Engaged in the summoning of lands that time forgot, whether it’s crude vestiges of Americana or the Styxian blues of his last record, the guitarist Bobby Would carries an iterative and sometimes thrillingly pleonastic charm as he finds new points of emphasis and scrabbles the nooks and crannies of his scuzzy yet melodious loops. His new album Relics Of Our Life for the Oakland label Digital Regress certainly bears some of the hallmarks of the Dunedin sound, depicted here as ‘the delicacy of The Great Unwashed with the heavy heart of The Verlaines and the smartness of The Chills’, but it’s really about breaking apart that sort of emotional and stylistic nexus, as Would explores everything from its forebears in the garage rock of The Velvet Underground and The Stooges with their artsy airs and punkish distortions to its successors in the slacker rock of Pavement and the mid-tempo balladry of R.E.M.
Other bands which spring to mind include the florid and even slightly wan psychedelia of Love, the surf rock and spectral wind chimes of The Beach Boys and the inveterate jangliness of The Byrds. There’s a little bit of the soft samba which characterised sunshine pop, and while the album notes also cite the ‘hymnal geometry and switched-on Palestrina’ of Popol Vuh and the cosmic elation of Terry Riley, perhaps the clearest representation of his sound would be to say that Bobby Would sits gladly somewhere between Bobby Darin and Ariel Pink with the same penchant even amidst his fuzzy repetitions for swashbuckling dynamics and fetching hooks.
Some of the earworms on Relics Of Our Life have clearer antecedents in the briskly incessant doo-wop of ‘Stay’ by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, the stoner sands of ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden and the gothic sloshing of ‘Riders on the Storm’ by The Doors. ‘All I do is thinking about you’ and ‘Why don’t you talk to me?’ are some of the petitions and supplications which Would intones to various stages of completion, riding waves of scum and foam as they stretch out beyond the sea.
The besuited Dubliner pigbaby offers a similar potpourri of genres on his debut full-length for PLZ Make It Ruins. The eleven mulched pearls of i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do run the gamut from torch songs to a sort of claustrophobic, world-weary anxiety which finds the sonic and atmospheric middle ground between Blackhaine and Brian Wilson (the frequent Blackhaine collaborator, grisaille tearjerker and White Hotel habitué Rainy Miller wound up mixing each of the tracks). From the scuttling or smothering pensiveness of ‘Meep meep said the rat’ and ‘I’m here, with you’, which introduces a characteristic swathe of muted woodwinds and brass, ‘Life moves fast, so take my hand.’ carries bird calls and other field recordings, an insidious, subtly propulsive post-punk guitar line, pitch-shifted cloud rap vocals and a glitching percussive tape hiss whose enveloping warmth is redolent of early-aughties indie standouts like Múm or The Notwist. Suddenly the air of quiet and groping desperation is dispelled by ‘The Green Hills of Cornamona’, the setting of the album’s cover, a winsome pastoral featuring bronzed saxophone and billowing strings.
Pigbaby recorded i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do in a little cottage in the Irish countryside in the winter of 2021, after he and a small group of friends lugged cellos, guitars, tape decks and samplers, plastic keyboards and portable Indian harmoniums, some of which were gathered from his mother’s attic, up a muddy hill as the rain fell and wild horses passed by. The prevailing mood is both mystically dank and sometimes deliriously heartfelt, with the accoutrements of the album such as its lowercase styling and the artist’s pervasive pig costume adding to the sense of an hermetic narrative. The songwriting veers from short epigrammatic utterances to lengthy confessionals which pluck at the heartstrings even though the listener is never quite sure how much is put-on or true, whose details steer between the musty and trite, the cod-cinematic and the keeningly familiar, always ready with an acute observation or resonant turn of phrase enough to steer us right back on track.
An example of the confessional narrative style, ‘Crying in Burger King’ is also the record’s most varied and dissolute track, with a simple chord progression on the guitar, elegiac fiddle strains and ramshackle percussion accompanying the mawkish saga of an empty stomach and fast food tears, from the damp concrete or peatlands teasing a jazz break before immediately seguing into a blur of fusion, Cocteau Twins glossolalia and staggering Sigur Ros or Godspeed You! Black Emperor-esque post-rock. ‘I miss my baby girl.’ dabbles with skiffle, brings in a transposed fiddle and closes as a bar room shanty with choral accompaniment, leading in to ‘Texas Girl’ which serves as both climax and centrepiece.
The recollection of a stalled romance by turns glibly absurd – as when the singer in his conversational intimacy admits ‘I sat and watched her suck some guy’s gigantic dong. I didn’t expect to fall so quick’ – and searingly poignant, the text is accompanied by the wordless sean-nós melismas of a tenor with peals of giggling laughter and Michael Jackson-esque hee-hees as pigbaby warms to his subject, before hope frays and the fantasy turns sour. On a sodden bike ride from Bed-Stuy over the bridge into Manhattan on Christmas Day, the narrator listens through his Bluetooth speakers to Aphex Twin, whose . . . I Care Because You Do is cannily referenced in the album title, and Tirzah’s soothingly downbeat ‘Fine Again’, but as ‘Texas Girl’ itself swirls to a crescendo and pigbaby dwells on a sense of loss and lessons learned, the piece evokes something of Paul Simon at his most quizzical, on Graceland tracks like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’, fittingly given some of the shared themes and locales while switching out its zephyr optimism for something more rainswept and threnodial, or ‘Gumboots’ and ‘I Know What I Know’ whose chorus and dynamics have been mined across whole songs and albums by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, another far-flung spiritual kin. Closing on a bit of music hall with harmonium and fiddle, i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do is a record that’s easy to dismiss but very difficult to shake, a sentiment of a piece with the title, a promise made and held dear.
