ROSE CITY BAND MP3 Pack

RUTracker – FOR UR CONSIDERATION

A fan-assembled music pack does not need to be complete to tell the truth about an artist. It can function more like a handful of seeds gathered from different plants, seasons and locations. The person who assembled it may have followed availability, curiosity, affection or some private logic that vanished when the folder began traveling. What remains is an invitation: begin somewhere.

Rose City Band is especially compatible with that form because it began as a project whose identity was deliberately left a little blurry. The first record appeared under a band name without making its creator the center of the presentation. It looked like the rediscovery of some obscure private-press country-rock group whose members had wandered out of history before anybody thought to document them properly.

The music soon betrayed the secret to listeners familiar with Ripley Johnson. His voice, guitar phrasing and devotion to hypnotic repetition were already recognizable from Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo. Yet the disguise still mattered. Rose City Band was not merely another name pasted onto the same machine. It gave Johnson permission to enter a different landscape.

Wooden Shjips often feel like forward propulsion through smoke, distortion and urban night. Moon Duo adds electronic pulse and a sharper futuristic glow. Rose City Band takes some of that same repetitive mathematics and opens the windows. The road remains long, but daylight enters. Pedal steel hangs above the rhythm like weather. Country-rock warmth replaces some of the earlier projects’ pressure without removing their psychedelic depth.

The result is not simply a rock musician putting on a cowboy shirt. Johnson’s interest reaches toward privately pressed records from the middle and late 1970s, especially music that existed between recognized categories. These were albums made by regional groups, small labels, communes, friends or solitary studio obsessives whose work might contain country, folk, boogie, psychedelia and homemade spirituality without waiting for a critic to decide which shelf deserved it.

That older private-press world has a distinct emotional temperature. The records often sound close enough to touch because commercial perfection was not available, expected or even desirable. A drum might occupy too much of one corner. A guitar solo may continue because nobody in the room feels a need to stop it. Harmony voices arrive as friends rather than salaried specialists. The limitations become part of the welcome.

Rose City Band carries that intimacy into contemporary recording. Much of the music is created at home in Portland, with Johnson building songs patiently and inviting selected musicians into the structure. The recordings are largely his compositions and arrangements, while the touring version becomes a more visibly communal animal. This produces an unusual double identity: the albums can resemble solo records released under a collective name, but the songs expand onstage through the personalities of an actual band.

Johnson has said that he prefers band names to placing his own name on records. Part of that may be shyness, but it also creates artistic freedom. A personal name can become a permanent storefront. A band name can be a room constructed for one particular kind of thinking. When another musical desire appears, another room can be built.

Rose City Band is the sunroom.

That does not mean the music is empty happiness. Its calm is made rather than assumed. The steady rhythms, major-key movement and open-air guitar tones often feel therapeutic because they acknowledge repetition as one of the ways human beings regulate themselves. A groove returns, the body learns where it lives, and the mind is temporarily released from having to predict every approaching second.

Johnson’s guitar rarely behaves like a speech demanding silence from everyone else. It wanders, circles, replies and occasionally disappears into the horizon. Long notes are allowed to remain unfinished. Faster lines curl around the rhythm rather than conquering it. His playing carries technical knowledge without presenting technique as an examination the listener must pass.

This is where Barry Walker’s pedal steel becomes so important. Traditional pedal steel can express heartbreak through notes that bend between fixed pitches, but Walker also approaches the instrument through ambient music, minimalism and improvisation. He is a geologist as well as a musician, which almost feels too perfect for this band. His playing can resemble layers of atmosphere sliding above layers of rock, each moving at a different speed while remaining part of the same formation.

The steel does not merely make the songs sound more country. It alters their gravity. Johnson’s guitar may describe the road directly ahead, while Walker’s steel reveals the curvature of the Earth underneath it.

John Jeffrey’s drumming supplies another part of the project’s identity. The beats are rarely crowded, but their apparent simplicity is deceptive. Repetition has to remain physically alive. A drummer playing a steady pattern for several minutes must introduce just enough variation to preserve motion without announcing every decision. Jeffrey gives the songs a pulse that can support country shuffles, psychedelic cruising and extended improvisation without making those approaches feel like separate costumes.

Paul Hasenberg’s keyboards add still another layer of hospitality. Organ and electric keys can make Rose City Band sound less like musicians crossing an empty desert and more like they have discovered a roadside building with lights still glowing inside. The keyboard parts often occupy the space between rhythm and atmosphere, adding warmth without closing the horizon.

Together, these musicians reveal why the word “Band” eventually became more than camouflage. Johnson remains the project’s central writer and studio architect, but he has described giving the players relatively little instruction. Instead of requiring them to reproduce an internal blueprint exactly, he lets their musical personalities alter the songs. The band becomes real by being trusted.

That transformation can be heard across the project’s five albums. The earliest material has the private glow of something made before an audience had fully arrived. Later records open into fuller arrangements, deeper country textures and more conversational interplay. By the time darker emotional shades become increasingly audible, the foundational warmth has not vanished. It has gained depth.

Johnson has described Rose City Band as generally devoted to uplifting, good-time music, but eventually acknowledged that the shadow could not always be excluded. That choice matters. Positivity becomes more believable when it is not maintained by pretending darkness has ceased to exist.

Sunlight is not disproved by shade. Shade is evidence that something solid is standing in the light.

This balance connects Rose City Band to the emotional usefulness of music. During the pandemic period, Johnson spoke about making music as a soothing mechanism and drawing creative energy from optimism, even while Portland experienced isolation, fear and destructive wildfires. The records did not deny those conditions. They created a temporary place from which a listener might endure them.

That is a humble but profound artistic ambition. Not every piece of music needs to diagnose civilization, issue instructions or expose a hidden enemy. Sometimes its work is to help a nervous system continue. A guitar phrase repeats until breathing becomes less guarded. A pedal-steel note crosses slowly overhead. The road remains open for another five minutes.

Rose City Band also demonstrates that “cosmic” music does not require synthesizers, science-fiction language or enormous studio effects. The cosmic can appear through scale. A simple country progression becomes vast when repetition alters the listener’s sense of time. A guitar solo stops functioning as decoration and becomes travel. Pedal steel turns the familiar sadness of one person into something spread across the sky.

The music is sometimes compared with the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Gram Parsons, J.J. Cale and other travelers through American country-rock. Those connections are useful entrances, but the band’s particular character lies in how Johnson combines that lineage with the trance logic of his earlier psychedelic work. The rhythm does not merely accompany the song. It creates the road upon which the song discovers itself.

This is music of motion without panic.

Even the name contains a small map. Rose City points toward Portland, but it also sounds like an invented place from an older record sleeve. A person could imagine a city organized around gardens, weather, slow traffic and amplifiers glowing in wooden rooms. The name belongs to a real location while leaving enough space for listeners to construct another one.

Perhaps that is why the project travels so well through unofficial fan collections. A Russian listener may gather several releases without attempting to produce a definitive archive. Someone elsewhere downloads that folder, keeps certain albums, replaces others with different rips, repairs the tags or adds artwork. The collection becomes another version of Rose City, constructed far beyond Portland by people who may never meet.

Completeness is not the only form of devotion.

A discography tells us what officially exists. A fan’s folder may tell us what reached them, what remained available, what they considered worth preserving, or what they hoped another stranger might discover. The omissions can be accidental, but the act of gathering still contains care.

