Ok so I guess the only mystery bigger than why a band from Texas would relentlessly pursue a more pop-oriented less experimental shoegaze in 2020 is why the fuck would a shoegaze band from Texas send their demo to an online publication that’s more than 50 feet underground in upstate New York?!

Theory #1; they think that ‘New York’ is ‘NEW YORK!’ i.e. Manhattan/Brooklyn. It’s not. We know nothing about the shoegaze scene in Manhattan or Green Point or wherever it’s centered in the City other than a Place to Bury Strangers had an interesting take on it around 10 years ago (which more importantly was good news because when we reviewed albums for another publication 10 years ago we got a free copy of a pink vinyl by the previous band some of their members were in called Skywave that made me $25 at my local record store).

Theory #2; they’re getting ‘New York’ confused with international American Heime Ville/Hollywood and think I can get someone’s ‘attention’ for them. In which case, you get points for trying since my Uncle was in a band with Harvey Weinstein, however, I highly doubt anyone wants to be ‘discovered’ by him or anyone like him right now if ever again. Also, if this is true (which I’m sure it’s not I’m just trying to be slightly offensively funny), bad EEP! Assuming that semites ‘know people’ in the show business is sort of anti-semitic. Shame on you.

Seriously though the serious mystery here; why would a self labelled shoegaze band from El Paso Texas be sending their demo out for review in 2020? I could understand if shoegaze was one of their influences (since recycling it does seem to be proving to be a shortcut to hipsterdom far longer than any other early nineties genre including any of the many that the (now) super beyond superhip Melvins invented) or if they were taking shoegaze to the next, or at least a new, level. Perhaps recycling some of the proto-shoegazers like Spacemen 3, Loop, or Jesus and Mary Chain to create a new interesting really genre bending electronic noise/noisecore/noise rock element which actually would explain why they sent it here too — we actually do get press releases from Whores. ever since we wrote a fake local music news story involving them so perhaps if you google some weird combination of ‘underground noise rock review blog’ Times Boredom comes up.

I guess the point is that I feel like I can write a bunch of bullshit to try to either make you laugh or roll your eyes because honestly there’s nothing worth writing about this band. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Their songs would be pretty decent throwaway tracks on, say, Souvlaki or Glider. But they are just purely recycling every shoegaze trope, and worse yet they’re doing it in a disturbingly clean and almost anti-experimental way. There are no really strange production techniques, surprising druggy interludes that either disturb or pull you in or spit you back out, or long indeterminably noise passages… Their bandcamp name isn’t EEP.bandcamp.com, it’s ‘eepshoegaze.bandcamp.com’. And as much as their short description advertises their ‘eclectic’ shoegaze, the only real diversity of influences here is that they range from Ride to Chapterhouse. Unlike most groups that take Jesus and Mary Chain or MBV/Kevin Shields as a starting point and experiment from there, EEP seems to start from there, remove as much of the innovation and bizarre aspects that make it most interesting, summarize and homogenize the genre split it into easily digestable 4 minute chunks and, well, even then make pretty boring stuff.

Of course I could have been much nicer about this all and started from the assuming point that the group makes the music they do because they simply have a deep love and endless respect for the shoegaze genre and don’t think anything should be done to change that perfect sound regardless of what critics or fans think… but then I’d still have to ask why they didn’t just start a cover band or make their music, put it up on bandcamp like everyone else and NOT take the pretentious step of thinking their band is so good or interesting that they’d carpet bomb online review sites so much so that they’d hit a tiny bomb shelter in upstate New York.

If you want our advice (and we recognize that no one does nor should as really deep underground critics obviously can’t do to say the least), we suggest you branch out quite a bit… maybe become the actually eclectic shoegaze band you say you are. Or better yet take an aspect of shoegaze that really defined and was great about the genre, like the electronics and production experimentation or signal to noise ratio and how long you can hold it before it becomes anti-commercial… etc.

Thanks for your submission. Good luck to you.

