By In honor of the 10th anniversary of Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Editor-in-Chief CJ Simonson decided to spend a few quick words highlighting a pair of albums from 2015, the year of the magazine’s inception, for today’s Bandcamp Picks! Be sure to grab a ticket for MGRM10, which starts this weekend! Cheers!
California X – NIGHTS IN THE DARK
Genre: Noise Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Nights in the Dark,” “Summer Wall, Pt. 2”
My prevailing memory of California X surrounds a college radio buddy at the time urging me to give their self-titled debut a go as an under-the-radar listen amidst the Japandroids/Cloud Nothings/Titus Andronicus/No Age etc. boom of the early-to-mid-2010s. That self-titled album was solid—big arena riffs that recall the clattering, Sabbath’y searching that really only the John Dwyers and Ty Segalls of the world came out of the 2010s continuing to successfully mine. Its best song, “Pond Rot,” a sludgy but melancholic drop-out, served to be something of a template for their only follow-up album, 2015’s NIGHTS IN THE DARK. That album channels a similarly forlorn low-end guitar sound to great avail—if their debut was all head, this is all heart. The free-falling fuzz acts as a different kind of catharsis on the opening title track, more J Mascis than MC5. Its best song, “Summer Wall, Pt. 2,” captures the listless days of a dying empire better than most art made a decade ago, the twitchy, anxiety-laden depression of a life too good:
“Time slides along
It goes so easy on
But when I hit that summer wall
I think I’ll crumple like before
Until the leaves we’ll pile
Gust and scatter on the road
In the evening light remote
From the first gold stains of dawn
That drag me on
When I don’t have that spark of life I ought to
I’ll take this sick day on the lawn
Its where I spent the last one
And on and on”
Everything in 2015 points to a world that was unprepared to grapple with what was coming, blissfully unaware of the evilness that was lurking. NIGHTS IN THE DARK exists at the precipice of that moment better than you could’ve anticipated 10 years ago. Grab a copy over on Bandcamp (or grab a copy of the vinyl, still in stock via our friends at Don Giovanni).
QUARTERBACKS – S/T
Genre: Power Pop, Twee Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Not in Luv,” “Weekend,” “Lauren”
In hushed whispers at DIY gigs surrounded by dudes of a certain age, you can mention Dean Engle’s bedroom power pop project QUARTERBACKS and see their eyes light up. The album lives on in the hearts and minds of plenty, but the project was like a shooting star, quickly capturing a sect of the comatose music blogosphere and then going away forever. You can hear the obvious K Records influence, and 2015 and the surrounding years were lousy with similar artists thinking they could riff on Tiger Trap or Beat Happening successfully and failing, but QUARTERBACKS was so unrelenting in its bright singularity that you’re won over by Engle’s obvious charm. Sure, Remember Sports, Radiator Hospital, LVL UP (broadly), etc. had longer tails, but you can’t deny the scrappy cheer of “Not In Luv” or “Last Boy” if you tried, even today.
I appreciate this piece from the FADER in 2018 noting a singular new QUARTERBACKS song where Engle notes that after recording “the four track shut off and won’t turn back on, so this might be the last Qboy track.” I was at a party one time and someone said Engle is a teacher somewhere in the tri-state area living his life. Who knows if that’s true, but I’m happy to believe it. Sometimes, things go away, and that’s kind of beautiful. Grab it over on Bandcamp.
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