SubmitHub – Page 77 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Consumer Culture’s Unhinged, Psychedelic Noise Rock Ripper “Knives” is a Caustic Fusion of Psychedelia and Straightedge

Consumer Culture packs a lot of vitriol and thrilling ill will into one minute, twelve seconds run time of “Knives.” The grinding, noisy sounds could just as well be a modern hardcore song but there’s something more frayed around the edges and unhinged and the spooky, spectral synth that haunts the last third of the song. It seethes and pulses with an insistence and the lyrics are so psychotically nihilistic it is borderline in the realm of a Brainbombs song if the latter was more into straightedge hardcore. This is a quality one hears across the concise mayhem of the rest of Consumer Culture’s latest album The Future is A Pile of Bodies (released on July 21, 2023 on The Ghost is Clear Records). It’s just too weird to be hardcore and too punk to be some experimental psychedelic rock band. Think something like Flipper sped up and edited to the bare essentials. Listen to “Knives” on Spotify and follow Consumer Culture from Baltimore at the links below.

Consumer Culture on Facebook

Consumer Culture on Instagram

Consumer Culture on Bandcamp

Springworks’ Psychedelic Folk Song “Rest Stop Painter” is an Exploration of the Sights and Sounds That Anchor Our Memories and Resonate Through Time

Springworks paired a collage of old educational videos with a song that sounds like it was written in another era in crafting “Rest Stop Painter.” The song is about images we might run into in passing in traveling in our youth or adulthood that resonate strongly with us for whatever reasons might anchor those visuals in our memory. Maybe it’s a bit of architecture, or a work of public art or merely a setting that in whatever alchemy of happenstance forms a picture that stays with you. It is these sorts of memories whether visual, in sound or through other senses that help to form our cognitive framework and the ways in which we respond to the world around us. These are the points of stimuli that are the anchors to the flow of information that makes up reality as we know it. The song itself is somewhere betwixt lo-fi psychedelic folk and outsider indiepop with minimal percussion, what sounds like melodica, synth, gently processed guitar and spare yet expressive vocals that clearly have a touch of production on them as well. And there is a quality to the song that sounds familiar and as mentioned before it has an aspect that is reminiscent of an earlier period in pop music development precisely because the lo-fi aesthetic is so well executed it draws across decades with stylistic touchstones much like the imagery in the video and the lyrics that anchor the song in the lived experience of being drawn to the points of memory that endure with us the most. Watch the video for “Rest Stop Painter” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.

Springworks on Facebook

Springworks on Twitter

Springworks on Instagram

springworks.com

Phosphone’s Dark Dream Pop Single “Black Sheep” is a Song About Shedding Bad Habits of Being

There is a delicate urgency that drives Phosphene’s “Black Sheep.” Guitar and percussion keep the melody and rhythm lean and spacious as Rachel Frankel sings in warm yet melancholic tones a story of almost folkloric dimensions of shame and oppression and in the end a memory of a moment of escaping from that dynamic or situation born of a legacy of familial and cultural indoctrination and/or resulting internalized behaviors. The song hits like folk-inflected, dark dream pop and its clear lines of melody shimmer in moments with the energy of shaking off a momentary chill or the echoes of bad habits coming to haunt your present. When the instrumentation of the song interact like weather phenomena across the song it brings a physicality to a song in a style that might otherwise feel as ethereal as it generates a lightly bracing mood. Watch the evocative black and white video for “Black Sheep” on YouTube and follow the Portland, Oregon-based band at the links below. Phosphene’s new album Transmute releases on September 15, 2023.

Phosphone on Facebook

Phosphone on Bandcamp

Phosphone on Instagram

BOWIE’s Synth Pop Single “Good All On My Own” is a Triumphant Examination of Self-Discovery