Rose City Band itself grew through a similar process. Johnson gathered musical languages that had reached him through old private press records, country rock, psychedelia, minimalism and repeated listening. He did not reproduce any single source exactly. He built a habitat where they could coexist and then invited other musicians inside.

That may be the deepest pleasure of this music. Nothing has to surrender its identity to belong. Country does not stop being country when it becomes psychedelic. Repetition does not stop being mathematical when it becomes comforting. A solo project does not become dishonest when it calls itself a band. A band does not lose its collective meaning because one person remains the main architect.

People are similarly multiple. We can be solitary and communal, old-fashioned and futuristic, wounded and joyful, rooted and still moving.

A listener does not need the complete catalog before entering this place. Any song may reveal the central practice: find a steady rhythm, make room around it, allow several forms of beauty to arrive, and do not rush them back out the door.

Someone encountering Rose City Band for the first time may hear a forgotten 1970s group, a modern psychedelic project, cosmic country, ambient Americana, jam music or simply a pleasant afternoon opening inside the speakers. Longtime listeners may hear more specific changes: the early home-recorded privacy, the arrival of Walker’s pedal steel, the growing confidence of the live band, or the gradual acceptance of shadow among the sunlight.

All of those listeners are standing in the same city, looking down different streets.

Anyone carrying a memory of the first mysterious release, a particular concert where the songs expanded beyond their recorded shapes, or a track that helped during an unsteady period already possesses another unofficial piece of the collection. Those experiences may never fit into a complete discography, but they belong to the larger record of what the music has done.

Some bands build monuments.

Rose City Band builds places to rest while continuing.

 

RAHIEM SUPREME MP3 Pack

RUTracker – FOR UR CONSIDERATION

An MP3 pack does not always behave like an album.

An album arrives with borders. It has an official beginning, an ending, a title, artwork and a sequence meant to guide the listener through one particular room. An MP3 pack is more like receiving a ring of keys without being told which door each one opens. Songs from different periods can collide. Production styles interrupt one another. A polished statement may sit beside a loose freestyle, an experiment, an orphaned single or something that feels as though it escaped from a larger project.

That disorder can reveal an artist beautifully.

Rahiem Supreme makes particular sense in this form because his music already seems to move by association. His verses pile images together until clothing, cars, food, films, street memories, luxury, family history and private mythology occupy the same few minutes. He does not always stop to explain why one thing has been placed beside another. He trusts the arrangement and keeps moving.

Listening to a collection like this feels less like following a conventional biography than opening drawers inside one unusually furnished mind.

His voice is immediately recognizable: roughened, flexible and animated, capable of sounding amused, suspicious, triumphant, reflective and half-inside a dream without requiring a dramatic costume change. He can approach a beat with the force of an old-school battle rapper, then loosen his timing until the words seem to be walking around inside the production, touching objects and reporting what they find.

The beats frequently sound recovered rather than manufactured. Loops arrive with dust on them. Melodies glow through distortion. Drums knock from behind walls. Samples sometimes feel bent, overheated or slightly seasick. Even when the production becomes cleaner or more modern, Rahiem’s presence keeps it connected to the same strange personal broadcast.

That may be what this pack captures best: not one definitive Rahiem Supreme sound, but the consistency of the person passing through many sounds.

He has worked with producers who give him different climates. Some tracks place him inside smoky rooms full of jazz and soul fragments. Others create crumbling psychedelic architecture. Some allow brighter trap rhythms and melodic impulses into the frame. Instead of treating these changes as contradictions, he uses them as different vehicles for the same roaming intelligence.

Cars are especially appropriate to his world. Rahiem does not sound permanently stationed inside a studio booth. His music feels mobile. It suggests night driving, passing storefronts, old neighborhoods changing shape, conversations remembered at intersections, and private thoughts becoming louder while the scenery moves outside the windows.

The MP3 format adds another layer. These files do not require the listener to approach the catalog through its official storefront, newest release or most celebrated record. They can be copied into a folder, renamed, reordered, burned to a disc, transferred to another device and encountered years later without their original surroundings.

That is one of the secret powers of an MP3 pack. It turns a musician’s catalog into portable folk material.

The listener becomes a secondary curator. A favorite song can be pulled away from its album and placed beside another recording made years later. New relationships appear. Accidents become sequences. The artist’s official discography remains intact somewhere else, while this unofficial little constellation develops its own internal weather.

Rahiem Supreme’s music welcomes that kind of listening because there is always another detail trying to get through: a phrase, a texture, a producer tag, a cultural reference, a change in vocal pressure, a joke delivered too quickly to announce itself. The songs reward returning because they do not surrender all their contents during the first inspection.

This pack is therefore not a substitute for the albums. It is an entrance into them.

Someone hearing Rahiem Supreme for the first time may leave with several different ideas of who he is, all of them partially correct. That is preferable to reducing him to a single comparison or genre description. The folder presents an artist whose identity survives motion, mutation and changing scenery.

Open it anywhere.

Choose a file.

Let the architecture assemble itself.

Rahill - 2023 - Flowers At Your Feet

 

Big Dada Recordings – BD308RT

Nirvana may have made it nearly impossible to place a baby photograph on an album cover without everyone first thinking of Nevermind. That image became so culturally enormous that it seemed to claim the entire category for itself.

Flowers At Your Feet quietly takes the baby picture back.

There is no spectacle here. No joke, provocation or attempt to make infancy symbolic of innocence in some enormous universal way. This is a particular child after a bath, her damp hair bundled inside a towel, another towel wrapped around her body, looking toward something outside the photograph.

Around her neck is a small gold necklace.

That was the detail that caught me. Babies do not buy necklaces or decide how they should be presented. Someone fastened it around her neck. Someone wanted her adorned, protected, connected or simply made beautiful. Before knowing anything about the record, the photograph already communicated that this child belonged to people who loved her.

It turns out the child is Rahill Jamalifard herself, and the necklace was given to her by her grandmother during her first trip to Iran when she was about one year old.

That changes the cover from an attractive childhood photograph into the first song on the album.

The necklace is inheritance before memory. Rahill cannot necessarily remember the moment it was placed around her neck, but the photograph remembers for her. The object carries affection across countries, generations and time, remaining present long enough for the grown child to place it on the cover of her first solo album.

Flowers At Your Feet is full of this kind of movement. Voices return from home movies. Family members pass through songs. Childhood scenes are not presented as a vanished paradise so much as living material that continues shaping the present. Rahill treats memory less like a museum case and more like a relative who may enter the room at any time.

The album was recorded in stages around the pandemic with producer Alex Epton, after Rahill had already spent years singing with the Brooklyn band Habibi. The solo setting gives her room to build something more inward and porous. Garage rock is no longer the primary container. Trip-hop rhythms, jazz, psychedelic pop, folk memory, tape texture and fragments of domestic sound all drift through the record without being forced into a single genre identity.

It feels assembled rather than manufactured.

That distinction matters. Manufactured records often try to conceal their seams. Flowers At Your Feet allows us to hear the family archive being handled. There are voices, environmental sounds and little passages that feel discovered inside an old drawer. The production does not clean these fragments until they lose their age. It lets the scratches, distances and changes in fidelity remain part of their meaning.

“Healing” opens the record as though the tape has already been running somewhere else. The listener enters after life has begun. “I Smile for E” brings in the voice of Rahill’s late aunt Elaheh singing in Farsi, turning a recording into a bridge between physical absence and continuing relationship. The song grieves, but it does not build a monument out of despair. Love remains more active than loss.

That may be the album’s deepest quality.

