BAND OF THE WEEK: MANORLADY + THE CHAW + WORTHLESS

“There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues, except for the end of summer, dude,” goes the unwritten, unrecorded sequel, never to be voiced by the inimitable soul-roar of a voice described by some one as “an aural apocalypse of defiant energy.” And who are we to argue?

Yet we herald the end of summer, where the question of temperature can be answered in a word: “cool.”  There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues, and – hey – that’s cool.

Our summer soundtrack ends much in the way it began, with repeated listens to the “Ego Opressor“ album/mind-training offered by Virginia’s own Manorlady.

Manorlady’s music, to these ears, offers some sort of kind of 23rd-century, mercurial machine music, built upon the ashes of every burned-out, sun-bright pop-hook that ever saw the light of day. In other words – really cool.

“Ego Opressor” offers enough of a sinister sneer among it’s streamlined sweetness to make it unclear whether you’re ears are being delighted by a deception or deceived by delight, a great strength of an album that attempts to make a long-form race through a gloom-glitch sea, sleek-sadness happily buoyed by anguished/angelic vocal counterpoints and accidental death-metal sunshine-pop. In other words – really cool. Songs of losing control, deep-dives into promises of protection, monsters – in other words, ego oppression.

“Ego is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing, and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.”

We’re going to try it some time.

But we’re not going to do it without a doomed clutching on to The Chaw. California’s Chaw comes on cool, traveling an equally deep and dark road, though one dustier and dirtier, all autumn-orange and smoky atmosphere, an inhale-able haze, with nephilim traces in the fields. “The Road” opens the convincing and convincingly-titled “EP.”

“The Road” begins this EP but The Chaw find a fine path of their own, one that doesn’t necessarily end as much as it keeps turning. This is the sound of old doors creaking open, and as a listener, we’re blissfully unsure of whether there’ll be angels or demons staring back at us over a straining door chain lock.

Or maybe it the difference is negligible, imperceptible – worthless, even. “Jeder engel ist schtrvhlich” sang Maria – and conversely, every terror we face directly, honestly, can then becomes an angel. In other words – be cool. So when the bedroom-doom-trip-drip of Floridian-freakery calls itself Worthless, don’t believe it for a second.

There ain’t no cure for the “Slumber Time Blues,” the slo-mo, wake-and-shake slither the oozes out of the gates, only to be followed by the eleven-plus minute post-planetary psych-bliss out of “Fantastic Planet,” a transmission pulled out of the air and into your ears, echoing HAL-cyon encouragements for those traveling 9,000 light-years from home without leaving the bedroom. In other words – space cool.

So it goes with Worthless – far-out and spaced-out, simple and shaggy, but willing to “face the fear, stare down the emotion, go into the neurosis, and assert the nondual logic of the unconcious and the emotions, where the love is also hate and where pain can morph into pleasure.” And where the Worthless is priceless – or at least, a steal at seven-bucks.