(2023) Bong Wish - Hazy Road      


Review:
Hazy Road is the debut album from Bong Wish, the solo project of Palestinian-American artist Mariam Saleh. Former bassist for beloved garage rock band Fat Creeps, Saleh got her start in the Boston music scene of the early 2010s. While living above a music venue, where she was also employed, she was exposed to a myriad of jazz, psych, and experimental music. In turn, Bong Wish incorporates both the high-energy and distortion of garage alongside kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and folds them into its folk rock sensibility. When we last heard from Saleh’s Bong Wish project, it was 2017 and she had just released a perfectly formed self-titled EP on the dearly departed Beyond Beyond is Beyond label that sounded like Jefferson Airplane doing Fairport Convention doing Jefferson Airplane — and it was just as awesome as you’d imagine. Saleh doesn’t disappoint on Bong Wish’s long-awaited full-length, Hazy Road, a homebrewed psychedelic fantasia that’s equal parts cheerful jangle rock (check out how the title track delicately shatters into a Grateful Dead-esque cascade of noodly guitar notes), meditative dark folk (“Breeding Evil”), and dreamy psych-pop with delightfully obtuse lyrics (“Shapes”). This isn’t difficult music, but it’s not supposed to be and the joke’s squarely on you if you think otherwise — Saleh called her band Bong Wish, after all. — daily.bandcamp.com




Track List:
01 - Ronnie
02 - Shapes
03 - Hazy Road
04 - Breeding Evil
05 - Can You Relate
06 - Dreaming of Switzerland
07 - Moon for You
08 - Witches
09 - I Can Feel


Media Report:
Genre: folk-rock, indie-pop
Country: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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