Cassette Review // Sam Gas Can "Gone Doing" (Already Dead Tapes)

$7 //
Edition of 100 //
https://alreadydeadtapes.bandcamp.com/album/gone-doing //

If you open your cassette with a song called "Portobello Season" and it's just 18 seconds of you singing about the title, odds are good I will like your cassette.   The first song on here has these heavily distorted guitars over bedroom vocals and I think we're onto a sound when the next song comes through more like They Might Be Giants.   It also happens to be the titular track and we do hear the words "Gone Doing" in the lyrics, which are words I didn't know how they went together but now I do.

I like the lyric: "Our Bladerunner future keeps enhancing" and not in a bad way but the fourth song feels like a commercial, it just has that energy.   I feel like commercials get a bad reputation because they can get stuck in your head or are something you don't choose to hear but it does take a certain level of talent to create them and to get them stuck inside of heads.   Commercials are just pop music you didn't choose to listen to.   We go into an instrumental number with beeps and bloops like sonar in space.   This takes us into "Carole", which is acoustic strumming like a song from the "Juno" soundtrack. (Big Kimya Dawson vibes)

Frequencies and a tapping now, this becomes peaceful and calm like The Karate Kid.  We go into a looping of singing and other sounds which feel like glitches, but then it's full on singing and sounds more like a traditional song.   By the end you do hear the title of this song- which ic "Click Clack" and for some reason while I listen to cassettes I try to follow along with each song by having the Bandcamp page open when I should probably be using the j-card.

On the flip side we kick things off with "UPTIGHT!" which has ping pong balls bouncing around.   The next song sounds like it has a flute in it and just really has that feeling of a television theme song, specifically from the 1970's as "The Greatest American Hero" and "Laverne and Shirley" come to mind.   This takes us into a slow crawl of electronics and Hendrix-like guitars piercing through.    "White Baby (w/ Zack Lyrics)" has beeping like an alarm and otherwise it sounds a bit like Devo.

The second to last song is fast and distorted then when we reach the end we go into this powerful ballad called "I Shall Be Released".   The nature of the song- the lyrics and just the whole overall way in which it is presented- makes me feel like it is a spiritual number.   At the same time when listening to this cassette and the sounds it can jump to from song to song it feels like perhaps one of the deepest and also final.