Tag Archives: Chicago

Split 7″ by Destroy This Place and Hospital Garden   (Chicago, Illinois)

This split, by Midwestern pop punk acts Destroy This Place and Hospital Garden, actually manages to sound a lot like a coherent EP that just happens to be by two different bands. Unfortunately, its coherence may be symptomatic of two bands who play it fairly close to the vest with their scuzz-pop sound. Destroy This Place’s ‘Vampire Day’ is a respectable fit of melodic punk much in the vein of early Green Day. There’s a goofy “rock & roll high school” vibe to the song that manages to be more endearing than annoying, thanks in part to complex lyrics that stay away from the giddy juvenilia of so many so-called punk acts.

This is pop music. Yes, it’s run through a scuzzy, proto-punk filter but it’s still committed to the egalitarian idea of pop accessibility. Destroy This Place are loud and emphatically churlish, but in an almost friendly and inviting sort of way. Hospital Garden take a similar approach to the conflation of noisy punk and radio-ready pop, and if it weren’t for two things – the production style and the vocals – Destroy This Place and Hospital Garden might be the same band. Vocals on Hospital Garden’s ‘Magnified’ are clear and distinct, surrounded by totally distorted guitars, though at no point overwhelmed in the mix. There is something almost Anglo-folk to the singing – a weird Peter Gabriel element to the vocals that gives Hospital Garden a slight edge in this split.

Hospital Garden is distinctly weirder than Destroy This Place, though it’s in a very ’90s way – as weird as a band like Blur ever got. Destroy This Place hits a little closer to the new millennium with their sound. Guitars are waterier and left to circle the mix amicably, with solos barely peeking out from under the thick smog of lo-fi appropriation. Hospital Garden are more in your face, though the end result is something a little more MTV than indie listeners (and readers of a DIY music blog) might necessarily be into. Still, this split is worth checking out – especially if you live in a major Midwestern city – to familiarize yourself with two bands who probably put on a very energetic live show.

get physical if…
-you wonder what would happen if Mike Heron fronted Bowling for Soup
-you’re not as pretentious as I implied you might be in the last paragraph of this review
-you didn’t get tired of pop-punk

just download if…
-you’ve been tired of pop-punk since the mid ’90s
-you only listen to “art rock”
- you need pop to be nice

I’m going to call this…
Punk-Engendered Scuzz Pop

It’s All Lore by Uwue   (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania)

It took me a few listens to figure out what Uwue is all about – what the catch was and what the sendup might be. The most confusing and infuriating thing about this group is that there really is none – it is just straightforward piano-based dream pop, something in the vein of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. But this is not ironic, it is not post-anything; it is genuine and sincere, which can be very off-putting to a music reviewer. This is music that could be described as “twee” without necessarily fulfilling any of the emotional goals set by that particular brand of pop music. It’s melodic ambient piano music with pop vocal sensibilities. It’s very weird without being weird at all.

‘It’s All Lore’ is instrumentally structured like something that might appear as the in-town music of a videogame (the soundtracks to both Persona 3 and The Sims come to mind). There is an ethereality to it – a definite debt owed to ambient music, but ambient music such as Eno’s micro-compositions for Microsoft, where aspects of new age and garden music are present, and where pianos are audible as pianos and not indistinguishable swells.

The more somber, but much more Bush-esque ‘Silent Wave’ plays off of an almost Sigur Ros-styled arpeggiated enchantment. The song is soothing without having to resort to drones or lullabies, but it is not necessarily all that compositionally distinct. These two tracks are definitely more concerned with setting the mood (one of festive enchantment and springtime bliss) than they are with surprising or exciting. It’s the kind of music that must be lauded for its production and for its clear articulation of form, but which will not – is not meant to – inspire any sort of need for structural processing within the minds of its listeners.

get physical if…
-you like Kate Bush’s “pop” period
-you found this article by Google searching “Sims soundtrack” or “dream pop”
-you think music is allowed to be polite and comforting

 just download if…
-you were the kind of person who killed your Sims by trapping them in the swimming pool until they drowned
-you don’t like music that’s polite…
-and you hate being comfortable

I’m going to call this…
Ambient Garden Pop

@HemlockShaw