These songs do not deny death, distance, migration or time. They simply refuse to let those forces have exclusive ownership over memory. People who are gone can still participate. A grandmother can remain present through jewelry. An aunt can enter through recorded sound. A father can be addressed in an ode. Childhood friends can return through the image of a sandbox. The past is not behind Rahill in a straight line. It surrounds her.

“From a Sandbox” understands childhood through modest details rather than grand declarations. Secrets, mothers calling children home and the temporary civilizations formed during play become enough. The song does not need to tell us childhood was important. It recovers the small machinery that made it feel endless at the time.

Elsewhere, “Hesitations” allows memory to become more dangerous. Nostalgia is not always harmless or holy. Sometimes it invites us back toward situations we escaped for good reasons. The record understands that remembering affection and obeying it are different decisions.

Even the guest appearance from Beck on “Fables” does not turn the album into a celebrity display. He enters Rahill’s world rather than pulling the record toward his own. Jasper Marsalis, also known through his Slauson Malone work, contributes to an album whose unusual shapes depend upon collaborators understanding when to leave space around her voice.

That voice often sounds close enough to belong inside the listener’s room. Rahill does not inflate every emotion into a climax. She can sing as though telling someone something at a kitchen table, then allow the arrangement to carry the part too large or complicated for ordinary speech.

The music is gentle, but gentleness here does not mean vague. Rahill has described honesty and vulnerability as necessities in her communication. Her Iranian-American family history is not used as ornamental atmosphere. Maps of Shiraz and Isfahan appear in the physical artwork, and Persian poetry, family storytelling and inherited music sit among Stereolab, Curtis Mayfield, Kool Keith, Beck, jazz, hip-hop and psychedelic pop.

Nothing has to be purified before it can belong.

That may be one reason the album feels so contemporary without chasing whatever “contemporary” is supposed to sound like. A life does not arrive separated into proper record-store sections. A father’s records, a grandmother’s stories, American pop culture, Iranian poetry, football heroes, childhood friends and obsolete home-video sound can all occupy the same nervous system.

Rahill lets them meet there.

The title also grows more meaningful as the record continues. Flowers are given when someone arrives and when someone leaves. They appear at airports, graduations, competitions, hospital rooms, weddings and graves. They celebrate achievement, offer sympathy and stand in for language when language has become too small.

Flowers At Your Feet can therefore be heard as an offering to the people inside these songs.

It is also an offering to Rahill’s younger self.

The baby on the cover cannot know what lies ahead. She does not know she will become an artist, leave and return to places, lose people, preserve voices, make records or one day look back at this photograph. She simply sits there wearing evidence that she was loved before she possessed any language for love.

The adult artist places flowers at that child’s feet.

And by sharing the record, she places some at ours.

There must be other families with photographs like this: a baby wearing a bracelet, pendant, religious medal or tiny piece of gold whose meaning was understood by the adults long before the child could ask what it was. Sometimes an object enters our story before memory does.

Flowers At Your Feet is interested in what happens when we finally turn around and ask what those objects have been carrying for us.

Robert Schroeder - 1990 - Pegasus

Innovative Communication – IC 710.121

 The previous record began with a baby wearing a necklace placed around her neck by someone who loved her.

This one begins by removing nearly everything we normally use to recognize another person.

There is no face to study. No lyric telling us whose memory we have entered. No family voice emerging from an old recording. The human figure seems to disappear, replaced by electronic pulses, suspended chords, distant signals and machines repeating patterns too precisely for hands to maintain alone.

Yet it does not feel less human.

Human feeling has simply been transferred into another material.

That makes the transition from Rahill to Robert Schröder more than a jump between genres or countries. Flowers At Your Feet gathered family, migration and memory into intimate rooms. Pegasus opens the roof above those rooms and allows the listener to look into enormous imagined distances.

The necklace remains a useful image.

On the previous cover, it connected a child to her grandmother, Iran and a family history she was too young to remember consciously. Here, the connection becomes invisible. Synthesizers, sequencers and recording machines create another kind of inheritance, passing signals between human imagination and electronic systems.

One record places memory around the body.

The next releases it into space.

Robert Schröder belonged to the generation of German electronic musicians who did not treat synthesizers as convenient replacements for familiar instruments. The machinery represented a newly available territory. Oscillators, filters, tape, sequencers and handmade electronic devices could produce environments that had not existed before someone wired them together.

Schröder’s background in electronics matters because the music often feels constructed from the inside outward. He was not merely choosing sounds from a prepared menu. He understood circuits, modified equipment and built devices of his own. Technology was not standing between him and expression. Technology was part of the expression.

This helps explain why the repeated patterns never feel like empty automation.

A sequence begins, circles itself and gradually changes the space around it. Another tone enters. A low pulse develops weight. A melody appears without announcing itself as the main event. What initially seems mechanical begins to breathe through accumulation.

The machine supplies repetition.

The person decides what repetition means.

Pegasus is presented as a succession of numbered parts rather than a collection of separately named songs. That encourages the listener to hear it as one continuous movement divided into temporary regions. There are no lyrical titles telling us whether we have entered a planet, dream, laboratory or remembered future. The imagination receives fewer instructions and therefore has more work to do.

Electronic music of this kind can become a private cinema.

The sounds suggest motion without showing what is moving. They imply distance without identifying a destination. A rising tone can become a spacecraft, an opening horizon, a nervous system waking up or simply electricity passing through equipment. The listener supplies images from whatever internal archive happens to answer the signal.

Perhaps that is why the winged horse remains such a useful title.

Pegasus joins two incompatible things: the grounded physical power of a horse and the impossible freedom of wings. Schröder’s music performs a similar joining. Electronic equipment is heavy, technical and material. It consists of cables, switches, voltage, metal, plastic and patient labor. But the sounds produced by that equipment can seem almost weightless.

The machinery remains on Earth.

The music escapes it.

There is also an unusual fold in the album’s history. Although the disc appeared around 1990, the underlying music had been created in 1982 for a proposed project connected to a science-fiction novel. The release was apparently assembled and issued years later without Schröder approving it as the solo album it became.

That does not make the music illegitimate, but it gives the object a divided identity.

It belongs to 1982 and 1990 at once.

It is an abandoned future project that later returned wearing the clothing of an ordinary album. Something intended to accompany a story became detached from that story and entered circulation alone. The missing novel leaves an empty space around the music, and the listener may unknowingly begin writing another one.

This is especially appropriate for Private Release.

Much of this blog involves objects whose original surroundings have shifted or disappeared: recordings separated from their first pressings, MP3s removed from old networks, images that outlive their makers, files renamed by strangers, and music that reaches a new listener long after its intended moment.

Pegasus already contains that instability.

It is music searching for the narrative that was once supposed to stand beside it.

The numbered sections strengthen that feeling. Rather than delivering a set of finished little worlds, they resemble stages of travel. One region develops momentum; another drifts; another introduces a sharper rhythm or a more luminous melodic surface. Changes sometimes feel architectural rather than dramatic, as though the listener has moved into another chamber of the same enormous structure.

Schröder’s patience is important here.

The music does not continually demand attention through shocks or obvious climaxes. It trusts gradual transformation. A sound can repeat long enough for the listener’s relationship to it to change. What first seems external becomes familiar. What seems simple begins revealing small internal movements.

Repetition becomes a method of perception.

That quality connects electronic music to several very different human practices: walking the same postal route, repeating a prayer, listening to one record until its smallest details become landmarks, or returning to an archive post by post until relationships begin appearing between years.

Nothing outside the pattern may have changed.

