about when alley driveway gates went up

Jeremy had his big driveway gate installed after someone broke into his car and stole his golf clubs. His wasn’t the first gate in the alley, but it was a little different because his family lived next door to mom and dad. Every time I was around, I would see their SUV pull in and out, the 8-foot fence open and close, grinding the same, coming or going.

The first time I saw a gate like that in the neighborhood was probably 10 years earlier—on one of the houses in the alley opposite the field belonging to the public elementary school. Is that the one that started it all? Today, those alley driveway gates are everywhere. Whatever neighbors value is stored away safely now, along with whatever value neighbors have.

 

something about a debut from a Dutch doom-noise trio

Each sate sullenly apart, gorging himself in gloom. – Lord Byron

Farer debuted last fall with Monad, four songs—exercises, really—of droning grinds of blistering, drilling bass; thunder-and-lightning drums; feedback; and throat-herniating, injurious shrieks that are more primal scream therapy than performance.

The doom-noise trio (two bass players and a drummer) started as Menhir in 2013 but changed the name to Farer in 2019 after recording this debut. The intensity in these four tracks carries on for 12 to 14 minutes at a time, and this prolonged length can recast the intensity as a drone effect.

This Dutch band is working out a sound. What they have so far is grim and brutal, all right. It's a difficult, hungering debut.

 
Monad was released in November 2020 through Aesthetic Death and Tartarus Records. (On September 24th, it will be available as a limited edition clear and black marbled-color double-LP housed in a heavy gatefold.)

a note about Talleen's new single and video, “Economics”

Last week, Montreal’s post-punk quintet, Talleen, put out a single, “Economics.” A pulsing bass drives the song while an insistent, anxious beat counters the woozy guitars. The combination produces a black cocktail of uppers and downers. The dominant sound, though, is the vocal—a mimic of ridicule and sneer. The song, accompanied by a video (by Alex Ortiz, the bass player and singer for We Are Wolves), gives a heavy-lidded glance at capitalism.

Talleen debuted with an EP, The Black Sea, in 2018. They sound a little like Killing Joke.