By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week featuring the nostalgically familiar experimental rock of Zack Benlan’s OBSCURITARIANISM!
Zack Benlan – OBSCURITARIANISM
Genre: Experimental Rock
Favorite Tracks: “One Lifetime Ain’t Enough,” “Give Up”
The title of the LP, OBSCURITARIANISM, might give the wrong impression for an uninitiated listener. Pastiches are always familiar in some sense. These are songs you have heard before, maybe near a rest stop’s vending machines when you were eight, or out the window of a wood-paneled Buick driving past another untrustable “antique” barn on the side of the highway. It feels a bit like putting your head through the arm-hole of a T-shirt. Unfamiliar examples of something you’ve previously taken as a fact.
Zakiyah “Zack” Benlan is based in Goleta, California, which spent a long period as the largest unincorporated populated area in Santa Barbara county. This locale seems fitting for the music—a collection of the lost bits of Americana that were left scattered across the Southern Californian desertscape over the past half-century that have been patchworked together.
This is Benlan’s first LP in three years, in a set of records that are surprisingly uniform in mission. Reassembling cereal boxes, old copies of People Magazine, and taking highlighters to the whole thing, Benlan has been able to nail their tracks on the head. There’s a funhouse mirror or Joe Meek aspect to the songwriting: When not being shot through vacuum tubes, there’s a levity and a return to classic pop form that feels uncanny in its sincerity. You’ll be taken down memory lane through the LP, and, hopefully, come out the vacuum on the other side having learned something about what you already knew. Check it out on Bandcamp.
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