The Garment District – “Following Me”

Got a really fun slice of pop-dipped ennui today, letting music and memory co-mingle between an excellent cover of The Human Expression’s “Following Me” from The Garment District and Peter Speer’s accompanying video. The vid cuts together archived footage from his collection of early ‘00s Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan films, turning Speer’s daily exercise of documentation into a snapshot captured in snow globe stasis. The track is a bit of an outlier on Garment District’s new album, which largely finds songwriter Jennifer Baron (The Ladybug Transistor) and vocalist Lucy Blehar burrowing into a verdant, velvet psych-pop wonderland. By contrast, the cover finds the band bathed in fuzz, provided by a carefully curated array of pedals on loan from Gregg Kostelich of The Cynics.

The original’s an unreleased gem in the former West Coast garage outfit’s catalog — a cool water contrast to some of their Elevators-inclined psych splash. Here, the Garments give it a barbed wire pillow of fuzz and foam, laying those prickled guitars into the crushed velour pop treatment that cradles much of the album. Baron noted that she was aiming for a Girls in the Garage approach, though that garage must be situated outside the Brill Building as glockenspiel and a virtual choir of ‘la la las’ turn this nugget into something more ethereal in the end. The band’s latest album, Flowers Telegraphed To All Parts of the World, is out now on Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records.

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