Garage Swim Compilation

I usually try to shy as far away as possible from releases like this. Corporate created labels diving into the indie world to extract bands into a release that will give the brand a degree of hipness, complete with another corporate sponsor in it as well. See everything within the Scion Audio/Visual spectrum. However, Garage Swim is far too great a release to be ignored by me in anyway. Put together by the folks at Williams Street, Adult Swim's inhouse label, Garage Swim is fifteen tracks of some of the best garage rockers out there in one tight, digital, and completely free package.

The most outstanding thing about this though, might be the outstanding degree of quality of it though. It's like every artist decided to hold onto one of their best songs just for this release. Thee Oh Sees' "Devil Again" is them at their catchiest, all nervous energy, popping keyboards, and hidden darkness underneath. Mikal Cronin's "Better Man" feels like the the lost gap between his new album and previous one, pure sunshine power-pop and noise guitar roar on top of one another. Mind Spiders are all dark punk glory, JEFF the Brotherhood channel Black Sabbath, and King Tuff's song with Gap Dream sounds absolutely nothing like a King Tuff (it's super slow! It has '80s synths in it!), but it still sounds awesome. The Gories have a new(?!) song on here that feels like a tribute to the older garage styles, and yet works just as well as anything else on here. The release closes with a mini-epic from Weekend, who should be completely out of place on an release like this, but the spacey psychedelia of "Teal Kia" is instead ends Garage Swim on a surprisingly uplifting note. Corporate or not, Garage Swim is 15 very awesome songs, and should be promptly shoved in the face of the next person who says guitar rock is dead.



Links:

Download Garage Swim here, from Williams Street Records