Vernon Manner by Webb Chapel

For fans of The Olivia Tremor Control, Elliott Smith, Hot Snakes, proto punk, and the morning after everything hits the fan, Vernon Manner by Webb Chapel reconstructs punk songwriting from its deepest foundations, resulting in a garage rock singer-songwriter journey to the edge of conscious experience. Straightforward rock instrumentation plays familiar riffs in arrangements which stretch verses and choruses to the extreme, an effect amplified by a distant, dreamlike production style. Graceful vocals shoot straight at the heart of this aesthetic, capturing that otherworldly absurdity which only intensifies with each cycle of the riffing guitars. When we see artists searching for the means of meditation or transcendence, we rarely see them take seriously the notion of exclusively using components which have existed in the American tradition since the 50s, but here we see exactly that: a proof of concept that all the same depth has always lived in classic rock n roll as all sorts of other more conventionally high brow traditions.