Speedbooth - Yammals

The first of two cassettes on Cost of Living this week comes from Speedbooth, the solo project of Spillage Fete co-founder/Bons contributor, Kevin Cormack and his first work since the debut cassette in 2019. Other than for distribution reasons, I can't explain why this is on CoL and not SF, since Yammals displays nearly all of the winning characteristics you might understand as typical of the Spillage universe. Folk-derived odd pop pastoralism that displays a good smattering of the Weird, the Eerie, the intimate and the inverted. A range of guitar digressions and figures rub shoulders with less expected musicbox styled sounds, off-kilter keys and clinking electronics - the things we love and can't quite know. The first signs of such oddity are in that band name and title - what is a Speedbooth? What are Yammals? You kinda get a sense of their meaning by the suggestion of their phonetics, and yet something hangs a little implacably out of reach, their essence strong, their form not quite discernible, off-centred. Like with the name of the label Cormack helps operate, the sense is of another world outside/inside/aside of our own: the upside down, the hidden reverse, a synecdoche, where there's nothing as uncommon as this folk.