Tape Deck Mountain
Ghost
Rating: 3.5/5.0
Label: Lefse Records
California trio Tape Deck Mountain’s debut album, Ghost, is a peculiar thing- it seemingly takes as much from the epic bombast of Dinosaur Jr. as from a rough lo-fi aesthetic. In the space of nine songs and not quite 28 minutes, they range from dabbling in scratchy sound collage, sinister almost (but not quite) pop music and dreamy, skewed ballads. It’s difficult to be both ambitious and terse, but they pull it off admirably.
Singer-guitarist Travis Trevisan mostly filters both of his instruments to an extreme; his voice is processed, sounding far-away on nearly every track and the combination of acoustic and electric guitars are reverbed to a swampy haze. Fortunately it works- backed up by Paul Redmond’s powerfully prominent drums (and occasional keyboards) and Jordan Clark’s far cleaner basslines, the result is a collection of songs both hazy and poignant, enigmatic in their minimalist lyrics.
The opening track, “Scantrons,” begins quietly, with a gently strummed guitar and a faint wash of distortion. Very shortly, it turns into a kind of epic emotionalism surrounded by pounding drums; it’s an arena ballad for the bedsit type. On the other hand, “F-” takes a creaking keyboard rhythm and turns it into tragedy with a lyric like “I always knew that you would fail/ Since that time we spent in jail” and the bewilderingly moving repetition of “matching tattoos.” Both songs wallow in miserabilism, but the following “80/20,” with its echoing, bell-like keyboards and high, keening vocals, turn that same darkness into something mysterious and nearly gothic. It’s fascinating to see the same basic ingredients changed into a new emotion with nearly every track. In particular, “In The Dirt,” a propulsive, dirty-drummed song is as negatively potent track I’ve heard in quite a while; a simplistic lyric like, “Please don’t marry/ That asshole Larry/ I know he’ll move the place you’re buried/ Next to me, in the dirt” and a fuzzy guitar can send a chill up a spine like no devil lock’d, eyeliner’d Satanist with a microphone could hope.
The aforementioned sound collage of “Dead Doctors Don’t Lie” isn’t nearly as successful. It’s a meandering piece of sound and fuzz that ultimately isn’t as effective as either a jam or the sharp songwriting of the rest of the album; while a descent into near silence and reversed tape loops is interesting in theory, in practice it’s more of a bluff. The same goes for “A+,” presumably the companion piece to the earlier “F-.” However, at 13 seconds, it doesn’t really count for much, serving only as a brief buffer to the melancholy closer, “Bat Lies.”
Tape Deck Mountain makes yet another good case for the power of lo-fi pop music. In an increasingly polished world, a little fuzz and distortion can do the ears and the heart well.
by Nathan Kamal
