I made Hot Cargo Bike Summer 2023 a little more interesting by buying a really terrible Bluetooth speaker with a very good handlebar mount. In painfully obvious bicycle listening, I was listening to (The) Desperate Bicycles. Their whole discography is great and totally not legally accessible except through the collector-scum market. Since most of the online anthologies are chronological, I never end up playing their last single as often as the rest. But every time I do, it rearranges my mind. '
Who makes music like this? It's reasonable to call it "post-punk," I guess (a term which I was struggling to define for Cosmonox live-dub enthusiast Jason recently). But what sort of post-punk is built like this? Things are jammed together in totally non-linear and exciting ways, it's all built around some sort of asthmatic organ/Stylophone sound, there are chords I can't figure out on the guitar, and then on top of it the bassist is positively shredding, on an emphatically fretless bass no less. (Important to note that even on their early stuff the bass is fretless and all over the place.) The last song, "Conundrum", is both super catchy and completely bewildering.
