The Point Is Blurred

Brakes “On Your Side” – The Brighton-based punk band Brakes dress up more than half of their new record in country and western drag, but aside from a few tracks that jump into the deep end of predictability, they mostly play with the genre’s signifiers whilst keeping their identity intact with a brisk tempo and a taste for sharp dynamics that distance them from the alt-country crowd. At its core, “On Your Side” is a simple pop song that could easily be nudged into several styles, but faux-country is the outfit that suits it best, though the genre is mostly just implied by guitar tone and minor instrumental cues. After all, your song can only sound so country if your singer just happens to come across like a friendlier version of Ade Blackburn from Clinic. (Click here to buy it via Brakes’ official site.)

The Good Good “We Go” – Since they don’t seem to be directly appropriating or referencing other works and there’s an implication of depth and contour, the Good Good’s approach to songwriting is closer to decoupage than collage, but in either case, it’s nearly impossible to engage with their songs without an awareness of their process. “We Go” holds together as a somewhat conventional rock song, but the band foreground texture and push the listener to imagine it as a physical work transposed to sound, with its obscured, whispered spoken word passages reading as cut-up diary passages smeared into an illegible blur by a clear gel medium. (Click here to buy it from Midheaven.)

Elsewhere: Dan Beirne’s entry on Said The Gramophone today is one of the best and most creative reviews that I’ve ever seen on an mp3 blog.

And: Sorry that this got up a little late today. It was completed around 10 AM EST, but there were some technical difficulties.