Song Post – Page 8 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Fast Romantics Invoke a Sense of Lucid Dreaming and Parallel Existences on Exuberant Dream Pop Single “Smoke + Lightning”

Fast Romantics, photo courtesy the artist

Fast Romantics tap into the logic of dreams for its single “Smoke + Lightning.” Kirty’s ethereal vocals relay imagery and ideas that bring together words from something you might dream and half-remembered ideas upon waking but makes it work with the rush of bright melodies and the exuberant sounds of the song. It’s an entrancing reconciliation of experiences that seem impossible to know at once like mystical concepts placed in a pop song such as the transcendence of death and immortality, living parallel existences at once and the image of “dreaming in smoke + lightning.” The contrasts of conceptualization Fast Romantics make work in the context of a song that is uplifting and bright but about headier concepts that might seem dark and bizarre when presented another way. It lends the song an unexpected depth that invites multiple interpretations in the re-listening. Watch the video for “Smoke + Lightning” on YouTube and follow the Canadian band Fast Romantics at the links provided. Fast Romantics’ new album Happiness + Euphoria dropped September 29, 2023 via Postwar Records.

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Ways of Seeing Offers Us All a Strategy for Managing the Hovering, Ambient Anxiety of Modern Life on Chillwave Funk Song “Hasn’t Happened Yet”

Ways of Seeing, photo courtesy the artist

Ways of Seeing’s “Hasn’t Happened Yet” sounds like something from another era that had to have been produced in the current era. The style is reminiscent of later era Roxy Music with the hazy synth melodies and the kind of New Wave funk Duran Duran indulged toward the middle of the 80s. The song sounds like it was recorded in a cavernous space with the tones trailing off into infinity with James O’Donnell’s soulful vocals offering observations about the ambient anxieties that seem to be a feature of modern life. But rather than being penned in by these fears and emotional urgency out of the blue, O’Donnell tries to place the sources of these anxieties in their proper context and identifying them and thus giving them a form instead of an amorphous mass of overwhelming emotion. And setting it all to a dance beat that grounds those experiences. Thus though the song is about all of those feelings that can plague us suddenly and catch us unawares it is also about a strategy for managing anxiety even if we’re right to be concerned about the ultimate source of many of them. There has been so much cause to reasonably expect the worst in recent years but O’Donnell spells it out in the title of the song and to hold on to that idea when we might be drowning in anxiety. Listen to “Hasn’t Happened Yet” on Spotify and follow Ways of Seeing at the links below.

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“Hailey Moon” is moondaddy’s Lush and Vulnerable Dream Pop Song of Overcoming Personal Trauma

There’s something deeply mysterious about the way Cara Potiker arranges the layers of evocative atmospheres across her new album Poet Lies. Take for example the lead single “Hailey Moon.” Without overtly hazy elements the synths flow effortlessly together to enshroud her sultry vocals in a dreamlike resonance. Slowly rising and falling drones and sparkling synth blossoming and fading over a steady beat that never seems to direct the pace but marks the time. All while Potiker seems to sing about tentatively opening up to someone in spite of one’s own flaws and weaknesses that one has had to harbor from other people for an extended period of time and how even exposing these things to anyone outside of your own head can be perilous because many if not most people lack the sensitivity and grace to respect vulnerability and trauma in a productive manner. But in this song Potiker appears to acknowledge that those “scars” and fears that one might think one has hidden from other people can be challenging or impossible to completely conceal and that maybe it might be better to operate knowing that to be the case and accept the possibility and perhaps inevitability of being hurt and even to be understood but that taking that risk might be the first step in getting to a place of greater personal strength. The gorgeous and cool luminosity of the composition of this song places it in the realm of shoegaze and dream pop but also emotionally in those psychic spaces that Julee Cruise expressed so well in her own dark pop confections of regret, resignation, despair and hope. Listen to “Hailey Moon” on YouTube and follow moondaddy at the links below. Poet Lies released via Volar Records on August 18, 2023.

moondaddy on Instagram

Precocious Neophyte Take You on a Journey to the Lights of Nighttime Chicago on the Soaringly Psychedelic Shoegaze Single “My Electronic Idol”