This record took us entirely out of our safe and hate zones, for which we are exceedingly greatful.

We don’t know glitch hop or lo fi beats idm electronic subgenres et al, so unfortunately we’re not really educated enough to adequately and accurately rate and put this record in any context whatsoever that we’d be satisfied with.

However, what we do know is what we hear, we like. We respect. We are intrigued by.

(above; an uninformative picture of the artist that raises as many questions that you know no answers will be given to as the befuddling nature of the music itself)

Apostrophe Beats is the brain child of omnipresent Albany scenester Dan Paoletti.  A mover and a shaker behind countless shows, projects, and collaborations, Dan’s a guy you probably know if you’re involved and you’re cool.  We don’t.

(That was a joke but also completely true.)

The album in question contains 21 tracks that typically run for around 2 and a half minutes, but there are plenty of sub minute and one nearly 5 minute tracks just to keep you on your toes.  It’s like it’s a feeling.  Not a song, not separate tracks; an entire lasting mood.  Ostensibly about life for Mr. Paoletti in Upstate New York, we can certainly relate here.  There’s something about everything here that includes everything you might think of; from Lark Street where if you close your eyes you can almost pretend you’re in the East Village, to North Troy where danger lurks around but when you’re there on a sunny day, you’re a bit high, it feels like an experience you just really want to have somehow. Well, those and to the sprawling suburbs of Levittown like communities that may be conservative, gun loving, pickup truck driving classic rock enthusiasts — they’re kind of unrepresented on this trek of Upstate New York. How unfortunate.

The genre is unknown to us but we did a bit of research.  For starters, we think the idea of dance music that you can’t dance to is fucking brilliant. And the constant tempo switches, the confusing slurry vocals that sometimes figure in, and the chill out organs and horn parts (?) that constantly pop in and out make you feel like you’re on even more drugs than the instrumentals do to start with. There’s no guidemap here, no straight raving, no glow sticks, no 4/4 or headbanging. Just pure experimental electronic music like nothing we’ve heard.

Some somewhat similar stuff I’ve familiar with includes ambient house, trip hop (more Tricky than Portishead), and early 90s hip hop like Tribe Called Quest and De la Soul might figure in to the paradigm within which we hear this. But we don’t get the theory from any reference points of the paradigm. We are without an oar here to paddle through the overall melange of sounds that comes out.  Some influences definitely show up.  You can feel the 90s hip hop, some slow jams, some ‘chill out’ music for lack of a better term (and that is a terrible term).  But the sounds, the format, are all unexpected and feel almost unmoored.

In contrast to true ‘chill-out’ records we’ve played like say the good Orb stuff (yes there was good Orb stuff), when we hear pretty much any of the tracks on Upstate Daydream we feel both mellow and on top of a mountain of repressed anxiety.  And this feels like an adequate reference point, given the spiked conversations on some of the tracks like ‘The Pomegranate (Breather)’ that are characterized by droll english accents.  But the feeling isn’t one of intentional enjoyment or calmness.  There’s always that feeling in the background that we’ve smoked too much pot or done too many other drugs that we don’t know the names of.  We’re good for now, but…

And that’s just one of the brilliant parts of this album that set it apart from anything else we’ve heard. It sets such an uncompromising, unusual mood that once you’re in you can’t get out of until you stop listening (and even sometime after that).  It also feels like a solo project that was born of collaboration and ideas from just about everywhere; the list of personnel in the liner notes is a road map to dozens of other musicians and groups from the area.  The only one we recognize is the brilliantly talented yet woefully underknown Grace Annunziato (who often makes music under the alias of Lone Phone Booth), another project we’ve enjoyed so much we wrote about unsolicited recently

