Blarg Engages in Culture Jamming Time Travel With the Bizarre Psychedelic Pop Song “Suburban Lawn (Su, Where Are You Now?)”

Blarg1_crop — Blarg, photo courtesy the artists

Blarg, which is a name many of us wish we had thought of before these guys did to express our contempt and disgust for so many things in the world and to put a humorously on the nose name on the project, really take us to strange places in space and time on its new single “Suburban Lawn (Su, Where Are You Now?).” It slips effortlessly in and out of a kind of psychedelic surf rock song but not the kind that got so played out between 2009 and 2018. It’s far noisier and Blarg seems to have no time for staying on script as there is an aspect of the cut-up method to the songwriting. At the end it sounds like someone just turned down the delay on the whole track and then a sound like someone ejected the VHS tape that was the source of the recording with the audio version of visual glitches mixed in with the song. Somehow Blarg wrote and recorded a song that sounds paradoxically futuristic and retro at the same time partly by grounding itself on a classic rock and roll structure and then dispensing that entirely when it goes into the tripped out section where most of the instrumentation drops out and extended synth blips convey a sense of being in outer space then back into a garage rock at the drive-in-theater-to-watch-campy-horror-movies vibe. But across the song there are sonic anomalies like bits of trap beats dropped expertly and perfectly into choice moments. Like some songwriter from the future who fell in love with various eras of past music and culture and didn’t see any reason why it couldn’t all be reconciled. Kudos to the nod to Su Tissue of weirdo post-punk band Suburban Lawns. Maybe VH1 can revisit one or more of its old series to answer the question in the song title. Listen to the track on Soundcloud and follow Blarg at the links below.