The person inside it has.

The cultural distance from Rahill to Schröder is enormous on the surface. We move from an Iranian-American woman assembling family voices in twenty-first-century Brooklyn to a German electronic composer constructing synthetic environments four decades earlier. One record is held together by ancestry and vulnerability. The other appears to be held together by voltage and design.

But placing them beside each other reveals that both are concerned with forms of memory.

Rahill preserves people through voices, photographs, jewelry and domestic recordings.

Schröder preserves imagined space through programmed sound.

One asks how the past remains inside a person.

The other asks how a future can be remembered before it has occurred.

That may be what attracts people to older electronic music. Its imagined future did not arrive exactly as expected, yet the sound has not become useless. Instead, it has acquired another emotional dimension. We now hear both the future its makers anticipated and the past in which they anticipated it.

A synthesizer recording from 1982 can therefore produce a strange double vision.

It sounds forward and backward simultaneously.

The machines are old, but their horizon remains open.

This is where your sequencing becomes part of the listening experience. There is no official reason these two albums must follow one another. The bridge exists because you placed them together. First we encounter a child wearing inherited love. Then we enter an electronic composition whose original story has been lost or withheld.

One object arrives carrying more history than the child can yet understand.

The next arrives missing the history it was meant to accompany.

Between them sits the listener, supplying connections.

That is not random listening. It is another form of composition.

The first album leaves flowers at the feet of the past.

The next gives that past wings.

R.A. THE RUGGED MAN MP3 Pack

RUTracker – FOR UR CONSIDERATION

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the photograph posted here looks capable of delivering ten thousand before the music even starts.

R.A. The Rugged Man is staring directly into the camera, but it does not feel like an invitation to come closer. The face seems to have already measured whoever is looking at it. There is fatigue around the eyes, alertness inside them, and no visible interest in making the encounter comfortable. It communicates what people mean when they say someone has “been through some shit.” James does not know this man personally, but he knows that look. It says that whatever happened has not been forgotten, and that approaching carelessly would be a poor decision.

A photograph cannot prove a biography. Faces are not court records, and toughness can be staged as easily as tenderness. Yet this image becomes difficult to separate from what is known about R.A.’s life and career. He entered the record industry young, carrying immense ability and very little willingness to behave in the manner expected of a promising investment. He gained a major-label contract, became notorious for behavior that overwhelmed discussion of his talent, lost the conventional path that had opened before him, and spent years rebuilding outside the system that had once expected to package him.

That history is already contained in the name R.A. The Rugged Man. “Rugged” is not polished adversity. It is a surface made irregular through use, damage and weather. The name does not promise that survival has made him pleasant, noble or purified. It suggests that whatever tried to smooth him into a more manageable object failed.

An MP3 pack is an ideal way to meet an artist like this because it does not force his career into one official argument. An album may present a particular R.A. at a particular age: the industry exile, the underground technician, the obscene storyteller, the son remembering his father, the aging defender of hip-hop fundamentals, or the parent looking differently at the world. A folder assembled across releases allows these identities to interrupt one another. The listener hears not one completed portrait but a sequence of confrontations with the same man at different distances.

The first thing that survives every change is the voice. R.A. can make rapping sound physically dangerous, not because speed alone is impressive, but because he maintains articulation, rhythm and intent while accelerating. Many rappers can crowd syllables into a measure. Fewer can make each cluster land with the force of an individually chosen object. His breath control creates the impression that the verse is outrunning the beat while remaining completely attached to it.

The technical skill would be easier to admire from a safe distance if the personality were less unruly. R.A. does not provide that distance. His music can be funny, disgusting, politically angry, historically informed, self-destructive, compassionate and deliberately offensive, sometimes within the same performance. He frequently seems determined to ruin any respectable interpretation just as it begins forming. A serious point may be followed by a grotesque joke. A display of virtuosity may arrive wrapped in language designed to repel anyone seeking tasteful evidence of virtuosity.

That refusal to separate the gifted artist from the difficult human being is essential to the music. R.A. does not ask to be redeemed into a clean inspirational story. His career is not a simple tale of an industry failing to recognize genius, because he has been unusually frank about supplying the industry with reasons to fear, avoid or abandon him. Nor is it merely the story of a reckless young man receiving deserved consequences, because the talent was real, the surrounding business could be predatory and cowardly, and the years that followed demonstrated that exile did not erase his place in hip-hop.

The MP3 pack preserves those contradictions better than a polite introduction could. One file may present the battle rapper who seems capable of dismantling a room for sport. Another may reveal the historian, naming traditions and techniques with the authority of someone who did not discover hip-hop retrospectively. Another may expose the family story beneath the public creature. These songs do not resolve one another. They accumulate.

The deepest change occurs when the listener reaches material connected to his father and siblings. R.A.’s father, Staff Sergeant John A. Thorburn, served in Vietnam and was exposed to Agent Orange. R.A. has linked that exposure to the severe disabilities and early deaths of two siblings, a family history he later transformed into some of his most powerful writing. Suddenly the aggression in the photograph cannot be interpreted only as a performer’s pose or an underground rapper guarding his reputation. There are forms of anger that begin long before a recording contract.

“Uncommon Valor” became famous because R.A. told a Vietnam story with terrifying control, writing through the perspective of his father rather than treating war as distant historical scenery. The verse compresses military recruitment, combat, chemical exposure, trauma and the consequences carried home into one sustained movement. Its speed does not make the subject superficial. The speed resembles events overtaking the person living through them. History happens faster than anyone can understand it, and then the body spends decades explaining what occurred.

That family history also complicates the idea that the face merely says, “Do not fuck with me.” It may say that, but it says other things underneath. It may also say: do not simplify me, do not mistake performance for the whole person, do not treat my family’s suffering as trivia, do not erase the years when I was considered unusable, and do not assume that survival produces gratitude toward the structures one survived.

R.A.’s humor is part of that survival, though it is rarely gentle medicine. It can be juvenile, vulgar and intentionally excessive. He understands that disgust is a form of attention and that laughter can puncture the solemn machinery surrounding fame, respectability and artistic importance. At his funniest, he behaves like someone dragging a muddy boot across the museum floor just as the curators begin praising the exhibit.

The danger is that the outrageous behavior can become the only story people repeat. Folklore grows quickly around artists who make themselves difficult to contain. The incidents become portable, while the work requires actual listening. R.A.’s career has repeatedly faced that imbalance: the legend of the uncontrollable man travels farther than the evidence of the disciplined writer. Yet the discipline is everywhere in the recordings. A person cannot rap at this level through chaos alone. Beneath the disorder is years of study, memory, breath, timing and obsessive attention to the architecture of rhyme.

That is another thing the photograph communicates. He does not look surprised to still be here. He looks as though remaining here required an argument.

The cultural transition from Robert Schröder’s Pegasus is enormous, but it works. Schröder uses electronic systems to remove the body from view, allowing patterns and synthesized atmospheres to carry the human imagination into space. R.A. returns the body violently to the center. Breath matters. Spit matters. Damage matters. Family genetics, military history, physical disability, aging, sex, shame and aggression all refuse abstraction.

Pegasus asks how machinery can give weightless form to imagination. R.A. asks what language can do when the body has carried too much weight.

Both artists depend upon precise control. Schröder regulates voltage, repetition and gradual transformation. R.A. regulates breath, syllables and rhythmic pressure. One creates distance so the listener can drift. The other collapses distance until the listener is standing directly in front of that face.

