By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the ripe jangle pop of Lost Film’s KEEP IT TOGETHER and the experimental folk stylings of journeyman Nathan Salsburg’s LANDWERK NO. 3!
Lost Film – KEEP IT TOGETHER
Genre: Dream Pop, Jangle Pop
Favorite Tracks: “Big Talk,” “Notion,” “Replaces”
Given recent online conversations (and full on re-evaluations) of the all-too-prevalent blog rock era, I’m sure the lo-fi bedroom pop and chillwave adjacent artists who rode in on the backs of that movement will no doubt see their own celebration soon. While many blog rockers burned bright and fast (we all just thought about a different artist), the likes of Day Wave, Geowulf, CASTELBEAT, Hazel English, etc, gained steam in the mid-2010s via more terminally online sects of the internet like Tumblr and 8tracks, as well as on the early wave of user generated indie vibes playlists on platforms like Spotify and YouTube, each releasing new records early and often just the way Daniel Ek wanted them to. The DSPs more than anything else may keep these projects each relevant, but the music has remained consistent in quality, each as essential in 2023 to those chill out playlists as they were in 2015.
Lost Film have yet to see the commercial highs of those artists (re: the right algorithm didn’t break in the right way at the right time), but you can tell on a smaller indie scale that the music has inadvertently followed a similar path in the streaming era, reaping the slight rewards of indie influencer generated micro playlists and healthy word of mouth via whatever music blogs (hey, that’s us!) still exist. And, like those aforementioned peers who continue to make music in this vein, Jim Hewitt’s songwriting and approach over the last eight or so years has grown, evolving from the isolating, sparse, and urgent indie rock of 2015’s IMAGO to loud, full bodied jangle pop on Lost Film’s latest, KEEP IT TOGETHER.
Even at their most lo-fi, Lost Film’s guitar tones always tapped directly into that Dunedin sound. At its best, KEEP IT TOGETHER cribs directly from the crisper, more mature late-career work of artists like The Bats or Felt (or, naturally, eventual students of those bands as well, R.E.M.), finding groovy, synthy, and considered rhythms to weave under familiar and bold guitar parts; the shinier pop construction of songs like the undeniable “Big Talk” or the ruckus finale “Replaces” occasionally expand into the kind of explosive emotional hooks that made artists like Los Campesinos! or Voxtrot brashly stand out in the 2000s. While plenty of tracks still tap into the primal quietness of their early work (“Searching” especially), it’s as big and technical feeling as anything Hewitt’s ever released before—and, cynically, a sound you’d have to hope the algorithm and playlisters will love. If 2019’s ZERO SUMMER dreamily smoothed some of the edges around the striking rhythm section present in Lost Film’s earlier work, KEEP IT TOGETHER feels like a natural progression of balance; those head bopping singles “Notion” and “Little Things Forever” are dizzying mid-tempo earworms, as quintessentially Lost Film as anything on the record and yet still striking nonetheless.
Lost Film or Day Wave or Beach Fossils or Swimming Tapes or whoever you want to pick from this sonic era will never go away—not as long as Spotify user Indiemono continues to update their “Saturday Morning ☕Chill Songs” playlist. But it’s thrilling to hear KEEP IT TOGETHER, among the best jangle pop records released in 2023, and fall under its hypnosis just like it’s 2015 all over again. You can go listen to the album over on Bandcamp. [CJ Simonson]
Nathan Salsburg – LANDWERK NO. 3
Genre: Folk, Experimental
Favorite Tracks: “XI,” “XIV”
From a conceptual standpoint, LANDWERK NO. 3 is a truly special record. Here, Kentucky composer-guitarist Nathan Salsburg has paired “electric guitar, resonator guitar, organ and piano” with phonographic samples. The end result is equally ethereal and nostalgic, a six-track collection that seems to emanate from some dimension vibrating just outside our own. And so given that magical sheen, it’s only right that this album deserves a different kind of review. Here, then, are the whimsical day dreams and general fantasies that overtook my brain as a celebration of this deeply potent convergence of cross-dimensional music.
“IX” (M. Gutmann’s “Mutter’s Kaver”)
I’m holding my lover’s hand as we walk across the snow toward an old barn as the churning guitar leads us on. We dance for what feels like hours until the barn slowly catches ablaze. That endless guitar locks us into our slow shuffle as the embers flicker in time.
X (Dnu. H. Bloom’s “Foiu Verdi”)
It’s the dead of a blazing summer, and I’m hunting some great unknown beast across the high desert. The hum of the sample and the sway of the guitar has me feeling like the craftiest hunter ever born. But when I see the beast in a clearing, all I can do is watch it feed.
XI (Abe and Sylvia Schwartz’s “National Hora”)
I’m trapped in some old black and white film. I’m either a private dick looking for a cheating bank executive, or I’m the young woman’s husband seeking out said executive. Either way, the fuzz is all I can hear as I push myself deeper and deeper into the mystery.
XII (Jacob Silbert’s “A Brief Fin 1916”)
The world has ended and I’m slushing through the ash and rain in someone else’s boots. I’m following a deer when we make our way over a hill. When the music slowly shifts to that subtly menacing tone, it’s then I see my first city in weeks and I can’t process a thing.
XIII (Ludwig Satz’s “Lom Ich Frier Alten Derbei”)
That horn-like sound and tone tells me I’m in some far-flung future landscape. Someone or something follows me through a crowded marketplace and I try my best to blend into the crowd. Even as I round a corner into an alley, I can’t shake the sense that I’ll never be alone again.
XIV (Abe Ellstein Orchestra’s “Mazel Tov”)
I’m sitting at a pond near dusk when the water changes, showing me the many moments of my life. Heartache and loss swirl around first loves and my greatest triumphs. I never think about who is behind this slideshow but only what happens when it reaches this very day.
Final Thought: Whether you have an over-active imagination or not, this collection should stir something deep in the ol’ cerebellum. Salsburg uses the past and present as tools to explore some shared creative space, and the end result is truly effective. More music should elicit this kind of fantastical thought with its quiet grace and slow-burning passion.
Listen to it now over on Bandcamp. [Chris Coplan]
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