Swirlies’ Signal Still Warbles
Nobody talks about Blonder Tongue Audio Baton like it mattered. Not really. Not in the way it actually mattered. Not like it was a detonated cassette left smoldering in a Honda Civic cupholder, slow-burning through somebody’s first love, somebody’s second breakdown, and a hundred flannel-shrouded basement shows where everyone swore they’d never sell out and half of them already had. Swirlies were the kind of band that soundtracked the part of your life you can’t even take pictures of—the parts that just come back to you in flashes, stained with mildew and feedback.
This band was never meant to age. And they haven’t. Not gracefully, not tragically—just not at all. Listening to Swirlies now, in the airbrushed algorithm wasteland of 2025, is like finding a forgotten sticker-covered four-track under your bed, hitting play, and hearing ghosts trying to harmonize over dial-up static and the hum of a CRT monitor.
They were never the clean kids of shoegaze. Never polished enough for the Slowdive altar, never brooding enough for Ride’s leather jacket dramatics. They were brats. American brats. New England post-everything noise weirdos who treated melody like a lab experiment — twisting it, frying it, dragging it through blown amps just to see if it would scream. They swerved between sugar-rush harmonies and rusted-out gearhead chaos with the same suicidal confidence as a teenager bombing a hill on a skateboard with no trucks.
"Bell" is still the sound of your neurons misfiring in slow motion. It’s not dreamy—it’s dehydrated, heat-warped, sung through a walkie-talkie held up to a dying star. Every time the riff drops, it feels like the tape’s about to unravel, like the band’s one downstroke away from total collapse. And then they recover, like it was all intentional. That was their trick. They staged chaos with surgical precision — faking collapse just well enough to convince you they meant it.
And then there’s "Sunn." God. "Sunn" is what it feels like when you see your childhood house from a highway offramp you weren’t supposed to take. It’s off-key and perfect. When the drum loop stutters behind those harmonies, it feels like memory itself is glitching. You’re back in a cold room, staring at a ceiling you used to cry under, trying to remember who you were before you figured out you weren’t special.
People call this “shoegaze,” but that only tells part of the story. Swirlies weren’t reverent — they were restless. Blonder Tongue doesn’t float; it jolts, cuts, interrupts itself. It’s shoegaze wired to a punk nervous system, covered in tape hiss, power tools, cat meows, and fake radio interludes. It’s a collage of broken experiments and beautiful accidents. It shouldn’t work — and that’s exactly why it does.
They were too American to be cool. Too clever to be dumb. Too weird to be accepted, too melodic to be ignored. While the majors were still hungover from Nirvana’s explosion — throwing cash at anything with a distortion pedal and a heartbeat — Swirlies were already deep in the basement, trying to destroy form while still writing the kind of choruses you accidentally hum in a gas station years later.
Their refusal to pick a lane wasn’t aesthetic—it was spiritual. They went from MBV worship to Sonic Youth damage to warped IDM detours and didn’t leave a map behind. Every track on Blonder Tongue feels like a lost channel on a broken TV in someone else’s living room. You’re not supposed to find it—but when you do, you don’t leave.
And still, almost no one talks about them. Not like they mattered. Swirlies were the kid in the back of the class making weird art no one understood until ten years later—by which time they’d scattered into jobs, families, or the occasional Bandcamp update. Rob Laakso—quiet architect of so much of that strange beauty—passed in 2023, and if that didn’t put a crack in your chest, you probably weren’t listening close enough. He was the one behind the veil, twisting dials, playing everything, making the broken things bloom.
There’ve been vinyl reissues, but no luxury box sets, no algorithmic resurrection, no Record Store Day parade. Just a slow cult burn that lives in the hearts of people who never outgrew distortion and never learned how to forget.
Listening now, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton hits harder than half the retro-core landfill clogging today’s playlists. It doesn’t wink at the past — it glitches through it. It’s messy and stitched together, but every frayed edge feels deliberate. It’s the kind of record you don’t recommend so much as share, like a cigarette behind a venue with someone who gets it. It’s not a throwback. It’s a threat.
Swirlies wrote songs like they were trying to see how far melody could bend before it broke. And they succeeded. Their best tracks don’t just stick with you — they mutate in your bloodstream. They remind you how beautiful it is to fail with style. How noble it is to chase noise like it’s holy. How perfect imperfection can sound when no one’s watching.
So no, Blonder Tongue Audio Baton isn’t just a record. It’s a signal. Still out there. Still warbling through the static. Still waiting for someone with a bent antenna and a cracked heart to tune in.