The MP3 format creates one final irony. A human presence this forceful has been reduced to small, transferable files: compressed data that can be copied, renamed, scattered across hard drives and detached from the albums that originally contained it. Yet compression does not make him smaller. Each file opens and the personality expands back to full size.

That may be what a good MP3 pack should do. It does not explain an artist or arrange his career into an approved monument. It releases enough evidence for the listener to encounter the scale of the problem.

And R.A. The Rugged Man is a magnificent problem: too technically accomplished to dismiss as spectacle, too confrontational to preserve as a harmless master craftsman, too historically rooted to call a novelty, and too emotionally complicated to reduce to the threat written across his face.

The photograph speaks first.

Then he starts rapping, and somehow says even more.

 

RAEKWON MP3 Pack

RUTracker – FOR UR CONSIDERATION

The previous record began with a baby wearing a necklace placed around her neck by someone who loved her.

This one begins by removing nearly everything we normally use to recognize another person.

There is no face to study. No lyric telling us whose memory we have entered. No family voice emerging from an old recording. The human figure seems to disappear, replaced by electronic pulses, suspended chords, distant signals and machines repeating patterns too precisely for hands to maintain alone.

Yet it does not feel less human.

Human feeling has simply been transferred into another material.

That makes the transition from Rahill to Robert Schröder more than a jump between genres or countries. Flowers At Your Feet gathered family, migration and memory into intimate rooms. Pegasus opens the roof above those rooms and allows the listener to look into enormous imagined distances.

The necklace remains a useful image.

On the previous cover, it connected a child to her grandmother, Iran and a family history she was too young to remember consciously. Here, the connection becomes invisible. Synthesizers, sequencers and recording machines create another kind of inheritance, passing signals between human imagination and electronic systems.

One record places memory around the body.

The next releases it into space.

Robert Schröder belonged to the generation of German electronic musicians who did not treat synthesizers as convenient replacements for familiar instruments. The machinery represented a newly available territory. Oscillators, filters, tape, sequencers and handmade electronic devices could produce environments that had not existed before someone wired them together.

Schröder’s background in electronics matters because the music often feels constructed from the inside outward. He was not merely choosing sounds from a prepared menu. He understood circuits, modified equipment and built devices of his own. Technology was not standing between him and expression. Technology was part of the expression.

This helps explain why the repeated patterns never feel like empty automation.

A sequence begins, circles itself and gradually changes the space around it. Another tone enters. A low pulse develops weight. A melody appears without announcing itself as the main event. What initially seems mechanical begins to breathe through accumulation.

The machine supplies repetition.

The person decides what repetition means.

Pegasus is presented as a succession of numbered parts rather than a collection of separately named songs. That encourages the listener to hear it as one continuous movement divided into temporary regions. There are no lyrical titles telling us whether we have entered a planet, dream, laboratory or remembered future. The imagination receives fewer instructions and therefore has more work to do.

Electronic music of this kind can become a private cinema.

The sounds suggest motion without showing what is moving. They imply distance without identifying a destination. A rising tone can become a spacecraft, an opening horizon, a nervous system waking up or simply electricity passing through equipment. The listener supplies images from whatever internal archive happens to answer the signal.

Perhaps that is why the winged horse remains such a useful title.

Pegasus joins two incompatible things: the grounded physical power of a horse and the impossible freedom of wings. Schröder’s music performs a similar joining. Electronic equipment is heavy, technical and material. It consists of cables, switches, voltage, metal, plastic and patient labor. But the sounds produced by that equipment can seem almost weightless.

The machinery remains on Earth.

The music escapes it.

There is also an unusual fold in the album’s history. Although the disc appeared around 1990, the underlying music had been created in 1982 for a proposed project connected to a science-fiction novel. The release was apparently assembled and issued years later without Schröder approving it as the solo album it became.

That does not make the music illegitimate, but it gives the object a divided identity.

It belongs to 1982 and 1990 at once.

It is an abandoned future project that later returned wearing the clothing of an ordinary album. Something intended to accompany a story became detached from that story and entered circulation alone. The missing novel leaves an empty space around the music, and the listener may unknowingly begin writing another one.

This is especially appropriate for Private Release.

Much of this blog involves objects whose original surroundings have shifted or disappeared: recordings separated from their first pressings, MP3s removed from old networks, images that outlive their makers, files renamed by strangers, and music that reaches a new listener long after its intended moment.

Pegasus already contains that instability.

It is music searching for the narrative that was once supposed to stand beside it.

The numbered sections strengthen that feeling. Rather than delivering a set of finished little worlds, they resemble stages of travel. One region develops momentum; another drifts; another introduces a sharper rhythm or a more luminous melodic surface. Changes sometimes feel architectural rather than dramatic, as though the listener has moved into another chamber of the same enormous structure.

Schröder’s patience is important here.

The music does not continually demand attention through shocks or obvious climaxes. It trusts gradual transformation. A sound can repeat long enough for the listener’s relationship to it to change. What first seems external becomes familiar. What seems simple begins revealing small internal movements.

Repetition becomes a method of perception.

That quality connects electronic music to several very different human practices: walking the same postal route, repeating a prayer, listening to one record until its smallest details become landmarks, or returning to an archive post by post until relationships begin appearing between years.

Nothing outside the pattern may have changed.

The person inside it has.

The cultural distance from Rahill to Schröder is enormous on the surface. We move from an Iranian-American woman assembling family voices in twenty-first-century Brooklyn to a German electronic composer constructing synthetic environments four decades earlier. One record is held together by ancestry and vulnerability. The other appears to be held together by voltage and design.

But placing them beside each other reveals that both are concerned with forms of memory.

Rahill preserves people through voices, photographs, jewelry and domestic recordings.

Schröder preserves imagined space through programmed sound.

One asks how the past remains inside a person.

The other asks how a future can be remembered before it has occurred.

That may be what attracts people to older electronic music. Its imagined future did not arrive exactly as expected, yet the sound has not become useless. Instead, it has acquired another emotional dimension. We now hear both the future its makers anticipated and the past in which they anticipated it.

A synthesizer recording from 1982 can therefore produce a strange double vision.

It sounds forward and backward simultaneously.

The machines are old, but their horizon remains open.

This is where your sequencing becomes part of the listening experience. There is no official reason these two albums must follow one another. The bridge exists because you placed them together. First we encounter a child wearing inherited love. Then we enter an electronic composition whose original story has been lost or withheld.

One object arrives carrying more history than the child can yet understand.

The next arrives missing the history it was meant to accompany.

Between them sits the listener, supplying connections.

That is not random listening. It is another form of composition.

The first album leaves flowers at the feet of the past.

The next gives that past wings.

RATBOYS MP3 Pack

 

RUTracker – FOR UR CONSIDERATION

Sometimes a photograph convinces me that I already know what the music will sound like.

The people look too current, too carefully casual or too perfectly assembled from pieces of an existing style. Before hearing a note, an old cynical mechanism begins sorting them into categories: I know this pose, these clothes, this lighting, this particular arrangement of coolness. They must be imitating something I have already heard. I can move along without risking much.

Then Ratboys begin playing, and the little courtroom inside my head loses the case almost immediately.

The songs are talented, melodic and joyful without becoming weightless. The musicians sound connected to one another rather than gathered around a marketable photograph. Guitars can jangle, bloom, scrape or suddenly become enormous. The rhythm section gives the music enough muscle to change direction without losing its warmth, while Julia Steiner’s voice carries an unusual combination of friendliness and distance. She can sound as though she is remembering something beside you while also looking through a window you cannot see.