Incredibly original, entirely discordant and wonderfully experimental, Upstate Daydream defies expectations you didn’t even know you had and puts you in a mood you’ve never been in but know all too well. Somehow. There may be mountains of music like this somewhere out there for all we know, millions of dj’s at home spinning similar lo-fi beats interspersed with an enormous variety of always unexpected electronic instruments and samples, but we’ve certainly never heard anything like it (ok we should probably stop repeating ourselves now.. now… repeating. ourselves. NOW!). At one point you’re relaxing and sinking into the easy chair, suddenly you find you’ve gone too far and you’re underwater and not breathing so well, then just as suddenly you’re looking at the defribillators that just brought you screaming back to life and reality. But it’s ok, you’re still pretty doped up from the trauma and the morhpine. And so you start sinking again…

We’ve never heard anything quite like this (I thought you were gonna stop repeating that!!! STOP IT!!!). But we imagine and hope very much that we will again. There is an intriguing, in depth, entirely original and unexpected underground in the Capital District, and this is definitely a part of it. We can’t wait to see where it goes next.

-W. A. Wright

Alex Hitrick is an incredibly talented, hardworking, polished songwriter and musician.

That being said, the music he makes really isn’t my bag.

Didn’t we all agree at some point that the excesses of 70s pop music, at least those lacking a tongue in cheek campy irony, were a regrettable mistake? It’s apparent that Mr. Hitrick firmly believes the opposite.

The songs on his debut album ‘Apple Trees’ conjure the influence of early Elton John and Wings (as opposed to later Beatles which is far more excusable). Some songs sound like that demo you had on your first casio… it’s actually a Billy Joel song played with every synth instrument imaginable. And everytime you hear it you feel like you’re at a phony schmoozing cocktail party and you just know the host wants you personally to have fun reallllly bad. But you want to leave. Really bad.

We’re not sure what he’s going for other than to write really good, catchy, pop songs that keep changing in the middle and are a little bit funny, a little bit campy, and happy in that way that depressed pop stars from the seventies became soft rock in the 80s.  I didn’t laugh.  I felt depressed.

To resummarize and conclude, Alex Hitrick has so much promise. It almost sounds like he could write pretty good music in any genre he chose. It’s just that the one that he chose, eclectic ultra-seventies ultra-polished silly power pop, has no relevance in today’s world and no appreciation by the likes of underground publications like ours. To be fair, he does warn you on his site of his ultra slick seventies pop influences.

Oh yeah that reminds me, he also really reminds me of Ben Folds. But Ben Folds was funny in a slapstick kinda ‘the music I make is silly but fuck you I’m a big rockstar!’ sardonic kinda way.  Mr. Hitrick is reaching very far for the humor.

Perhaps most telling, he doesn’t acknowledge any more contemporary influences whatsoever… maybe that’s a suggestion that he should, you know, listen to music that wasn’t made in the cheesy seventies.

If he wants our advice (which we know no one does); if you want to be a popstar, focus on more contemporary music. You don’t have to go hard rock or metal or drone for us to like you, but more John than Paul for us to appreciate you, and more Katy Perry than Chicago/Peter Cetera if you want to have a succesful career/make money.

Thanks for your submission and good luck.

Mr. Cancelled has finally released their long awaited nearly 30 minute long ep and we can’t stop listening to it.  This lo-fi, indie rock, post punk masterpiece has melodies that are meticulously crafted and divinely inspired that soar above the mundane indie landfill surrounding them at every corner of mediocre indie rock… yet the band is as humble as the lo-fi packaging of a paper sleeve and a couple of printed decals on a CD-R reveals…

(cover art by Shane Sanchez)

Made up of local legendary scenesters (all involved with the Collective in major or minor ways) the band has many more claims to royalty than just being one of the best local rock bands around. A pop punk trio in the traditional sense, with Chris Brown on the bass cranked high setting the entire atmosphere for the songs, drummer Jon Cantiello (also of national superstars hailing from Glens Falls Candy Ambulance) a phenomenal driving force with kung fu precision and timing, and a bunch of swearing distorted noise coming out of Ziroli’s guitar as he seamlessly goes back and forth between rhythm, lead, solo, and just plain noisewash.  Not to mention the production work by local legend Paul Coleman of Haley Moley and Sinkcharmer which is crunchy, clear, and sharp at all points it needs to be to highlight every particular aspect of the band as it shines.

