Swirlies
Blonder Tongue Audio Baton

I live on the sixth floor of a building at the foot of which lie the offices of the education department. Just a few minutes ago, I was overwhelmed by the shouts of protesting temporary teachers against Brunetta, school reforms, and a certain Malaguti, who I suppose is the principal of the institution these teachers belong to.

Nothing to object to their motives and noble intentions, but frankly, their screams have definitely scraped my scrotum with sandpaper. My windows are closed, and these days it’s starting to get warm too, but I can still hear them buzzing around the room. I was even considering throwing some buckets of water, I don't know, tomatoes, but, as mentioned, it’s not appropriate: after all, whatever they’re saying, I agree with them, with their aversion to the government.

To vigorously counter the less pleasant aspect of the parade experienced passively, I took out the vinyl of "Blonder Tongue Audio Baton" and played it at an intolerable volume. Intolerable even for regular rave-goers, I suppose. Certainly more tolerable than the roar of the furious crowd surrounding my house as if I had committed a crime. But so it goes.

The Swirlies are legend, anyway. They have several albums to their credit with which they navigated the nineties and emerged unscathed, alive.
I thought of them just to keep hoping to come out of that noise unscathed, without losing my mind.

It happened that in 1993, when they were compared to My Bloody Valentine, the Swirlies released their masterpiece, "Blonder Tongue Audio Baton" (Taang!, 1993). A slap in the face to those who dared compare them to someone else. Sure, they weren't compared to a pile of garbage, but the Swirlies, despite the tangible shoegaze reminiscences, have a very distinct personality, which is not exclusively summarized by the ether that leaks through the cracks of the guitar walls of their English "rivals," but extends towards a possibly more approachable rock, nonetheless no less bold and sophisticated in structures and arrangements - sometimes rather bizarre and twisted, but certainly original. Their personal trademark has a life of its own and finds oxygen in the lo-fi component of a basement band and in these brilliant insights combined with love for that pop melody that lightens the mixture into a fascinating, evocative, and undoubtedly more sustainable synthesis. Thus, for many critics, they became "the low-fidelity answer to Loveless". But it was still a too trivialized view of their approach to music. And then there was a time when even My Bloody Valentine adopted more scrappy productions.

At the time of release, or at least that of the recordings (dating back to the previous year), the historic lineup was still intact: the unyielding Damon Tutunjian still paired with the timbral purity of Seana Carmody, both divided between singing, guitars, minimoog, and mellotron. Moreover, this will be the last episode to see them together. The last before Carmody's departure, who will migrate towards more melodic fields and form the indie-pop oriented quartet, Syrup USA.

The record (also known as "I’m Almost Twenty and Don’t Show It!"), despite everything, is absorbed slowly. And if it weren’t so, it would probably show its nearly twenty years more prominently today. Instead, it’s a rock, unyielding. There, perhaps the factor that would find the same resonance in both the Swirlies and My Bloody Valentine is precisely the ability to propose a genuine style, hardly deteriorable.

Eleven perfect tracks follow one another that immediately leave no time to realize what exactly is being listened to. An escalation of lessons absorbed in the previous decade, reinvented for the occasion, leading mercilessly to the album’s epilogue in a climax of satisfaction.
What strikes the listener first and foremost is the homogeneous versatility of the material contained, which nonchalantly traverses rock 'n' roll settings anything but conventional and canonical, typically shoegaze and fuzz pop guitar walls ("Pancake"). Everything is bastardized - especially thanks to the use of atypical instruments and a radio - and structured in an apparently wacky way, yet at the same time catchy ("Vigilant Always", or the initial "Bell"), enough to prompt All Music Guide, who at the time didn’t let it slip away, and, rightly so, immediately called it "a pillar of the independent music of the nineties". And so be it.

The record stops spinning, and no chirping comes from outside. I touch myself to see if I am here. Yes, I too survived the nineties.