Song Review – Page 61 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Spunsugar Capture the Sugary Sweetness of Teenage Romantic Fantasies on the Self-Aware Dream Pop Single “White Sneakers”

On the surface Spunsugar’s glittery shoegaze single “White Sneakers” seems to be an offbeat love and lust song. But its melancholic tone with undercurrents of regret point to an interpretation of its unusual lyrics and imagery. Like a love song yearning for someone for whom you shouldn’t hold such feelings but earnest in its expressions though the sentiments as expressed sound like the words of someone inexperienced, naive and awkward and cast in terms that might seem unusual to anyone else but in your head they might make sense in the way of an unrequited fantasy of the kind that happen all the time in the teenage mind. And it’s that sensibility that Spunsugar captures here. Most people have had these kinds of thoughts and cinema and literature is not short on examples of people expressing that reality in all its awkwardly endearing and sometimes cringeworthy glory. In the music video the members of the band are seen walking around a rural or suburban Swedish landscape when all the green is gone and in the distance we see hints of neglected human dwellings and vehicles while the the vocalist sometimes hangs around a rusted out football goal. And there’s something very self-aware and sentimental about this aesthetic captured in an image quality like something from a camcorder recording. Like having a fondness for a place and time in spite of yourself because of how genuine the feelings are in those moments in your memory and how the reality of it isn’t as romantic as you remember for anyone else and yet it doesn’t quite matter in the living it and in the enjoying of revisiting those feelings knowing how silly it might be. Apparently the song started as a cover of “Carrie” by Europe but definitely sounuds nothing like that now minus maybe some of the synth tone but in context that is the perfect origin story for the song. Watch the video for “White Sneakers” on YouTube and follow Swedish shoegaze/dream pop band Spunsugar at the links below. The song appears on the group’s new album A Hole Forever which landed November 17, 2023 via Adrian Recordings.

Spunsugar on Facebook

Spunsugar on Instagram

Jake Minch’s “whose you are” is Like a Diary Entry Brimming With the Raw Vulnerability of Feeling in a Moment of Peak Reflective Loneliness

With mostly just an acoustic guitar and jhis voice, Jake Minch is able to pack a lot of emotional power and vulnerability to the songs from his October 20, 2023 EP how many EP. For the single “whose you are” we get a music video that looks like footage of someone documenting a time of great transition in a time of cold weather and journeys away from the places one knows best and the inevitable disruptions that occur and the necessary change of physical and social scenery and thus the nature of the emotional bonds one built with the people closest to you. The song is like a diary entry in its raw and poignant honesty and with some simple poetry it conveys impressions of connection, intimacy and the yearning for that when it’s something in the past and how confusing and painful it can be and how it can linger and still haunt a present that doesn’t seem so far to measure up and create new memories with the same depth of psychic resonance. Musically it’s reminiscent of artists like Wolf Colonel and perhaps Microphones but in a current manifestation of those creative impulses and mode of expressing those all too real feelings that strike you in a moment of peak loneliness and desolation. Watch the video for “whose you are” on YouTube and follow Jake Minch at the links below.

Jake Minch on Instagram

Alunawolf and HyperXa Infuse Hazy Hyperpop Single “Like You Hate Me” With a Sultry and Vibrant Sense of Yearning and Desire

Alunawolf worked with producer HyperXa on the sultry hyper-pop inflected single “Like You Hate Me.” The singer’s vocals sound swim in dark atmospheres shimmering with light motes of tone and swells of luminous melody as she relates hours spent yearning for her lover. The lyrics express a certain kind of tension and desire where we hear how she’s reluctant to let herself feel such a heightened level of desire for someone. And thus the lyric “Love you like you hate me” makes a certain kind of sense contrasting those feelings that for many people are two sides of the same coin of emotional intensity. And in lines like “Love you like an animal/eat you like a cannibal” we hear that base level of attraction that can take you by surprise in a way you can resist because it’s not rational or go with it. Alunawolf in this song decides to go with instinct and pleasure. HyperXa’s beats and layers of atmosphere give the song a futuristic feel like it’s from a time and place that should have come to pass had our civilization taken a different path the past few decades and a club hit for a time that should have been now in a world free of austerity. And it’s that spirit the song delivers. Fans of Dua Lipa and Charli XCX may find some of that emotional and sonic kinship here. Listen to “Like You Hate Me” on Spotify and follow Alunawolf on Instagram.