Precocious Neophyte, photo courtesy the artists

Graveface Records remastered Precocious Neophyte’s 2022 album Home in the Desert for a vinyl release and the first single from that reissue is “My Electronic Idol.” The new music video is like a layers of hazy and washed out and then enhanced colors with cityscapes over the band performing in what looks like an abandoned office. Musically its swirling guitar and wailing melodies flowing around ethereal yet intimate vocals are simultaneously soothing and exuberant. Like the songs had a root in being written for a more quiet musical style but translated into complementary soaring passages of sound that get into your head and transport your brain to a better place. Though the recording has the virtue of having a sound like a bedroom production but one imagines this music live having a colossal flood of mind-bending frequencies that don’t sound blunted on the recording so much as cast in a way that a home listening environment can handle. Watch the video for “My Electronic Idol” on YouTube and follow the Chicago-based Precocious Neophyte at the links below.

Precocious Neophyte on Bandcamp

Precocious Neophyte on Instagram

Joseph Shabason Pairs His Cosmic IDM Jazz With Elegant and Graceful Skating Footage on the Video For “Jamie Thomas”

Joseph Shabason, photo courtesy the artist

Joseph Shabason’s new album Welcome to Hell (released on October 20 via Western Vinyl/Telephone Explosion Records) is a tribute to and reinterpretation of the 1996 skate video from Toy Machine that propelled skaterboarders Mike Maldonado, Elissa Steamer, Brian Anderson and others including Jamie Thomas. In the video for the song named after Thomas we hear the intricate rhythms and dusky atmospheric melodies, wordless voices and lush vibraphone setting a mood like a cosmic after hours jazz session in an IDM mode. It has a cool elegance that pairs well with Thomas’ own series of navigating stair rails, streets and other environs by day and night seemingly able to make those landings with relative ease but not without the element of danger inherent to the sport and the wide variety of landscapes we see Thomas make look like no big deal, no sweat. Many people got introduced to great, cutting edge music through skating culture and skating videos from the 1970s onward and this is an example of that tradition but with not the traditional forms of music often associated with the culture. Watch the video for “Jamie Thomas” on YouTube and follow Joseph Shabason at the links below.

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Swan Hill Navigates Nostalgia and Not Living in the Past on the Exuberant Fuzz Pop Single “Rosebud”

Swan Hill from Swansea, Wales, UK tap into a period of music that will remind you of what might be called “classic alternative rock” at this point in the exuberant drive of “Rosebud.” As the title suggests, assuming its something of a reference in some way to Citizen Kane, its a song about the sometimes crushing weight of regret when combined with nostalgia and how one’s own life and the world can pass you by so quickly in the living it can crash into your brain in near panic attack inducing waves of despair at the time you might feel like you’ve been wasting at doing what? The opening of the song and the way the more quiet opening riff gives way to a more urgent, fuzzy, guitar melody is reminiscent of something The Who might have done. But the rest of the song hits more like “Can’t Hardly Wait” or a particularly upbeat Dinosaur Jr song. The lyrics about “hundreds of old scratched copies of Otis Redding ‘s Blue, TV dinners cold, I get we’re getting old” conjures a specific time and place of life when maybe you had all the time and spare money to indulge a romanticized view of going to thrift shops in search of lost and neglected gems in the record section and eating quick meals on the cheap and not thinking about the future overmuch until it the time catches up to you. And what all of us think of fondly back with the lens of nostalgia eventually does catch up with us but so long as we can embrace what we cherished as having a value tied to a certain time in our lives maybe we can try not to live a lot in the past. “Rosebud” embodies and celebrates that moment of awareness and the navigation of memory, feeling and living in the present in a way that also feels vital. Listen to “Rosebud” on Spotify and follow Swan Hill at the links provided.

