A Rorschach islet of Heinz EZ Squirt Purple Ketchup still stains the carpet, only occasionally phasing its way into the short-term cartography of your memory when the living room’s sofa is shifted, revealing the condiment bruise beneath.
As the outline of this concealed splatter passes through an unsuspecting conscious, so too does the equally grimy, violet-tinted shoegaze produced by Floridian guitarist Adam Kritzman, whose static-laden tapestries released under his My Own Retard alias scored the second trimester of my sophomore year in high school. The project quietly generated a single cassette printed in 2012 by the now-defunct Swan City Sounds label, but its 20 minutes of phantasmal dream-pop noodling has managed to tunnel into — (and remain deeply entrenched in) — the shadows of my limbic system. Every so often, a bus ride or sleepy nighttime walk will conjure the album in its entirety, a heavy sheet of gaseous distortion hanging in the air like an invisible cloud.
Over four years later, Adam’s guitaristry has returned to Bandcamp in the form of Goalkeeper, a duo formed with drummer Richie Schnellbacher that dabbles in the sedimentary sludginess of early Dinosaur Jr, imbuing proto-grunge slimescapes with the K Records-inspired twee-punk energy of QUARTERBACKS. Though not quite as alluringly spacey as My Own Retard’s Bumble, the band’s debut EP, Listeria is satisfying in its own right, inundating a canvas of analogue hiss with action-panted splashes of green and purple. Try not to listen on carpeted surfaces.