A beat-driven tale and twangy blues
É Arenas “Mar Iguana” (Self-released)
Best known as the bassist in high-flying Los Angeles band Chicano Batman, Arenas builds his own brand of beat-driven madness on this new 7-inch single and two-song Bandcamp release. Sounding like a weird electronic Devo experiment or the score to a quirky game about robots chasing energy pills, “Mar Iguana” is a playful ditty that nestles its way into eardrums only to blossom into an indictment of unjust drug laws.
A play on words, the song is composed as a quebradita, a joyous Mexican music genre and dance style. Lyrically, “Mar Iguana” stars a sea-dwelling iguana that, according to Arenas’ advance notes, “loves smoking weed but has a deeprooted worry about his friends who are locked up for related crimes despite the fact that California recently legalized the use of recreational marijuana.”
The B-side, “El Nopalito,” gallops to a merengue beat as Arenas, percussionist Gabriel Villa and bassist Federico Zuniga run musical circles around a song that celebrates another plant, the cactus used to make nopales.
Ford Madox Ford “This American Blues” (Porterhouse)
When the brothers Kinman were helping to define L.A. punk as founding members of the Dils, singer and guitarist Chip and bassist brother Tony let loose politicized sprints on class warfare — “I Hate the Rich” and “Class War” — that forged the sound of the So Cal hardcore movement.
The Dils split in 1980, and the Kinmans evolution into hardened, Johnny Cash-inspired country punk found purchase after relocating to Austin, Texas, and joining with guitarist Alejandro Escovedo to found Rank & File. There, the band helped codify the alternative country movement.
Flash-forward to Chip Kinman’s most recent project as Ford Madox Ford, which was produced and engineered by brother Tony. The band’s second pool of grim, twangy heaviness, “This American Blues,” organizes its distorted chords as a series of quadrupleshot belts of rock.
Tremolo guitar strums open “If That’s How You Feel,” a structurally sound rock song about fading love. “Before the Fall” maneuvers through stop-and-start chord bursts and a funny time signature while dwelling on impending doom.
“Dark American Night” might be Kinman’s later-period response to the Dils’ “Class War.” Whereas four decades ago he screamed, “I wanna war between the rich and the poor — I wanna fight and know what I’m fighting for,” he’s now meditating on what that might look like when American exceptionalism expires: “Where are we going, dark American night,” Kinman wonders. “You don’t know us/ You don’t see us/ You don’t hear us.”
Rollmottle “I Can See You” EP (Sentrall)
Did somebody say dark American nights? The new four-song instrumental EP by the L.A. producer and who makes music as Rollmottle crafts electronic tracks that seem designed for way-past-bedtime listening.
Soothing, unobtrusive works that place cottonball-gentle tones in patterned melodic grids, the tracks revel in their plasticity. Absent voice, though, the human touch still wends its way through “As I Lay Spinning,” which, despite having a title that riffs on a Southern gothic comedy by William Faulkner, recalls the retro-futurism of “Bladerunner” and “Mad Max.” Each of the tracks wanders this realm.