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Photo Credit : Tess Parks // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Nihilist fuzz-rock oozing evil? Buzzed out-slacker fuzz? Oozing psychedelic-hippie haze? Fuzzily evil nihilist-rock haze? flutes? bongos? wah wah guitars??
Those are the basic elements of the Sam Jr. oeuvre as presented on the smashing slab of raunch that is the new Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips/MGMT/Tame Impala) mixed single “You Lock The Door, I Broke The Window”, anyway, and on an even more smashing debut album, the details of which will be revealed in early 2022.
“Career anarchists need their anthems,” says Sam Jr.. “You Lock The Door I Broke The Window’ is a stealthy, snaky earworm – you might not have realized that yet but, believe me, your ears will be wormed – but also a genuine anthem-in-waiting for everyone who’s spent a lifetime being told what they should and shouldn’t do and getting absolutely nothing in return. Everyone who’s realized that ‘Do what you’re taught’ and ‘Do what they say’ are drilled into you from childhood for some nebulous Other’s benefit but definitely not your own.
So the message is to not let yourself be boxed in by others and what society can try to convince you is the ‘right’ thing to do because a lot of the time it’s for the benefit of the higher-ups. ‘Go to school your whole life so you can work for my company and I can ride around in my Porsche while you grind yourself into the grave for me, thank you. I’ve always put myself in positions where I break the rules to see what’s on the other side of life. Jump the fence, break the window, be a weirdo. Fuck the masses. Question what you’re taught.”
LISTEN / SHARE “YOU LOCK THE DOOR, I BROKE THE WINDOW” HERE
BUY / STREAM “YOU LOCK THE DOOR, I BROKE THE WINDOW” HERE
“You Lock The Door…” Single Artwork // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
You’re probably wondering how such a confident ‘debut’ could pop out of nowhere. Well, that’s because it didn’t. This Samuel Goldberg, Jr., chap looks oddly familiar, right? And that name … it rolls off the tongue nicely, yes, but it also rings a bell. So where exactly have you seen this guy before? Because you know you’ve seen him before.
You have indeed seen Sam Goldberg before. And you’ve seen him pretty much everywhere, that’s where. If you’ve kept even a casual eye on the Canadian pop landscape for the past 25 years or so, in fact, Sam Goldberg, Jr., has been hiding in plain sight the whole time as a vital member of an uncanny number of bands with whom you’re either already acquainted or – and no judgement here – should perhaps be ashamed of yourself in hindsight for previously failing to get acquainted with.
There’s the globetrotting group hug known as Broken Social Scene, of course, which has counted Goldberg as a stable conscript since 2007 and whose ranks have over the years helped launch the likes of Metric, Stars, and Leslie Feist to a modest form of indie-rock greatness. But there’s also Uncut, a truly formidable noise-rock “guitar band’s guitar band” that made evangelicals of its far-flung followers but never quite grasped as a whole how huge it could have been to properly follow through on its generous promise. There’s Bodega, whose subtly transfixing 1997 debut album Bring Yourself Up got gobbled up and murdered by an international major-label deal gone wrong and remains to this day one of the best Canadian records of all time (“That first Bodega record is fucking great,” concurs Goldberg) that pretty much no one has ever heard. There’s Bionic, a punk-rock pseudo-supergroup originally of combined Doughboys, Change of Heart, and, yes, Bodega extraction that could reliably melt your face from the get-go but ultimately proved too volatile to survive for long in any consistent form. There’s Hawaii, a duo whose eponymous 2003 one-off LP will easily satisfy your next desire for a late-night (Slow)dive into (Mazzy) stardom if you bother to sleuth it out. And there’s Yardlets, another duo that was so sardonically ‘meta’ in its expert appropriation of au courant 21st-century ‘psychedelic goth shoegaze punk’ trends across two albums released in 2012 and 2015 that it actually managed to make you feel uncomfortable for enjoying its own music.
And now with “You Lock The Door, I Broke The Window” you have Sam Jr., which is Goldberg taking a undiluted and unfettered deep dive into the black buzz-bin catacombs of the soul and having a bit of a laugh at his own expense while doing it, in much the same manner the Jesus and Mary Chain or Suicide were always kinda winking at you while they were wallowing. If that isn’t enough to interest you, wait till you hear what’s coming next.