Guardian Singles - Guardian Singles (2020, Moral Support)

If I watch one more video of someone opening Yu-Gi-Oh cards, I'm going to scream.

Eight months. I have not played in any of my bands (physically) since March. I have not seen a vast majority of the people I know indoors since March. I have not had a drink or a meal inside or outside of a restaurant since March. I haven't seen my parents since December because my mom was texting me to stock up on dry beans in January. I didn't want to do a "woe is me" still COVID-19 post on this blog, but it's helpful context. I've been privileged enough to work from home at a steady job this entire time, so it's not like I'm in any real danger. I've just been bored out of my skull and still trying to do the right thing as cases spike in my city.

I guess that right thing involves watching people spend $5,000 on a first edition Metal Raiders box. I played a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh in my youth; my mother would make frequent shopping trips to the Barnes Crossing Mall in Columbus, MS and drop me off at the Books-A-Million to play cards with strangers, occasionally children my own age, in the manga and fantasy novel aisles. I wasn't an objectively good player (I was a child on a child's budget with a child's understanding of a fairly complex game) but I won with a shocking frequency. It felt good to be on the upper end of a social situation, like really winning something in the face of people that I considered peers. I spent tons of time online, researching every strategy and how to counter it. I couldn't really beat players on sheer card availability, but I was able to quantify every situation I could put myself in and deftly maneuver myself on top of it. 

That didn't happen a lot for me. I was a smart kid, and I worked harder that I probably needed to on whatever assignments my fifth grade teacher handed me, but I didn't really understand how to be someone that people actually wanted to talk to. It was easy for me to equate social gatherings to a trading card game: everyone comes in with a certain pool of resources that they've either cobbled together from what little they had laying around or they have an organized, well curated set of tools that they've honed over time. There were winners and losers. I lost at conversations. I won at Yu-Gi-Oh.

That gradually started to change for me when the things I was interested in started to carry some actual social weight to them. At age 14 I was sitting on GameFAQs forums on a Friday night, discussing the finer points of Radiohead albums. By age 17, I was meeting other people that liked Radiohead. By age 21, I was playing Beach House and Modest Mouse covers to actual paying audiences. I had played so many conversational games with my formerly esoteric set of interest/hobby trading cards that they started to be legitimate social currency. It felt good. It felt like winning.

Memphis has been great to me in that way. I could go on and on about it's former glory as a Music City and it's current state as a Tourist Destination For People Who Think It's Still A Music City but I think the best way to describe it is as a Punk Town. Punk, for all of it's frustrations, is endlessly fascinating to me. It's such a small, insular scene that calling somewhere a Punk Town means that you can get 30 people out to a show and that's a success. It's a little bit of a hollow victory, though, because the punks will go to fucking everything. They know every band touring right now, what label they're on, and how the shows are going. I don't know how. For all my talk of social currency and how I'm trying to loop it back around to mean something in this essay, I don't know shit about current punk. 

What I do know, however, is Gonerfest. Gonerfest is one of the weirdest, most magical phenomenon in music. Every year 300-400ish music lovers from all around the world congregate in Memphis, TN to go to three venues and a smattering of late night afterparty spots in pursuit of That Moment that every music obsessive dreams of: discovering the best band in the world that no one has ever heard. When I say all over the world, I mean it; Musicians and fans alike from Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Japan all fly to a way-too-hot-for-September Memphis to hang out at The Lamplighter and watch bands at 3 AM. 

That's cut and dry fucking cool. Memphis is definitely not a Music City anymore but to this handful of people, it's the punk and garage Mecca of the universe. And I am one of those people. Granted, I used to live walking distance from one of the day time show venues, but still. It means the world to me that this is accessible to me and, moreover, that I actually know about it. They're going on 17 years of this bizarre extravaganza and basically no one in the world knows that it exists. It's not some hipster paradise either, where the appeal is that you get to brag five years from now about how you "saw En Attendant Ana before they blew up." These bands, by and large, do not get famous. The most famous bands are the legendary punk acts that sold 30,000 records in their entire career. Gonerfest is not where you come to pick up indie cred, it's where you go to gain record collector cred. Very different. The goal here isn't to brag, it's to show off. You know the real shit. The 7"s no one's ever heard of on labels folded long ago. You have that record with that insert and that matrix number. Gonerfest is one of the ultimate future record collector enthusiast enabler zones in the world.

