Tracklisting:

1) Evening Loving – Jenny Gillespie
2) Luxury – Patio
3) Low – Yours Are The Only Ears
4) Either Way – Sorority Noise
5) Home at Last – The Sports
6) Braver – Sally Fowler
7) Chow Chow – FAYE
8) Meant – Spartan Jet-Plex
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) October – These Bashful Claws
11) Bad Vibrations – Naps
12) Baked Goods – Young Jesus
13) Heroine – BB Cream
14) Winona Death Ryder – Boy Problems (No Dice Tapes comp)
15) The Only Other Girl From Back Home – Advance Base
16) When it Feels – Soft Spell (STAY RAD SAV comp)
17) The Unnatural – Claire Cronin
18) Same Old Ocean – Crabapple
19) Diet Coke – Lake Michigan
20) Ferris Beuller – Flatsound
21) See Good – Jobless
22) Anything but Yourself – Tom Greenwood
23) Under the Mountain II – Mermaidens
24) Liars – Gregory Alan Isakov
25) Warning Sign – Mikko Joensuu
26) Candy – Fish Food
27) White Gold – Good Good Blood
28) We Bury Our Dead Alive – Coping Skills
29) Joke/Rope – Haybaby
30) Slacker – Will B & the Teen Creeps
31) Double Bacon Cheeseburger – Yikes
32) All I Have – Derek Ted
33) Try Hard – Hovvdy
34) Dark & Gloomy – Horse Teeth
35) Migratory Birds – Western Skies Motel
36) Endless Wave – Hanging Valleys

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The songs here are heavy and brooding, Mermaidens dabbling in the darker edges of psychedelica to produce tracks which twitch and throb with something almost malevolent in nature. ‘Under the Mountain II’ is a perfect example, loud and massive, rumbling on with the momentum of a dark prophecy. There’s a shamanistic quality to the song too, the lyrics packed with loaded imagery from the natural world, esoteric symbols from which some great energy can be unlocked or governed.

“I don’t want to die in the shade
I’m a corpse on the beach
I’m a corpse on the beach
I’m a thing,
send me out to sea”

Other highlights include the title track, a song sparser in nature for all of two minutes before the drums accelerate into a fine groove, ‘Cold Skin’, with its bewitchingly off-kilter instrumentation and reptilian persona (“Let me fold around you / Taste your skin”), and the sleek ‘Wander’, a song which glides forward with grace and old world oddness. The record closes with ‘Splinter’, a song reminiscent of the intuitive mysticism of Todd Umhoefer’s Old Earth, where something both ominous and alluring bubbles under the surface, daring you to submit to its charm.

You can buy Undergrowth now from the Mermaidens Bandcamp page.

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