SubmitHub – Page 71 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Great Northern’s Darkwave/Dream Pop Single “Bad Light” is a Song About Shedding Outmoded Habits and Stepping Into What Comes Next

Great Northern, photo courtesy the artists

In naming “Bad Light,” Great Northern says it refers to how “bad light” is when “the light is shown on something you don’t want to see. You’re exposed & there’s no going back. It’s all the ways we turn ourselves inside out to avoid change.” The song itself is a bit like a breakup song with our old selves and our old ways of being and a farewell to our habits that no longer serve our lives. The pulsing synths and soaring drones over the soulful yet introspective vocals sound like an easing of this journey. The progression from a more tranquil mood into one more impassioned as the song progresses is like the struggle with shaking off who we’ve been holding onto so much like it really is us and not a collection of behaviors we thought defined us. But in the end we hear a peaceful acceptance of the necessary change. Fans of Chromatics and Tamaryn will appreciate the emotional tenor and tonal inflections of this song and the new chapter of Great Northern who stepped away from the project in 2015 and returned with an even more creatively realized set of new material. Listen to “Bad Light” on YouTube and follow Great Northern at the links below.

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Joh Chase Shows Us How to Experience Joy in the Acceptance in the Impermanence of All Things and the Thrill of Genuine Connection on “Risking It With You”

Joh Chase poignantly expresses a deep appreciation for the impermanence of so many things in our lives in the spare composition of “Risking It With You.” In emotionally raw and vulnerable vocals and minimal, slightly distorted guitar we hear in Chase’s song the importance of being devoted to what makes our lives feel enriched by our connection with one another and the people we dare to love however long that bond lasts on either side of that connection. In the music video we see Chase looking into the camera with a variety of backgrounds seeming so serious until the end when they break into a smile as the song concludes. It is simply an arresting song about how we can’t control everything in our own lives much less that of other people and we have to be comfortable with this fact in order to live a rich existence that benefits from not being too attached to circumstances beyond our ability to predict or fully influence. But that’s one of the things that makes life feel so vital and there’s a freedom in not being too tied to what we think we need and who we think we are on our own or in partnership with anyone no matter how that partnership lasts. But the closing line of the choruses, “But something I know for sure: I’m devoted to risking it with you” honors those moments of romance and connection that you can share with someone for the duration and exult in that joy without a need for control. Watch the video for “Risking It With You” on YouTube and follow Joh Chase at the links below. Look for the new Joh Chase album in 2024 via Kill Rock Stars.

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Old Man Canyon Ponders the Virtues of Being Taken Away by Aliens From a Dysfunctional World on Downtempo Dream Pop Single “What’s Even Real Anymore”

Old Man Canyon’s song “What’s Even Real Anymore” is a song about reality and what we assume to be reality and its music video inspired by a supposed UFO sighting is a perfect visual presentation of the song. It combines computer animation with footage of actual people and a natural landscape near Kamloops, BC in the desert hills of Cache Creek. In the beginning we see two people staring into the sky from a gas covered hill when one of them is abducted by an alien or is it? The next scene is of the band’s vocalist sitting in one of those claw machines where you can, if you’re skilled and fortunate enough, retrieve a tchotchke for paying some coin for the opportunity to guide that claw into a pit of of toys, trinkets or other items. The song itself is a lush, minimal downtempo dream pop sort of affair with a cascading keyboard arpeggio and low key bass line under introspective and hazy vocals. The images switch between real imagery and those clearly animated. Even without the benefit of the visuals of the video the song shifts between heartfelt emotion and dissociative thoughts that can descend into your brain when you’re feeling overwhelmed and recovering from overstimulation and burnout. And there’s something soothing about that dynamic that in the end when we see our protagonist being abducted it might even seem like a desirable possibility to escape from our current struggles even if that means being taken away by a mysterious civilization of which we have no knowledge or frame of references. But who that has lived in this era of late capitalism hasn’t felt this stirring in the imagination? Watch the video for “What’s Even Real Anymore” on YouTube and connect with Old Man Canyon at the links provided.

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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.

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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.

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