No idea who Baker’s Pace is/ are, as this release is devoid of any information. However, it’s on Australian DIY lo-fi label Strange Pursuit, and it sounds like a further expansion of the kind of angular melodic fuzzy guitar pop brought to us over the past decade by Sydney bands Day Ravies, Sachet, and Shrapnel, so I’m going to stick my neck out and say Sam Wilkinson is involved in this low-key release of high-spec ear-popping over-achieving melodic guitar pop
The first of the two songs here “Starless Eyes” has a kind of Guided By Voices on psychedelics thing going on, all hyper-active melodic twists and turns and fuzzy guitar gymnastics.
The more sedate “Watch You Fall” that “Starless Eyes” segues into adopts a kind of woozy lo-fi tribute to 1970s psychedelic rock anthem nostalgia. Only someone born well after that decade could absorb the essential elements of that overblown sound and re-assemble them in a way that reclaims the sounds involved and enhances the memory.
The song seems to channel in equal parts the kind of hyper-saturated melodicism of Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” single as well as the ridiculously epic guitar solos you’d expect on Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” album. It also sounds like it was casually knocked off in a weekend, rather than obsessed over for months in an expensive recording studio, and all the better for it, if that was the case.
Such a ridiculous display of precocious talent on an anonymous Bandcamp double single without so much as a band member credit seems so wrong, but that’s the way the Strange Pursuits label rolls.
There’s also a whole 20-track album of this stuff released mid-2020 called “C 60 2020” which is also on cassette tape – “an inferior, and obsolete medium”. When I say “this stuff” I mean absolutely essential lo-fi garage/ glam/ psych/ rock that every music-loving freak should know about and download and play.
Pop Lib 