By the time the pack has played several different songs, I am eating my hat and, somehow, corn.

That is not an unpleasant meal. Being proven wrong by music is one of listening’s better gifts. Nothing has been taken from me except a judgment I did not need. In return I receive an entire band.

The embarrassment is useful because I once thought punk had taught me to see beyond appearances, marketing and social categories. Punk was supposed to distrust the uniform, including its own uniform. Yet cynicism can quietly become another dress code. After years of watching music styles return, get copied, become fashionable and get sold back to younger people, suspicion begins acting like experience. Sometimes it protects us from empty imitation. Sometimes it simply stands at the door turning away guests before they can introduce themselves.

Ratboys made it past the bouncer.

What first appeared trendy begins to sound lived-in. The band’s relationship with older indie rock, folk, country and loud guitar music does not feel like a costume shop. These are materials they enjoy using. Familiar sounds become personal through the decisions made inside them: when a guitar should remain tender, when it should tear open, how long a song should wander, how much narrative detail a lyric can hold, and how sweetness can survive beside distortion without either quality apologizing for the other.

They also remind me that influence is not the same thing as imitation. Every musician begins inside sounds that already exist. The meaningful question is not whether we can recognize the ancestors. It is whether the artist has formed an actual relationship with them. Ratboys do not seem interested in fooling anyone into believing they invented guitars, country accents, quiet verses or explosive choruses. They take pleasure in those things and then place their own memories, humor and chemistry inside them.

That pleasure comes through as joy, but not the synthetic joy of people being ordered to smile for promotional photographs. It is closer to the joy of a band discovering that a song can suddenly do more than it did yesterday. A drum entrance changes the size of the room. Two guitars begin speaking across one another. A restrained passage finds the exact moment to become loud. The musicians sound delighted by possibility.

An MP3 pack allows that quality to appear from several angles. Without one album cover, release date or official sequence controlling the introduction, the band keeps changing shape. One file may emphasize their folk beginnings, another the large guitar sound they developed later, another a story that barely needs amplification, and another the sensation of four people discovering how far they can stretch one piece of music without breaking it.

The scattered format also recreates the way bands used to enter many of our lives. We did not always begin with the accepted masterpiece and a guide explaining its significance. We found one song on a compilation, another on a mixtape, a stray MP3 from somebody’s shared folder, or an unlabeled track whose title had been damaged during transfer. Affection developed before expertise. The music earned curiosity, and only afterward did we begin assembling the history.

That is happening here. I know almost nothing about Ratboys when the pack begins. The photograph produces one story, the music contradicts it, and the contradiction makes me want to know more. Instead of confirming what I thought I recognized, the band gives me the far better experience of discovering that I had not recognized them at all.

There is humor in the name too. Ratboys sounds scrappy, juvenile and perhaps deliberately unattractive, while much of the music possesses great care and emotional precision. The name lowers the gate just as the songs reveal a much larger property behind it. It also refuses the solemnity that can gather around serious musicianship. A band can write carefully, play beautifully and still call itself Ratboys.

The transition from Raekwon makes the pack even more surprising. We leave one of hip-hop’s great world-builders, whose voice carries the architecture of the Wu-Tang Clan, and arrive at a Chicago guitar band I nearly dismiss because of a photograph. The genres, histories and visual languages are far apart, but the listening process remains connected. Raekwon asks us to enter a vocabulary that does not immediately translate itself. Ratboys ask me to get past a visual vocabulary I translated far too quickly.

Both encounters require humility from the listener.

That may be one of the hidden purposes of a collection this broad. It does not merely gather music I already know I will approve of. It exposes the machinery of my approval. Certain names, clothes, decades, labels and production sounds receive immediate permission. Others encounter suspicion. When the music crosses those checkpoints anyway, I learn something about the artist and something less flattering but more useful about myself.

There is no need to punish myself for making the judgment. Taste depends partly upon recognizing patterns, and decades of listening produce a large catalog of them. The trouble begins when pattern recognition hardens into prophecy. A photograph becomes a review of music that has not yet played. Experience stops helping me listen and begins listening in my place.

Ratboys interrupt that process with melody.

The correction feels gentle because the band does not seem to be arguing with me. They are simply too good at being themselves for my first explanation to survive. Their joy is persuasive. Their musicianship has the relaxed confidence of people who have spent time learning how to hear one another. Even when the songs become expansive, there remains something approachable at the center, a human-sized detail or melodic turn that invites the listener back inside.

Perhaps this is the punk lesson returning in a form I did not expect. Punk was never only a particular guitar sound, haircut, photograph or approved amount of grime. At its best, it was permission to examine inherited judgments and discover which ones had become another authority living inside us.

The old rebel still works.

This time it has to rebel against its own stereotype.

I looked at Ratboys and thought I already knew the story. Then I pressed play and the story changed. That is not a failure of taste. It is taste remaining alive enough to be revised.

I will gladly eat my hat for that.

Pass the corn.

Rat Columns - 2012 - Sceptre Hole

 

Smartguy Records – Smart 031

Sometimes the argument that the future is getting better does not need a prediction, a chart or a debate. It only needs somebody to press play.

Rat Columns provide another document for the case.

At first, Sceptre Hole sounds familiar enough to place. There are jangling guitars, distant voices, fragile melodies, drum machines and rhythms that remember post-punk, psychedelic pop and the private weather of old independent records. A listener who has spent decades with this music can begin naming ancestors almost immediately. The temptation is to treat recognition as a verdict: this came from there, that sound belongs to this earlier band, and therefore the past remains the original while the present becomes a copy.

But listen longer.

The record does not behave like someone trying to impersonate a vanished era. It behaves like someone who grew up in a world where all those sounds already existed and were available to be loved. David West does not have to pretend the past never happened in order to make something new. He can accept it as inherited material, the same way a guitarist accepts that six strings existed before he arrived.

That is one reason I believe the future can become better than the past. Later artists do not begin at zero. They inherit every previous attempt, including the beautiful mistakes, abandoned possibilities and small regional scenes that were once difficult to reach. They can hear records from cities they have never visited, find obscure singles that survived through somebody’s homemade transfer, and discover that a sound dismissed thirty years earlier contains an unopened door.

The future does not erase the past. It gains access to more of it.

Sceptre Hole moves through that access with unusual freedom. “Eastern Vibrations” begins in slow fog, closer to an imaginary horror soundtrack or damaged transmission than the bright guitar pop that soon follows. The record does not introduce itself with a clean statement of identity. It allows uncertainty into the room first. Voices drift inside drones, and the music seems to be approaching from a distance before “Death Is Leaving Me” suddenly opens the curtains.

That title should feel grim, yet the song moves with almost ridiculous lightness. This is one of Rat Columns’ great little inversions: melancholy does not always require slow motion, and joy does not require emotional simplicity. A guitar can sparkle while the words carry shadows. Rhythm can make the body move while the mind remains somewhere less certain.

David West has described this as a natural attraction to the sad-and-happy condition, and the record repeatedly finds that narrow current. The songs do not solve sadness by covering it with cheerful music. Instead, they allow two realities to occupy the same recording. The melody may know that life is beautiful while the voice knows beauty cannot be kept.

“Flowers” is barely more than two minutes long, but it contains the pleasure of a song that understands exactly how much space it needs. The guitar rings, the rhythm moves forward, and nothing is inflated to convince us of its importance. It passes quickly enough to leave a shape behind. Several songs here work that way. They arrive, establish an atmosphere and disappear before the listener has finished living inside it.

