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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The music box sound introduction to Tashi Delay’s “Blue” is a recurring device like a companion to the main rhythm line running through the song and one that introduces a whimsical element in a song about how one processes trauma. Sometimes the event hits you and you spend some moments trying to figure out how it could happen. Those music box tones are like those moments. The rest of the song has some crunch to it and a loping, menacing yet sinuous bass line and in the music video Emily Seabroke looks slightly shell shocked with a blue light partially washing out her image as her vocals follow the melodic line up and down her wide register. The image then fragments into crystalline chunks that fall way as all the sounds converge and a bluesy and noisy guitar solo burns through and fades giving way to an introspective outro that suggests that even if you overcome this immediate trauma response the mind has a way of submerging that pain only to return at a later date when you may or may not be ready to take it on from some emotional distance. Watch the video for “Blue” on YouTube and follow Tashi Delay at the links provided. Tashi Delay’s self-titled debut album became available on November 10, 2023 on Spotify.
London-based post-punk band Beige Banquet is set to release its debut album in 2024 as a full band and its first recorded in a studio to capture its full live forcefulness and sonics beyond the limitations of the bedroom recordings of its earlier releases. The first single of the album is the frenetic and headlong “Animals.” The song creates a powerful emotional resonance with its propulsive bass line and urgent, noisy, searing guitar shimmer, splayed and finely accented drums with Tom Brierley’s vocal lines as descriptive statements about how at our base all humans are animals that respond to environmental pressures and stimuli in a similar fashion especially under pressure and in a state of stress and discomfort. Fans of the more discordant end of shame and the angular side of JOHN (TIMES TWO) will likely find some musical spiritual kindred here. Listen to “Animals” on Spotify and follow Beige Banquet at the links below.
Church Chords’ forthcoming album elvis, he was Schlager (out February 26, 2024 on Otherly Love Records) sounds like an ambitious, experimental post-punk album years in the making with numerous collaborators that songwriter and producer Stephen Buono brought together after the manner of a hip-hop producer. And you get a taste of what’s in store with the single “Recent Mineral” with the quietly sultry vocals of Genevieve Artadi who sings in Portuguese. What are the lyrics about? Might have to ask someone that understands the language or wait for the full release of the record. But you don’t need to know in order to really be taken in by the finely accented percussion and hypnotic arrangements of texture tones, slashes of echoing, stretching, warping guitar altogether reminiscent of Young Marble Giants, Faust and an abstract Bossa Nova band mixing it up to make a song that is entrancing and mysterious and you wouldn’t think overmuch about if it was in a movie like something Jim Jarmusch or Sofia Coppola would produce.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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