All At Once

Band Practice “I Want You”

This song is barely over a minute but it’s an incredibly vivid and nuanced portrait of an ephemeral but intense relationship at a specific moment in time. There’s a bit of manic desperation, and a little naiveté, and awkward but genuine lust, and the looming weight of cultural expectations, and the implication of an uneven age dynamic. Best of all, there’s the way the song conveys anxiety in fidgety, increasingly agitated strums, as if playing the guitar was a nervous tic about the same as pulling your hair, shaking your foot, or grinding your teeth.

Buy it from Bandcamp.

Salami Rose Joe Louis “Cyanotype of Blue”

Salami Rose Joe Louis composes her records as suites made up of short song vignettes, sorta like Robert Pollard when he’s in collage-rock mode, so the individual tracks can feel a bit abrupt out of context. I mean, I definitely wish “Cyanotype of Blue” was longer – the mood is so strong and the way it springs out of a sleepy mode into something a bit more swinging and bright could sustain at least another minute or two. But at the same time, there is something very compelling to me about songs that resolve themselves rather quickly, and records that are so full of musical ideas they don’t slow down to reiterate their own hooks.

Buy it from Amazon.