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Nikodimos’ “Driftwood” is a Dreamlike Journey to Soothe a Devastated Psyche

The melting, drifting rhythm at the beginning of Nikodimos’ “Driftwood” and the way it progresses organically and seemingly intuitively with the off beat emphasized gives the whole song a mysterious and dreamlike quality. Like the ghost of J Dilla stepping in to guide the structure and flow of a more ambient Flying Lotus song. The vocals all sit behind the percussion seemingly commenting on a relationship that one suddenly realizes has never been rooted in a mutually beneficial association but rather in which you can be discarded once your immediate usefulness has passed. The unmooring feeling of that flash of insight that casts you adrift in your heart and mind and free floating in a morass of confused emotion until your find your footing once again. The song captures that feeling so accurately it is vivid and striking in its informal structure and shifting tonal arrangements. Fans of the aforementioned artists and the retrofuturist dub of Gonjasufi will appreciate Nikodimos’ willingness to go off standard musical devices here. Listen to “Driftwood” on Spotify where you can also listen to the rest of the new Nikodimos album What Colour is the End? which released on October 26, 2023 via Berlin-based label XYZ123.

Nikodimos on TikTok

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Nighdrator’s Epic and Stirring Heavy Shoegaze Song “Frigid” Embodies the Storm of Contrasting Personality Types

Just in time for the cold to begin setting in with some bite and force is Nighdrator’s single “Frigid.” It’s sets a steady pace with the flooding distortion on the guitar wailing and floating like a bleak, icy, windswept landscape accented by the percussion and low end, the bass droning like mysterious and menacing rumblings in the distance. All while the vocals keep a sense of warmth and feeling in a song that seems to be about someone who is incapable of emotionally giving in a regular, human way even when you extend yourself to them whether that is the product of trauma or social conditioning the epic dynamics of the song embody an intensity of emotion when contrasting personality types come together. Fans of the more ethereal end of doom metal or the heavier end of shoegaze will appreciate the hybrid of styles Nighdrator brings to this song and its output thus far. Listen to “Frigid” on Spotify and connect with Nighdrator at the links provided.

Nighdrator on TikTok

Nighdrator on Bandcamp

Nighdrator on Instagram

“My Head” is Soft Punch’s Indie Power Pop Song About the Will to Push Past Everyday Anxieties and Frustrations

“My Head” by Soft Punch sounds a little like an indie rock update of New Wave power pop and XTC. It has those attentions to detail and uplifting melody with lyrics about a seemingly never-ending struggle with a bevy of things to get through the day. And in the end the song goes off the rails into triumphant and gloriously chaotic noise to burn out the anxieties and frustrations outlined in the song. Singer and songwriter Rye Thomas is based in Washington, D.C. and he’s no stranger to overcoming seemingly impossible barriers to a normal life. In 2013 he acquired a mysterious, debilitating illness that left him home bound as someone who was already an active musician (touring in bands like Pash and Tereu Tereu) but for whom then many sounds triggered severe migraines. But he didn’t stop writing music even if that meant 30 minutes a day with just a minimal keyboard and a cassette recorder to capture his song ideas that when his health improved some he was able to hone into a fine body of work which can be heard on his album Above Water which released on Bad Friend Records on September 15, 2023. Watch the video for “My Head” directed by Jonathan Howard on YouTube and follow Soft Punch at the links below.

Soft Punch on Facebook

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Metro Riders’ “Aenigma,” Inspired by Lucio Fulci’s Film of the Same Name, Resonates With a Darkly Enigmatic Menace

Metro Riders’ “Aenigma” was inspired by Lucio Fulci’s 1988 horror film of the same name. And in the video we see a chain of gossip in a classroom at the boarding school where the film was set. Which fits track that has a clandestine feel, one might say it has a mood of late night contemplation and after dusk secret adventures. There is a slow oscillating melody over a pulsing low end drone and minimalist percussive tone holding an informal rhythm. But it maintains a deep sense of mystery and when the flourish of other keyboard sounds come in it feels like other secrets are unveiled even though we know nothing of the exact thoughts going into the track’s composition, it just imparts the emotional resonance of traveling further into an alluring mystery that might go tragically but not without a certain dark fascination with a tantalizing enigma. Watch the video for “Aenigma” on YouTube and follow Metro Riders at the links below. The new Metro Riders album Lost in Reality became available on September 29, 2023.