Ryan Garbes

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Still a steady stream of great albums tumbling out of 2020, so don’t expect a wrap from me while there are still corners to uncover. There’s more to scrape from this year yet. This one comes from a longtime favorite from the site, Ryan Garbes, who has been kicking around RSTB for years as part of Raccoo-oo-oon and Wet Hair. Both were constants on the site back in the ol’ Blogspot days and Ryan’s kept up the exploratory spirit in his solo releases since. Tabbed View explodes the notion of pop — burrowing incessant hooks under a layer of crust, a careen of noise-chewed psychedelics, and a deluge of disjointed rhythms. This release feels like it would sit right at home with the broken Teac days of Raven, burrowing through noise-pop fodder from Sic Alps, Times New Viking, and Psychedelic Horseshit. Though Garbes isn’t exactly miring himself in the past. That would be selling the record short. There’s a surreal crispness to this album that plucks it out of the lo-fi froth that constantly surrounded the class of ’08, letting this one creep into the room in 3-dimentional crystalized crumple.

Garbes’ sound has pushed into a sort of skin-slipped acid-sluiced funk as well and it’s a sound that’s hard to shake. The urge to dance is inherent in Tabbed View but the mechanics constantly elude the listener as the drums lag and lap and the guitars blot out proper motor skills under a wash of corroded fuzz. Garbes is inhabiting some sort of bomb shelter disco, keeping the captive audience fluid until the sickness seeps through the walls. There have been a lot of sounds that have come to define the year, but few albums hit like this one in 2020. Garbes proves he’s still a pop innovator, chewing on the wires and turning the taste of voltage into freaked funk for the rest of us.



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