That brevity gives the album the feeling of an old box of photographs whose images do not come from one occasion. A bright exterior scene follows a blurred room. A face appears and vanishes. Something strange has been included without explanation. The sequence is coherent, but its coherence belongs more to memory than conventional storytelling.

The tiny instrumental and transitional pieces make the album stranger. “P.S.F.” and “Raincloud I” are not merely pauses between proper songs. They alter how the surrounding music is perceived, creating little chambers of sound where the album can lose its outline. Sceptre Hole understands that pop becomes more vivid when it is allowed to brush against abstraction.

That is another improvement the future can make. Genres that once had to stand apart can now coexist inside one person’s imagination. Jangle pop, punk, drone, homemade electronics, psychedelic atmosphere and melodic tenderness no longer require separate uniforms or declarations of allegiance. They can occupy neighboring rooms and pass signals through the walls.

Rat Columns are not exceptional because they invented every ingredient. Very few artists ever do. They are exceptional because they understand what the ingredients can still become when placed in a slightly different emotional order.

The record also carries geography in a peculiar way. David West came from Perth, but Sceptre Hole was recorded in San Francisco with a small working band. The music belongs completely to neither place. It has crossed an ocean and entered another underground network, gathering musicians and equipment without losing the inward quality at its center. This is not global culture as a smooth commercial product. It is the older and stranger version: people finding one another because records, tours, friendships and shared tastes create hidden routes between distant cities.

Private Release understands those routes. A record pressed in only 500 copies can travel far beyond the original objects. It becomes an MP3, a rip, an upload, a folder, a recommendation or a post encountered fourteen years later by somebody who hears proof that musical life did not stop when his own youth ended.

That may be the more personal argument contained here.

It is easy to mistake our most formative period for culture’s highest point because that was when everything entered us most violently. The bands were new because we were new. A guitar sound could reorganize a life because the walls had not yet hardened around what music was allowed to mean. Years later, unfamiliar artists sometimes seem to arrive after the important decisions have already been made.

Sceptre Hole refuses that story.

It does not ask the listener to abandon older records or pretend that influence is unimportant. It demonstrates that the conversation continued. The younger musicians heard some of the same things, loved them from another position in time, and carried them somewhere we could not have predicted from the original moment.

The future becomes better not because every new record surpasses every old one. That would be a silly competition, and music does not need a podium. It becomes better because the world keeps gaining more possible combinations. Nothing truly loved has to vanish when another generation arrives. It can be remembered, misunderstood, altered, restored, digitized, played too loudly, slowed down, mixed with something once considered incompatible and handed to another person.

The archive expands, but so does the imagination capable of using it.

Rat Columns make music from that expanded field. Their songs contain the pleasure of recognition without being imprisoned by it. A guitar may remind us of another decade, but the life moving through it belongs to the moment of recording. The past supplies tools. The present supplies necessity.

Following Ratboys, this album strengthens the lesson. First, a photograph nearly caused me to dismiss a band whose joy and ability overturned the judgment. Now Rat Columns show why that judgment would have been historically mistaken as well as personally limiting. Younger artists are not trespassing upon our memories when they use sounds we loved. They are keeping those sounds alive by finding out what else they can carry.

The old records do not become smaller because Sceptre Hole exists.

The world becomes larger.

There are moments here when the guitars seem to glow without producing much heat, when the drums push a sad song into motion, and when a voice half-hidden by the recording becomes more affecting because it cannot be completely reached. Nothing announces itself as the future of music. It simply plays, quietly confident that the future has room for this too.

That may be the strongest evidence of all.

Just listen and hear it.

Rat Columns - 2015 - Fooling Around EP

Blackest Ever Black – BLACKEST043

 After Sceptre Hole demonstrated that the future can inherit older sounds without becoming their servant, this EP makes a smaller and perhaps stranger argument: sometimes progress means giving an idea more room than it originally received.

“Fooling Around” had already appeared on Leaf, but here it is allowed to stretch past seven minutes. The song does not use the extra time to transform itself into an enormous climax or prove that it deserves the space. It simply keeps moving. Bass, drums, guitar and synthesizer settle into a groove that feels capable of continuing beyond the edge of the record. David West’s voice remains soft and slightly removed, as though he is participating in the song while also watching it travel away from him.

The title makes this looseness sound unserious, but fooling around can be an important creative method. It is what happens before an activity has been forced to justify itself. Musicians repeat a figure because it feels good. Somebody adds a sound without knowing whether it belongs. A song outgrows its first recorded form because the players have not yet been told to stop. What appears casual from outside may be the moment when a piece discovers what it really wants to be.

Rat Columns sound comfortable inside that uncertainty. Their music contains melody and forward motion, but it also leaves a faint question hanging over everything. The guitars can be bright without fully escaping gloom. The rhythms suggest travel, yet the destination remains vague. Even when the songs are catchy, they rarely seem interested in grabbing the listener by the collar and demanding approval. They continue at their own peculiar temperature and allow us to decide whether to remain with them.

“Waiting in the New World” carries that contradiction directly in its name. A new world sounds like somewhere we should arrive triumphantly, but waiting implies that the door has not opened yet. The music moves with greater speed and lightness, while the title keeps the future just beyond reach. This is another reason your belief that the future is getting better does not feel naïve to me. Better does not mean fully delivered. Sometimes we can hear it approaching while remaining stuck in the waiting room.

“Strays” feels perfectly named for a recording left outside the album that originally produced it. Not every song finds its proper home immediately. Some pieces remain behind after a project is finished, carrying enough life to survive but lacking the official address that would explain where they belong. An EP can become a shelter for those recordings. It gathers the extended version, the session survivor and the portable four-track songs into one temporary household.

That improvised geography matters. Two of these pieces were recorded in borrowed spaces after touring, in apartments and a summer house rather than one permanent studio. You can hear the idea of the band becoming portable. The equipment may be modest, but the music does not need to wait for ideal conditions. A borrowed four-track and a room belonging to somebody else are enough to preserve a moment before everyone moves onward.

Private Release is full of objects created under similar circumstances. Music escapes its first container, travels through another format and develops a second life somewhere its maker may never have imagined. A shortened album track returns in full. An unused session song receives a side of vinyl. Recordings made while passing through Europe become part of a release issued by a Berlin label. Years later, the EP becomes files and reaches another listener through a blog archive.

Nothing stays in the place where it began.

The closing title, “Should I Leave You Alone?”, almost sounds like the EP speaking to the listener. Rat Columns do not overwhelm the room. Their songs hover nearby, repeating small movements and waiting to discover whether intimacy is welcome. The question contains awkwardness, affection and the possibility of withdrawal. It is not a grand romantic demand. It is the sound of someone unsure whether remaining close is comforting or intrusive.

That uncertainty may be the emotional thread holding these four recordings together. Fooling around, waiting, becoming a stray and wondering whether to leave someone alone are all conditions without firm resolution. They describe time spent between decisions, identities and destinations. Rat Columns make that in-between state melodic enough to inhabit.

The EP also confirms something suggested by Sceptre Hole: David West does not need to disguise melancholy as seriousness. Sadness can ride inside a bright rhythm. Doubt can be accompanied by a guitar that seems pleased to be alive. The music does not force the listener to choose between pleasure and uncertainty because most actual days contain both.

Perhaps that is another reason the future can improve. We become better at allowing several feelings to exist together without treating one as evidence that the others are false. A joyful sound does not erase pain. A borrowed room does not make a recording less real. A song excluded from one album is not necessarily a failure. An idea revisited later may reveal that its first ending was only an interruption.

