Over the last few years, the Des Moines-based group GOLDBLUMS have recorded with a wide sonic palette, including elements of garage punk, noise pop, and even some stoner sludge metal into their music. On their latest, Bless Me for the Get Better, they present six tracks full of whispered meditations and deeply aural, sometimes eerie music. These are devotionals for this garbage timeline, strummed out with as much country drawl as rowdy angst.
To facilitate the approach to that divine headspace, the record fittingly begins with “mungy/bungy,” which centers around the opening words of what sounds like a guided meditation from Ram Dass. One could imagine a whole possible album of tracks like “mungy/bungy,” with GOLDBLUMS supplying musical textures to his particular word journeys.
They have plans of their own, though. On “burner,” the band drifts in and out of a drunken country strum. Amidst the whistled melody and hazed-out vocals, a spiritual twang flourishes. Many of the lyrics are obscured, but when the words “suck down that inner brain” are said, you can’t help but at least try to. It took me until “bust” to realize that the vocals on this release remind me most of Harmony Korine’s “singing” in his uncanny film Trash Humpers, somehow both familiar and wildly unsettling. There are screaming voices and distant crashes buried in the mix here, complicating the band’s particular vision of new age meditation music.
They rescue it, though, with the ever-changing electronic harmonium drone of “deliver me from what’s nestled within…” As with the rest of the music on this release, it is uniquely comforting with hints of a sinister outcome not yet arrived. With “awash,” GOLDBLUMS relents to a straight up country rock guitar solo to make it familiar. Lyrical epiphanies include “So I sit here pushing buttons by myself/I’d sell my soul but it ain’t got much wealth,” and, later, “I’m lost here I’ve got nowhere else to go/I’ll even ghost out my own funeral.” The final track, “knocked down,” feels like a coda, a real carnival lullaby to send both record and listener out into the waiting winter. This is as sanguine as GOLDBLUMS ever get, with synthesizers and keyboards eventually fading into a single, diminishing note.
GOLDBLUMS’s greatest achievement here is that absolutely nothing on Bless Me for the Get Better feels musically forced. Throughout, they are able to follow the advice of the meditation that opens the record: “Just get here. Breathe gently, and sit with what you are experiencing.” You don’t have to stay there forever, but it’s always nice to get to be wherever GOLDBLUMS land, for as long as they allow it.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s January 2024 issue.
