Slipped Through the Cracks 2023 - The Dog Indiana & Test Card

In lieu of our usual Friday Quick Picks column, this week, we’re highlighting a couple releases that Slipped Through the Cracks in 2023. This week, Harman Burns writes about albums from The Dog Indiana and Test Card.

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The Dog Indiana

Burnt Ends // Self-Released

Last April, Victoria’s finest purveyors of churning grunge rock The Dog Indiana sledgehammered our ears with their fiery album Burnt Ends, an apocalyptic excursion through no-wave, hardcore, noise rock, and heavy psych. The album has all the ingredients of a Dog Indiana release— massive drums, crushing guitars, primordial rhythms, acid-laced interludes, hoarse vocals— cranked up 500%. The album features bona fide facemelters like “Loaf,” “Natural Law,” and my personal favorite, “The Hanged Man,” whose scorched guitars blaze blackened trails across desolate landscapes, bringing to mind early Swans albums. It’s a brutal, cynical delight— and fun for the whole family!

Test Card

Channels // Self-Released

Lee Nicholson’s work over the past seven years as Test Card has been many things— exploratory, contemplative, melancholy, playful— but it is always enchanting, and deeply soothing. With his fifth album Channels, released last April, Nicholson has managed to strike an immaculate balance, presenting us with an auditory feast that sizzles and jumps with teeming life and prismatic colors, while maintaining a perfectly dialed cruising tempo that allows the music to glide among your thoughts while out for a walk, crocheting a scarf, doing the dishes.

For me, it’s music for the spirit; it's enriching, a kind of sonic brainfood. Nicholson infuses the music with what seem to me to be the sensibilities of a poet. Tracks like “Still The Field Is A Pleasure Pasture And Space So Softly Was” manage to coast between nostalgia and revelation, looking backwards and forwards at once; something is being transmitted. Listen close, and fill your cup: Channels will not leave you hungry.

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