Welcome to OPE!, the ranch dressing of music blogs by Brady Gerber. OPE! is a daily blog, but this weekly newsletter includes more song reviews, my favorite links of the week, and exclusive essays. All typos are intentional.
Well, hello there. How are you?
Here’s a special PM edition of the newsletter. Spooky! I refuse to make the “pretty, pretty good” joke in honor of that other Larry David show that just ended. I’m too busy being underwhelmed by the last few episodes of Shogun (I’m hopeful for a bombastic finale at least) and Ripley (very good, looks amazing). I also finished 3 Body Problem, a great example of “We blew our budget on one incredible sequence in the middle of our season and ran out of money to pay our writers to do anything coherent after that sweet shock ‘n’ awe and also our casting director should be fired for being mid.” Writing is hard! But yes, this week’s mixtape: pretty, pretty eggsalad.
Also, for some reason, Substack is not letting me turn my OPE! links into its normal header fonts this week. Weird.
Anyway, let’s get to the dang thing. Here are this week’s links and songs.
MY FAVORITE LINKS OF THE WEEK
Real estate expert answers US housing crisis questions. (I love this WIRED video series where smarter-than-me folks explain important stuff to me.)
I’ve recently been playing around with Photopea, a free online Photoshop alternative, and I found a lot of helpful beginner tips via these two videos, here and here. (You can literally learn lo-fi Photoshop in less than a half hour.)
Do you have what it takes to watch a 38-hour-long YouTube video about The Beverly Hillbillies?
Turning your lightsaber off. (Thank you Brendan for sending me this video and making me ugly cry this week.)
Shorter version of The Lord of the Rings. (It works!)
THIS WEEK’S MIXTAPE
DOLLHOUSE - “Be Nice to Me (Part II)”
4/4
I have nothing smart to say about this DOLLHOUSE song (and EP) that makes me feel a whole lotta lotta. “Be Nice to Me (Part II)” feels like someone jumping through my laptop wearing jorts and yelling “YR LIFE SUCKZ NERDZ” and me politely nodding in severe agreement as we mosh in my bedroom. I don’t want to listen to anything else for the rest of my life.
Alien Nosejob – “The Executioner”
3.5/4
Evan Minsker starts a new punk blog (see/saw) and immediately shares a bunch of amazing Bandcamp punk records and now we have competition and oh no we’ve already lost The Battle of the Blog™ to Evan and now OPE! is doomed to be a site just for posers and nerds and people who didn’t mind the Star Wars prequels??????? A tough L for me. But now I have a bunch of great new-to-me punk records to explore, so who’s the L now????? Still me but anyway Alien Nosejob is one of my favorite new discoveries of the bunch. (You’ll see some of top picks throughout this week.) Australian punks are the best at sneering. I could smear hummus on the bathroom walls of the old Shea Stadium and I still wouldn’t be as punk. Don’t do that. Never do that. Never do anything that I do or ask you to do. Repeat after me: Your band is only as good as your drummer.
3.5/4
Another winner from the recent see/saw round-up of amazing Bandcamp punk records, except I know the lead singer. “Know” as in I used to be a big Royal Headache fan. It’s nice to see that that band’s frontman has landed on his feet by making music that memyselfandi like. Amazing how self-care and progress doubles as making art that appeals only to me. Antenna’s Bandcamp page insists on referring to Tim Wall as Tim “Shogun” Wall. Whatever, dude. At least you’re making solid lo-fi punk tunes for all the nerds who still miss Japandroids and that brief period when music critics still cared about Cloud Nothings and for anyone else who treats Australia like an exotic state of mind. Like Royal Headache, Wall’s way-too-pretty-for-punk crooning is best heard when it’s turned all the way up. Is that Matt Healy’s older and smarter but not as successful brother on the album cover?
3.5/4
Happy EP release day to an artist who blew me away when I saw her live—her second-ever show apparently—a few months ago in the back room of a posh Chinese restaurant full of well-dressed young folk experiencing the mind-melting power of shoegaze and actual songwriting in real-time. I’m just thankful her music is good enough (sometimes great enough) to outrun any ongoing guitar rock trend. This is a too-long way of saying that Wisp makes my insides melt into pink sugar, which is how I once described My Bloody Valentine in a magazine. It’s a compliment to Wisp that when I listen to “Pandora,” I’m not thinking about the ’90s.
bad tuner – “repeat to fade” (feat. Pollena)
3.5/4
I meant to write about bad tuner back when “24 hours” came out but was so aw-struck by their attempt to write an MFA take on Moby that I had to spend a few weeks recovering my breath and eyesight. Some washed Gen X executive probably watched this music video and now thinks that this and Euphoria are how all teens look and talk. Trying to catch up now with “repeat to fade” ahead of bad tuner’s new EP. “24 hours” is more attention-grabbing, like your second college roommate who would go out of their way to tell people that they didn’t give a duck about what they thought. (Youth of the world: Your love of Uncut Gems is not interesting.) “repeat to fade” is the more successful song. Pollena is a nice foil for this style of song-making; she’s the calm warning sign to keep your cool before jumping off that cliff into the great glossy global malaise. I love dance music that kills in a club and soundtracks my lonely yet peaceful evening walks around the parts of Los Angeles only filled by visitors.
3/4
I caught DeepFaith live for the first time a few months ago in someone’s quaint little home in LA, which was also the first time I heard any of DeepFaith’s music. The show felt like an IKEA rave, if the band members covered themselves in Swedish meatball goo and threw Das Kapital pamphlets down their perfect pants while yelling at angular sofas in dreadful living rooms next to super models. I mean this all in the best way possible. Their music is a confusing yet fun assault on all the senses, even wearing the smell of a band that hasn’t showered in 17 weeks because they’ve discovered the unholy dark arts of making basement rave music that doesn’t suck. “Rave” is maybe not the right word to use. I can’t think of a better term. If you can think of one, you should go to therapy. 2 kool 4 skool u must b. “PATTI SMITH” may be a more interesting than compelling experience if you’ve never seen them live, which is not great music criticism so I won’t pretend to be unbias here. I also won’t pretend to not care about this band because they seem to be doing something pretty special and are worth at least paying attention to after you go to therapy.
And that’s it!
Until next Wednesday, as always.
With love and all the other good things,
-b
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Original OPE! logo by Claire Kuang. Words and cartoons by yours truly. Stock photos by Substack unless credited. Animations made using FlipaClip and EZGIF. All typos are intentional.