BOWIE’s video for “Good All On My Own” charts an inner narrative most people can relate to with all the stories and identities you’re conditioned and to which you’re socially rewarded to conform—at least as well as you can—and you do until you get to a place in life when you become comfortable with who you are and who you’ve wanted to be or who you’ve become aside from all the layers of adjustment that had nothing to do with living as a good person but more arbitrary standards of culture that develop and become the expected norm even if it doesn’t make sense for everyone. In the video we see BOWIE covered in green grime that gets “washed off” and she gets dressed up in a pink, “girly” outfit and sits there looking really unimpressed by the transformation. And at the climax of the song she gets back into the grey-green “filth” of one’s genuine self but is really the self one comes to recognize as perfectly acceptable and a rejection of imposed, superficial personality traits as signified by a standardized image that is intended to convey identity. It is a journey for self-discovery of the authentic self and throwing off what one has learned that don’t seem to suit you. The video is like an experimental film. But the song is a finely syncopated bit of uplifting synth pop driven by BOWIE’s wide-ranging vocals and heartfelt melodies and by the end of the song accompanied by a bombastic horn section and screaming guitar to drive the message of self-validation home. Watch the video for “Good All On My Own” on YouTube and follow BOWIE at the links provided. BOWIE’s The Right Way Up EP releases September 2023.

BOWIE on TikTok

BOWIE on Facebook

BOWIE on Instagram

Lo Artiz Pokes Some Lighthearted Fun at Our Dysfunctional Ways of Coping With a World on the Brink With the Neo-Soul Single “the last of us”

Lo Artiz leans heavy into her neo-soul sound on “the last of us.” The nuanced accents on the beat give it a different feel than a lot of music in the realm of R&B these days in that they’re solid and anchor the song into a strong groove. The singer’s voice is playful and sultry in delivering words about ways many of us cope with this sense of impending doom that seems to hang over the world for anyone actually paying attention and sensitive to the forces that much of the power centers of our civilization have been able to ignore because wealth has shielded them from the worst consequences but now it’s just inescapable. So who can blame people for taking not the healthiest choices in offsetting the ambient despair through self-medication, not always the most ideal sexual experiences but something to take our minds off how real things have been and the various ways we plug ourselves into the lives of others whether they’re people we know or celebrities who may or may not deserve our attention. Lo Artiz pokes fun at these impulses in the song while acknowledging sometimes we humans don’t always know a better way of dealing with life unvarnished and without filters. Listen to “the last of us” on Spotify and follow Lo Artiz at the links below. Look out for her sophomore album out September 2023.

Lo Artiz on Instagram

loartiz.com

The Title Track to Sleepy Gonzalez’s Mercy Kill EP is Soulful Dream Pop Song About Letting Go

Sleepy Gonzalez, photo courtesy the artists

The title track to Sleepy Gonzalez’s Mercy Kill EP concludes that June 30, 2023 release on a note of closure. From the beginning of the song and its atmospheric, orchestral arrangements the male and female vocals in tandem seem to be bidding goodbye to a chapter in life, maybe a time of struggle that felt for a long time like something you had to do endure or get through to get where you thought you wanted to be. But when you get there it’s rarely what you’ve made it out to be in your head but at least it gave you a direction to go instead of being lost with nothing to strive toward. Whether that be a place in life, a point in one’s career or in one’s creative pursuits, a relationship or all of it and more. The whole EP has more than mere undercurrents of melancholic feeling but “Mercy Kill” itself seems to tie up the loose threads of one’s life in one particular passage of it in a way that makes it feel easy to let go of what no longer serves your life. Each song of the EP seems like an exploration of some facet of those themes but its outro song is like listening to the musical equivalent of watching the end credits of an existential indie film and Christian and Ally from the band have an emotive harmonization that is reminiscent in moments like what one hears between John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, more readily apparent in earlier tracks of the EP, but here too when the shoegaze and dream pop instincts dissolve some and a touch of soulful jazz flavor sweeps through to give it an aspect of late not ponderings and because of that it hits a satisfying spot in the mind and of letting channels of anxiety and pain go in a way gentle and organic. Listen to “Mercy Kill” the song and the EP on Spotify and follow the Vancouver, British Columbia-based band at the links below.