Fooling around is sometimes how the future rehearses.

Rat Columns - 2021 - Pacific Kiss

 

Tough Love Records – none

By 2021, Rat Columns no longer sound like a group testing how many shadows can fit inside a jangling guitar song. The shadows remain, but someone has opened the windows.

Pacific Kiss is brighter, fuller and more immediately generous than the earlier Rat Columns records in this sequence. Where Sceptre Hole often seemed to arrive through fog and Fooling Around lingered inside uncertainty, this album walks forward with the confidence of a band that has learned pleasure does not need to be defended. The guitars ring clearly, keyboards add color rather than mystery, and the rhythm section gives the songs a physical bounce that earlier recordings sometimes deliberately withheld.

The opening track, “Hey! I Wanna Give You the World,” states that change almost comically fast. It lasts less than two minutes, but its title contains the scale of a grand romantic promise while the music delivers it with the efficiency of a postcard. There is no long atmospheric entrance and no need to establish credentials. The record simply begins in motion, cheerful enough to sound spontaneous but constructed carefully enough that every entrance lands where it should.

That economy continues through the first half. “It’s Your Time (to Suffer)” places one of David West’s characteristically gloomy titles inside music that refuses to behave miserably. Rat Columns have always understood that a sad idea can become more affecting when it is not accompanied by the expected sad costume. The melody moves, the keyboards glow, and the song’s emotional unease travels inside a body that appears capable of dancing.

“I Can’t Live on Love” continues the contradiction. The phrase sounds like a correction delivered after somebody has mistaken romantic intensity for shelter, food, money or a workable future. Yet the arrangement is buoyant rather than bitter. Rat Columns rarely separate hope and disappointment into different containers. Their songs understand that affection can be real while remaining insufficient, and that recognizing its limits does not erase its beauty.

Joey Fishman’s keyboards are essential to the album’s new openness. They do not overwhelm the guitars or turn the record into synth-pop, but they provide flashes of brightness that make the songs seem wider. At times the keys resemble sunlight reflecting from a moving car window: visible for only a moment, but enough to change the color of everything nearby. Amber Gempton and Raven Mahon’s backing vocals create a similar expansion. West’s voice often carries a private, slightly withdrawn quality; when other voices appear around him, the songs begin to feel communal without losing their inward center.

“No Stranger to Life” may be the title that best describes the record’s tone. It does not claim mastery over life, only familiarity with its repetitions and disappointments. The song sounds experienced without becoming exhausted. That balance is difficult to achieve. Many records built from older independent-pop languages either attempt to recreate youthful innocence or lean heavily into adult resignation. Pacific Kiss chooses neither. It sounds like people who have lived long enough to recognize recurring trouble but still find the world capable of producing a good chorus.

The album was largely made in an East Williamsburg rehearsal space described by the label as dingy but comfortable, and that setting suits the sound. This is not luxury-studio polish. The music retains the directness of people playing together in a functional room, but the arrangements are clean enough that the separate personalities remain audible. Max Schneider-Schumacher’s bass frequently carries more melodic responsibility than casual listening might reveal, while Dylan Stjepovic’s drumming gives the brighter material its certainty. The songs do not merely shimmer above the ground; they have legs.

“Candlelight” slows the forward rush without abandoning the album’s warmth. The title could suggest intimacy, nostalgia or the flattering light in which objects become more beautiful because their edges are less visible. Rat Columns have always been skilled with blurred edges, but here the blur feels less defensive. The record is willing to be seen. Even its quieter passages possess a clarity that distinguishes them from the murkier rooms of the earlier work.

“She’s Coming Home,” the album’s longest conventional song, is given enough time to settle into its repetitions. Five minutes is hardly excessive, but in a record filled with compact pop constructions it feels spacious. The song stretches without losing form, allowing the band’s chemistry to become the subject. Repetition is no longer a corridor leading into abstraction, as it sometimes was on Sceptre Hole. Here it feels like anticipation, the same thought returning because the awaited arrival has not yet occurred.

The title Pacific Kiss beautifully describes the record’s combination of geography and intimacy. “Pacific” suggests an ocean, enormous distance, the Australian west coast, and the routes connecting Perth to San Francisco and New York. “Kiss” reduces that scale to the smallest physical exchange between two people. The title joins a body of water too large to comprehend with an action lasting only a moment.

That contrast suits David West’s musical life. Rat Columns has existed across cities and with changing groups of collaborators, but the songs rarely advertise themselves as grand international statements. They remain modest and personal even when their creation involves musicians separated by continents. Pacific Kiss was engineered between New York and Perth and mixed by Mikey Young in Victoria, giving the record a scattered geography that never sounds fragmented.

“Feeding the Fire” briefly raises the heat before the album moves into its strangest section. The final three pieces, “Soul Kiss I,” “Athens,” and “Soul Kiss II,” alter the proportions of the record. After a sequence of relatively concise songs, “Athens” extends past seven minutes and sits between the two “Soul Kiss” pieces like a large island between related shores.

This closing sequence prevents Pacific Kiss from becoming merely a successful collection of bright indie-pop songs. Rat Columns still want an opening into somewhere less stable. “Soul Kiss I” loosens the album’s grip on conventional structure, and “Athens” gives the band room to drift, repeat and gradually reshape the listener’s sense of time. The title “Athens” may indicate a real city, an imagined place or simply a word attached to the music, but the track feels geographic. It suggests travel through a landscape rather than progress through verses and choruses.

Jef Brown’s saxophone and Mikey Young’s unusual guitar contributions help give these edges additional color. Young’s involvement is particularly appropriate because he has spent years recording, mixing and playing within Australian underground music, often helping bands sound more sharply themselves rather than imposing one recognizable production formula. His mix lets Pacific Kiss remain polished without becoming airless.

The return of “Soul Kiss II” after “Athens” creates the sensation of arriving at a related location from another direction. The album does not end with its largest pop hook or a dramatic emotional conclusion. It leaves through atmosphere, reminding us that the clarity of the earlier songs was a choice rather than a limitation. Rat Columns can still blur the frame whenever they choose.

Listening to these three releases in order reveals genuine development. Sceptre Hole moves between noise, pop and small instrumental passages as though discovering the boundaries of the project. Fooling Around gathers displaced recordings and gives uncertainty a temporary home. Pacific Kiss sounds less concerned with protecting its private world. It steps outside and discovers that brightness can carry complexity just as effectively as fog.

That does not mean the sadness has disappeared. It has been integrated. Earlier Rat Columns songs sometimes sounded as though melody were trying to survive the surrounding gloom. On Pacific Kiss, melody has survived long enough to become confident, but it remembers where it came from. Even the happiest moments contain the slight emotional tilt that makes West’s writing recognizable.

This is why the record avoids becoming shallow power pop. The immediate choruses and polished surfaces are not a retreat from the earlier work. They are the result of it. A musician can spend years learning how to make uncertainty audible and then discover that one of the hardest things to express honestly is uncomplicated pleasure. Pacific Kiss allows itself more pleasure than before, but it never mistakes brightness for simplicity.

The future is getting better here too, although the record does not need us to announce it on its behalf. The evidence is in the playing. A band can absorb decades of jangling guitars, post-punk reserve, power-pop precision and homemade experimentation, then produce something that feels neither nostalgic nor embarrassed by beauty.

Pacific Kiss does not argue for its place.

It opens the window and plays.