“A Fallen Angel Weeping” by Lost Ark is Like Moments Spent in a Neglected Gallery of Noise Generating Sculptures in the Dead of Night

With the soft shimmer of crystalline chimes and an enigmatic, mechanical beat and melancholic strings to usher in Lost Ark’s “A Fallen Angel Weeping,” the song feels more like a cinematic experience than one more musical. The percussive details convey a depth and distance like what you’re hearing is the sound of a gallery for sound generating sculptures with its own soundtrack so that the assembled sounds create their own complementary orchestra of noise. When the beat stops a little more than three and a half minutes into the song it’s like some essential feature has left the gallery and the sounds wind down with a descending drone, a single bell tone seeming to count down on notes on a scale and in the distance we hear a voice repeating the words “falling down” before it too disappears and later on a voice with an aspect like words put through a reverse delay signals the end of the song. In retrospect its a bit like a spooky and haunted Art of Noise song and one not attached to any particular genre of music that demands and commands attention on its own terms. Listen to “A Fallen Angel Weeping” on Spotify. The Lost Ark compilation Primus Impunctus from which the song is drawn became available on November 6, 2023.

Jack Quinn’s Expansive Ambient Song “Poppies” is the Sound of the Mind Stirring Slowly to Full Wakefulness

Jack Quinn’s ambient composition “Poppies” draws your attention immediate by evoking a sense of something mysterious yet calming coming into your consciousness perhaps unnoticed in your everyday life for some time. The crystalline piano echoes of melody hang in the cloudy drone like faint rays of sunshine through a springtime fog but experienced on a rare warm day in late winter. It sounds like something opening up in your brain after a long period of feeling like you’ve been coasting through moods of being adrift in your own life. It is the sound of a manifesting clarity found in a stretch of tranquility in a time of daily disruptions and angst. The drawn out sounds trailing into the distance and the swells of guitar meshing effortlessly through the piano is like a calm awakening. Fans of Eno’s early 80s period in particular his collaborations with avant-garde pianist Harold Budd will resonate deeply with this song. Listen to “Poppies” on Spotify and follow Jack Quinn at the links below. Look for Quinn’s new album Music For Painting due out on December 8, 2023.

Jack Quinn on Instagram

Middle Sattre Exposes and Exorcises Some of the Contradictions and Gross Hypocrisies of a Theocratic Culture on Starkly Gorgeous Ambient Folk Song “Pornography”

In titling the song “Pornography” Hunter Prueger of Middle Sattre references a couple of instances of adults sexualizing a child in the name of modesty or chastity. Setting the these stories against a backdrop of acoustic wall of sound gives it a gentle yet intense quality that conveys a sense of compassion for the victim of that kind of attention. We hear melodic drones that sit in the background and give an evolving emotional undercurrent to the music but when it combines with the horns at the end it is starkly chilling playing over the recording of a middle aged man lecturing young women about the way they dress and how it can attract unwanted attention, the sort he is giving out. It’s a haunting yet poignant telling of a small sampling of the sorts of situations Prueger saw coming up queer and Mormon. That tension informs the forthcoming Middle Sattre album Tendencies due out on February 9, 2024. Fans of Elliott Smith’s fragile and emotionally refined songwriting and Microphones’ fusion of avant-garde folk and ambient soundscapes will surely find “Pornography” fascinating as well as the rest of Tendencies. Listen to “Pornography” on Spotify and follow Middle Sattre at the links below.

Middle Sattre on Facebook

Middle Sattre on Instagram

Elena Ross’ “With You” is a Beautifully Cinematic Pop Passage Into a Dark Forest of Tragic Romance

Elena Ross begins “With You” like a walk in the forest with the sounds of birds and the sounds of twigs breaking underfoot and a brush of bell sounds. When her clear and melodious vocals come in with a spare piano figure underneath it’s like coming into a clearing and having a moment to take in a moment of absolute tranquility and the time to indulge reliving a memory, a cherished moment like a living daydream. The piano melody expands and strings enter with a touch of synth tone to lend the song a touch of heartbreak at simply having to remember a fond time with someone you love but holding onto that yearning. The song was inspired by Slavic folk fairy tales and sonically dwells in dark, haunted woods minus a sense of menace. But it does retain a sense of tragic romance and the cinematic. Listen to “With You” on Spotify and follow Elena Ross at the links below.