Sleepy Gonzalez on Facebook

Sleepy Gonzalez on Bandcamp

Sleepy Gonzalez on Instagram

sleepyfuckinggonzalez.com

Qozy’s Deconstructed and Distended Lo-Fi Indiepop Song “Pieces” has the Sound of Acceptance of Uncertainty

Qozy sounds like he’s deconstructed and distended the elements of a lo-fi indiepop song on “Pieces.” There is a repeating guitar figure that sometimes echoes slightly in chords while a bass line that sounds like it’s on the verge of melting holds a kind of rhythm alongside the minimal percussion. The vocals sound like existential poetry written in a state of disorientation and unmoored from standard reality. Yet it also seems to be the description of a simple path out of that headspace. “Forgotten where to go/Take the way you best know/Losing form/Piece it all back up.” What does this mean? It matters less in the precision of literal meaning than the cadence of the words and how it all fits in with this beautifully unusual song.As the song progresses toward the end the tones and rhythms seem to unravel and go in their own directions like the tenuous grasp of form that seems to be the central struggle of the song has resolved in dissolution. Fans of vintage 2000s Siltbreeze bands or 90s lo-fi home recorded pop and its 2000s descendants will appreciate this song and the rest of Qozy’s 2023 EP Sleep Over which dropped June 17, 2023. Listen to “Pieces” on Spotify and follow Qozy at the links below.

Qozy on YouTube

Qozy on Bandcamp

Qozy on Instagram

Paul Cousins’ Process Video for “Broken Patches of Sky” Reveals the Method of Crafting its Analog Ambient Tranquility While Preserving Its Mysterious Resonance

Paul Cousins used reel-to-reel machines, tape loops, speed alterations, random assembly and frippertronics in recording and manipulating the music that became “Broken Patches of Sky” (from the artist’s debut album Vanishing Artefacts which released on April 14, 2023 on digital and bone white vinyl). The process video demonstrates a bit of this level of craft alongside pastoral footage and snippets of lead cells of film and what looks like educational and industrial cinema of a bygone era. Cousins left in the tape hiss to give the track a sense of texture to ground the introspective and echoing melody, the sounds of tape speeding up and slowing down to suggest organic transitions and the hint of percussive artifacts from piano and/or struck, prepared guitar before being put through processing to give those notes a lingering and streaming aspect. Overall it’s like using older technology to simulate what some now might do with full digital technology and sampling and putting that extra effort in gives the song a mysterious resonance that keeps your attention to its minimalist composition like a soundtrack to a dream following a deep session of meditation. Fans of early 80s Eno forays into outer and inner space will appreciate the vibe here. Watch the video for “Broken Patches of Sky” on YouTube and follow Paul Cousins at the links below.

Paul Cousins on Facebook

Paul Cousins on Twitter

Paul Cousins on Instagram

paulcousinsmusic.com

Paul Cousins on Bandcamp

Baleen’s Spirited Shoegaze Track “Ocean Hue” is Like an Exhilarating Trip Out to Sea on a Sunny Day

“Ocean Hue” begins with an ambient tranquility of floating and sparkling motes of sound before Baleen ramps the song into high gear with whirling guitar fuzz. The male and female vocals in ethereal tandem float on the soaring guitar melody and steady yet expressive percussion. The warping and winding dynamic of the song and its cool swirls of tone and the exuberant energy of the song embody a trip on the ocean on a sunny day coasting the waves at high speed. There is an exhilarating quality to the song that the band sustains until the very end when the sounds recede into the tranquil depths and warp out of tune in a wonderfully disorienting fashion. Listen to “Ocean Hue” on Spotify.

Skycabin’s Soul-infused Downtempo R&B Single “Somnia” Articulates a Deep and Hopefuly Yearning to Wake Up From the Collective Human Nightmare

“Somnia” is the culminating moment in Skycabin’s “waterfall series.” The single is steeped in the sounds of soul and R&B, with a commanding performance from acclaimed singer Denise Stewart, as well as 90s downtempo. The song has a defiant and striving tone but the lyrics are brimming with expressions of anxiety that most people living in the world and paying attention might feel themselves. And the chorus of “I’m living in a bad dream” has a hint that all of this chaos, conflict, static and desperate challenges feel like a moment in time that has been building for decades and longer from which we might find ourselves free if there was a collective shift in consciousness, a waking up, from outmoded and unproductive ways of thinking and being. For several years now it seems as though unfortunate and nightmarish events have been transpiring at an accelerating pace and it leaves little time for recovery so maybe you dissociate a little to survive the day but with the impending sense of what could come next. The song and its AI generated, Afro-futurist imagery suggests a hope against hope and a will to get through this period and shake off the collective human nightmare. One can only hope. Watch the video for “Somnia” on YouTube and follow Skycabin at the links provided.

Skycabin on Facebook

Skycabin on Instagram