The major highlights of the album are the vocals and melodies, both mostly the province of self confessed ‘old post-punk guy’ Gary Ziroli’.   And indeed the band moves from pop punk to ‘Old Guy Post Punk’ seamlessly (like their fellow local bands and scenesters that are ominpresent here at Times Boredom because we’re in half of them like Dryer, Che Guevara T-Shirt, and Hill Haints), still making excellent original rock music in a traditional indie rock vein even though its major progenitor may be getting elderly and losing hair, which just makes it all the sweeter, more worldly, and more accepting that it’ll never be appreciated by as many people at the level it really deserves to be.  You could certainly say ‘Old Guy Post Punk’ is more of an attitude than a sound, but, you know, you’d be wrong.  It’s both.   And I’ve already discussed it enough for you to get bored with it most likely (if not write to timesboredom@gmail.com and I’ll write a whole article about it!).

Every song is a three (or almost three) minute masterpiece of verse, bridge, and chorus (or some variant thereof) proving once again that the art of punk rock songwriting will never die and is taken very seriously by them that hold fast to it.  It’s clear that every catchy melody and riff came to lead singer Ziroli in the middle of the night when the Spirit moved him to create something that sounded entirely original yet incredibly familiar in a comforting way to anyone that’s a fan of punk or post-punk.

And the final real star here is the goddamned humility! Whoever’s writing the melodies is a true blue, hardworking artist that only cares about the results, and not whether any audience hears it, appreciates it, or even gives a shit. These songs are works of art for the art of songwriting, perfectly fine tuned and crafted down to every syllable sung, every bass melody underneath, every… snare… hit (inside joke).

‘Nowhere Again’ begins the record with a Sebadoh like melody that tells you exactly where this record is telling you it’s going to go, hahahah (fake laugh) ‘I’m going nowhere again’, and then it takes off and shoots to one of the catchiest melodies you’ll ever hear.  Oh yeah, it’s going nowhere alright!

‘Failure Street’ similarly brings you in with a catchy bassline and a subtle melody that gives way to an exploding chorus of high melody vocals about failing, while doing exactly the opposite.

‘Half Dead or Worse’ (ostensibly inspired by Glens Falls legendary folk songwriter/performer William Hale) is classic three-four cord pop punk with pop melodies that go back to super catchy nascent fifties rock songs and don’t let up until the 2 minutes end and you just want to hear it again.

But before you rewind, you’re on to ‘You Can Go’; another undeniably will get stuck in your head melody that owes as much to Sebadoh as it does to the Kinks (though Gary may very well deny he listens to either one).

‘Jesus Disturbed’, the standout track of the album will definitely get stuck in your head.  A perfectly crafted pop song full of hooks reminiscent of the dirgy but poppy Nirvana hits.

‘Every Town has its Dolls’ a song that sounds like a Mudhoney track sardonically inciting you to commit suicide because you’re gonna die anyway so you might as well choose the way you die.  And it ends in the most perfectly humble way, with a fuckup left in where Gary shouts ‘FUCK!  God damn it!’ as though he played the wrong cord or lost his voice.

Finally, ‘Show You’ (continuing with our grunge rock comparison theme, warranted or just for laughs), is like a Soundgarden song gone wrong that you can’t stop laughing at as you try to sing.  Classic mock in the vein of every indie rock band that wants you to know that they don’t take any of it very seriously, especially not the gods of rock nor themselves.

Just wondrous fun from a band that wants you to think they don’t take themselves very seriously; but while they’re heavy (and funny) on the self-deprecation, it’s clear that every note on this album is exactly where they want it to be and worked out that it should go.  All the melodies are memorable and catchy, but just enough, without any showboating at all, that you can call it… Mr. Cancelled.