Elena Ross LinkTree

Elena Ross on Instagram

Elena Ross website

CATBEAR’s Lush and Romantic “Higher” is a Synthpop Song About the Virtues of Undistracted Conversation

CATBEAR’s “Higher” is inspired by a time before video calls when people only heard a voice on the other end of a phone and you only had words and your imagination in connecting with people. A time when maybe you would actually talk with friends and lovers for long periods of time late into the night discussing whatever came to mind without the distraction of visuals or the pressure to share anything. Your focus could and would be just on that moment and the undeniable emotional bond of it almost as pure as that could be. The music has a retro synthpop feel with the hazy synths and infinite horizons that matches well with the romance inherent to the song’s lyrics and concept with soulful and soothing vocals that are lush and introspective that lead you through a journey into a moment of emotional intimacy and deep affection, something that seemed more attainable decades ago and could be again if everyone involved were committed to not being on call or on demand to the social and economic forces of our current era even if only for a night or a day. CATBEAR makes that seem not only possible but inherently desirable with this song. Listen to “Higher” on Spotify and follow London synthpop duo CATBEAR at the links provided.

Bad Veins Imbues Synthpop Single “Wendy” With a Powerful Sense of Regret, Heatache and Hope

After eight years of no obvious new music issued into the world Cincinnati, Ohio-based indie-pop band Bad Veins gives us “Wendy” from its new album Imposter (released on December 1, 2023 via Dynamite Music). The visual concept of the video (as directed by Cat Rider) for song seems to be one of a man watching old VHS camcorder footage of the titular character to whom the yearning and melancholic lyrics are directed. He stands against the screen singing as the images wash over him as the memories swirl in his mind and break his heart. It sounds like the relationship was one currently on a break because our narrator had a bit of an emotional disruption. The lines “One thing I know/If I hang around/The undertow will take me down/Wendy I grow more afraid of drifting further everyday/I never meant to come undone/I never thought I’d miss someone like I miss you, Wendy” pack a lot of meaning into such a small space. The song has that kind of energy like John Waite had on his 1982 hit “Change” but the sounds are the more hazy synthpop of that era and it perfectly suits the mood of regret and hope that songwriter Benjamin Davis captures so poignantly in this song. Has the narrator ruined things in that bond forever with his mental health issues or is there a more positive resolution? Who can say but the heartache is palpable and immediate and that’s what makes the song so compelling because so many of us have been there at some point in our lives. Watch the video for “Wendy” on YouTube and follow Bad Veins at the links below.

Bad Veins on TikTok

Bad Veins on Facebook

Bad Veins on Twitter

Bad Veins on Instagram

Bad Veins on Threads

A Door Tears Into the Hypnotic Death Spiral of Algorithmic Derangement with Buzzsaw Shoegaze Song “Do You Want Me To Come In Your Feed?”

Former The Manhattan Love Suicides drummer Rachel Barker returns with a new project A Door and debut single “Do You Want Me To Come In Your Feed?” During the peak early pandemic Barker started making visual art the likes of which can be seen in the cover art for the single. Barker has a hole in her spinal cord which affects her ability to play guitar and the automatic expressionist figure work of her visual art she believes is her body’s attempt to correct her proprioception and spinal alignment. The artwork is a bit reminiscent of the work of Edvard Munch, Picasso and Chagall but very much her own style. The song is a noisy, chaotic affair with flairs of distorted atmospheres and hovering guitar shimmer like a menacing shoegaze-y post-punk song akin to the likes of her old band but not pop and much more pointed. Its lyrics are a critical and incisive examination of what might be described as a mechanization of culture and the monetization of curiosity and serendipity through the harnessing of algorithms on the internet and especially in social media to connect your supposed interests with how they can be marketed to in an overall attempt to manipulate behavior for an insidiously automated revenue stream for corporations that have no interest in or insight into what might actually peak your curiosity or spark your imagination. The refrain of “get out of my head” speaks to the uncanny yet gross and predictable “recommendations” that stem from clicking on anything or following a thread or a stream of content or doing a simple internet search using Google or other essentially data mining tools that also serve as a method of routing your path to sponsored websites. In the 80s and even early 90s the dystopian future looked maybe even a little bit desirable and in the Terminator films Skynet was a conglomeration that could be defeated. But when the dystopian future involves feedback loops that give you a massive dopamine hit for only giving attention to what you already know and already know you love or mildly like, culture can end up being one, gigantic, bland mess. And this writhing, buzzsaw melody and fracturing rhythm of the song with scathing words for the headlong slide into a bland monoculture is more of the kind of thing we should want to hear and not be so drawn to playlists that cater to background noise comfort rather than challenging or at least idiosyncratically human expressions that aren’t so easily slotted into a marketing campaign. Fans of A Place to Bury Strangers and Firefriend will find a good deal to like here. Listen to “Do You Want Me To Come In Your Feed?” on Soundcloud and connect with A Door at the links below. Maybe the band will “raid” your Twitch channel while you’re streaming Diablo IV, Black Desert Online or Baldur’s Gate 3 but probably not. They, and you, have better stuff to do.

Rachel Barker website

A Door on Instagram