There is simply no local bias anymore. It’s truly exhilarating to see exhilarating music in your region, made blocks from your house, knowing there’s an artistic enthusiasm emanating from a cult of forward-thinking youth gathering in your community. We will need that in the janky dystopia we are now descending. Being able to hunker down in a silo and start to think about the next phase of resistance, and how that looks culturally–that should be a focus.

I apologize to Golomb to project any kind of hope I have in the future onto them (an indoctrinating leftist agenda), but jeez, the art of these three people–Xenia Holmes Shuman on bass, Mickey Shuman on guitar, and Hawken Holmes on drums (plus more people, as this album becomes the Basement Tapes in the final third)—feels like an intuitive resistance that we have to nurture, support, and help expand (plus cheer live). How do I, as a Gen X who survived without brain rot, communicate to the young that the old ways were the best and the only way? To be loud? To make a difference? Or, in contrast, how does one listen to new ideas and how they want to interpret our mistakes?

Golomb certainly comes from that chaotic world. To tap into their upbringing–formidable parents making formidable art past the expiration date of “youthful” art–would be unfair. These are kids born with the Great American Songbook read to them every night, but they also found a way to rebel against that book while embracing it. These are kids who come from High Street bohemia, who were in a Stones cover band, and who played a pre-drinking game of Making the Band. How to be a band was second nature.

To be insular and find their craft in their community and then release it upon the world shows a band so confident in their dynamism that they put a reggae song (“Other Side of the Earth”) right in the center. That’s how nearly every moment of The Beat Goes On, the trio’s debut full-length, inherently feels: like an achievement of confidence. Golomb already released a series of “singles” that celebrated living in Columbus and the gauntlet the world of local stages might portend. Here, in every note, they are already ready to go.

“That’s okay, most of my songs are simple ones. Pick a chord and it plays on,” sings Shuman and Holmes. You can’t question the dynamics. Their playing is some kind of rickety machine that always works. In those simple songs, there’s space for Shuman to shred, for brother and sister, Xenia and Hawken, to lock in, a battery that goes beyond DNA. Familial synthesis and love aside, seeing these songs live is living, at least for now. Within these simple structures, they can swing, drone, skronk, shoegaze, and rip most of all.

“Staring,” a song the power-trio has pinpointed as one more theirs than most, hits that nerve. I’m unsure what it must have been like to ingest that first Dinosaur Jr. record (probably fulfilling and goosebump-inducing), but this too has that germ-like impact on first contact. Meanwhile, “Play Music” and “The Sad Song” are titles obvious beyond irony. That’s the primitive attraction to them as well.

They have songs above board, especially for any group mining the past. But they’re also a blank sheet, a tabula rasa that comes from the mid-80s Our Band Could Be Your Life revolt: the Meat Puppets (Shuman shreds like a Kirkwood), Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth (when they were cool). Still, the trio’s simultaneous resistance to anything simulating cool is, well, cool. A universal truth.

I’m unsure of what “cool” is in 2025 (it’s a slippery slope), but again, that song, “Play Music,” flits in very, very, close to cliché. Still, other guitars intercept, a horn invades, Shuman mutilates his strings for extra drama, and it transcends whatever “cool” could be. Really, just vibes. Now, that’s all that really matters.