Gnar Tapes, the Portland cassette collective run by Erik Gage, has a whole new batch of tapes fresh out of the oven for you. The bulk release format has been a trend in the resurgence of cassette culture so to make it for more manageable for our readers, we have taken the liberty of writing one sentence reviews of all the new tapes on Gnar to guide your ears and hearts to a cassette that suits you.
Honey Drum: Brokenhearted With A Busy Schedule
Bio: The ’80s made love with the early ‘00s in order to produce this lo-fi piece of 2012 goodness.
Listen to: “Big Chris on the Couch”
Juiceboxxx: I Don't Wanna Go Into The Darkness
Bio: Endlessly energetic punk rapper from Milwaukee with an impressive touring resume. Crazy, yet equally fresh guitar beats accompanied by the sing-speak (rap?) vocals we have come to expect from the Milwaukee maniac himself.
Listen to: “Expressway to the Darkness”
Snow Wite: …As Psychadelic Days Go By
Bio: Dirt pop weirdo with an affinity for burning guitar out of LA. Celebrations abound, self described “slimepunk” tracks that embrace their near-ridiculousness in the form of elongated and pitch shifted burning solos and octave swinging vocals that sway between a pop falsetto and a punk accented fold over DIY, air-guitar ready summer-laced hooks.
Listen to: “300°”
Keel Her: Keel Her
Bio: Stoned British bedroom pop artist with some serious accolades including being covered by Ariel Pink. Funky, DIY electronics with vocoder heavy, almost unidentfiable vocals, straight out of Portland.
Listen to: “Babe In Total Control Of Her Life”
Le Elbow: The Midnight Rooikat Tapes
Bio: South African sci-fi noise band hell bent on twisted landscapes of sound. Eclectic abstract noise music that shifts in and out of active and passive sound with an attitude that that is consistently strange and always different from song to song without ever sporting a single and rarely any traditional song structure.
Listen to: “Entropy”
Street Gnar: Study Wall
Bio: Kentuckyan by way of Nashville, Tennessee bedroom pop artist with previous tapes out on Night People and Eggy Records.
Listen to: “Twenty Two, Twenty Two”
Adrian Orange: Four Songs
Bio: Portland’s experimental folk man behind the Thanksgiving moniker. Four raw, detuned and warbled lo-fi bedroom folk songs that feel broken in a shy and brooding 90’s Athens, Georgia kind of way two of which are covers, oh and just as a curveball, the most lo-fi whispered track of them all slips into an minimalist electronica track.
Listen to: “I'd Give You Everything I got and You'd Say It's Not Enough”