And now here we are, pandemic and all. The show must go on, right? Apparently it can from New Zealand. Gonerfest was segmented into three virtual sections this year: pre-recorded sets (full disclosure - my band was one of the pre-recorded ones), safely livestreamed from Memphis bands, and full on livestreamed concerts from a bar in New Zealand. A few bands got together at 10 AM NZ time and streamed an entire mini-fest from a bar. Apparently you can just do that in New Zealand now. Can you imagine packing into a bar right now and seeing any band without worrying about coughing your lungs out and dying in the next two weeks? What a dream.

The secret to Exploration #4 is that I'm actually awful at describing how music sounds but I know how it feels. When Guardian Singles took the stage at Virtual Gonerfest my jaw dropped from the first note. Within 7 minutes I crashed their Bandcamp trying to buy a record. I changed every part of my Twitter profile to read TEA LIGHTS EXPLODING. I told my band that I felt like we had been dunked on and should cancel our set the next day. 

If this record had come out in 1981 we would be talking about it like a post-punk classic. "Tea Lights Exploding" and "Gold Plated Cars" feel like they were plucked right off of a mythical second pre-breakup Mission of Burma LP. There's a lot of todo in 2020 about the "post-punk revival" happening in the UK, but not a single one of those bands comes close to that explosive, chest-bursting energy I felt the first time I heard "Academy Fight Song" or "She Is Beyond Good and Evil." Guardian Singles somehow infuses that with a heap of the South Pacific jangle you expect from that region's punk records. I've thought about the 1-1-2-3 snare pattern from Heartland for months now. It's just that good. 

Even the production feels ripped directly from the early-80s. I think that's where a lot of post-punk revival stuff loses me - it's too clean. It either rocks too much or doesn't rock like it should. Guardian Singles feels tinny in the right places (the snare) and heavy when it should (the ending of "Being Alone" where one of the guitarists decides to turn on all of their pedals at once). There are so many small layers to every single song that reward the kind of complete listens you'd only give this if you were absolutely obsessed with it and let me tell you, I've noticed every single vocal track on "Midnight Swim."

Guardian Singles is one of a very small handful of albums to make me actually want to get out of my chair during COVID-19. It's been so difficult for me to connect with most albums released since March because they all smack of post-COVID blues. Everything is covered in this fine sheen of malaise and hopelessness that does nothing but remind me of the mess we're all in. That's why I tend to stray away from music that's "relatable" in a certain sense. I want to feel music in my bones. I want to get up and air guitar. I want to be transported to a different world where Gonerfest means getting drunk at the Hi-Tone with my friend Trip. Guardian Singles has been the ultimate version of that escapism, condensed into a friendly post-punk package. Plus it's only 8 songs in 25 minutes. You should always leave your audience wanting more, rather than thinking they got too much. Guardian Singles has me wanting to fly out to New Zealand as soon as I can get vaccinated. 

And that's the ultimate form of record nerd social currency. There are only 150 copies in circulation and I had to get mine shipped in from New Zealand. I had to learn the conversion rate to make sure I wasn't spending too much on a single LP. There's a certain borderline-elitist magic that comes from the shorthand of knowing that I have a secret that I can share with other keen listeners; a perverse sort of pleasure that comes from being on top of a microcosmically meaningful scene. It wouldn't mean anything if the tunes weren't great but they're goddamn amazing, and that's the brilliance of the whole equation. 

Eight short bursts of manic punk energy, fueled into a clean guitar driven, catchy pop. This is the record from 2020 you have to hear. It will bowl you over and stick in your head for weeks. The getting will never be good, but you should still get it while you can.