Brown-nosing agendas

Kevin Greenspon - Bracing
Bridgetown #80

Releases from Kevin Greenspon's Bridgetown Records are always done with such loving care. This flattering praise is not the work of a brown-nosing agenda-pusher simply because there's no legitimate reward to be garnered when the entity conducting the brown-nosing is a cassette blog and the entity being brown-nosed is a cassette label. All that being said, Bracing comes with a quality card stock insert complete with enduring, vibrant images, like a photo of a topless woman gorgeously silhouetted against a window. Should I ever allow my heart to be blackened and start up a cassette label, this is the kind of expressive and meticulously detailed packaging I would aspire to emulate.

And oh yeah, there's music, too. "Petty Dream" and "Bracing" are my choice tracks. Spellbinding guitar melodies unfurl over layers of prickly noise; it's ambient music for the background or the foreground. A blend of the satisfying with the unpleasant. You know, like everyday life. Like the time you bombed that job interview with that big company in the city and on the trudge back to your automobile, you went by the waterfront and when you saw how the blue of the ocean accented the blue of the sky, and the way the perched gulls on the pier arranged themselves in such a way that it spelled out the word "donut" it tickled your soul right down to its very core.