Gary War^(US)

Gary War, ofwel Greg Dalton uit Brooklyn maakt garage/synth/prog/pop. Samen met John Maus zat hij bij Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, en met Taylor Richardson richtte hij het label Fixed Identity Records op. Het was in 2011 bovendien John Maus' tweede status update ooit op Twitter, "GARY WAR IS THE FUTURE", wat hij hier verder toelicht. 

Pitchfork: "Like Ariel, he could be said to have an unusual knack for changing time signatures, counterintuitive melodies, and lo-fi textural play. But where Ariel's perversion of pop expectation feels celebratory and nonchalant, Gary War's has always felt a bit more manic and claustrophobic to me, as though he were trapped inside his own accidental-rich labyrinths, frantically trying to strum his way out of them."

The Fader over Gary War's nummer 'Highspeed Drift': It never occurred to us until we watched this video, but former Ariel Pink bandmate Gary War is making galactic surf pop. Of course, the vocals of that surf pop are buried under enough effects that you can't tell where his voice ends and the instruments begin. Occasionally syllables will be choked out like bubbles made out of approximations of words, but then it all blends back in with the instruments again, every piece working in tandem toward a driving conclusion. This video, which features dudes in triangle masks doing suspicious stuff, is from War's Sacred Bones release Horribles Parade, which is a simultaneously warm and uneasy glimpse at a new weird music direction where pop hooks don't need to rely on actual phrases to embed themselves in your brain. War's music might be hard to get into, but having a video directed by Jacqueline Castel (who was also responsible for the Blank Dogs "Setting Fire to your House" video) that looks like a lost VHS tape of an alien invasion may actually help the skeptics find something to grasp onto.