity gravel-n-tar roof surrounding barely-held walls slapped together from equal parts melody and menace. Main fella Justin Hubbard has a terrific voice to boot, and I could see this stuff being gobbled up by Elephant 6-loving heads in the late 1990s. It’s not often you and I will find a modern central-casting indie rock band this remarkably and reliably great, top to bottom across an entire LP; suggest you give it a whirl or swear to god I’m buying you a Coachella ticket. (Trouble In Mind; troubleinmindrecs.com) – Jay

Crystal Liu - The Lake, “In The Blue”

Pee Wee—

Haruki Murakami, from Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World (Vintage Digital, 2011)

Bas Jan Ader

Primary Time, 1974