Michael James Tapscott (middle) and Ed Askew (right), photo courtesy the artists
Michael James Tapscott brought psych folk legend Ed Askew on board for vocals for “Police Patrol the Border.” Askew’s vulnerable voice tells the tale a guy whose night seems haunted by his memories of a time of a time of conflict and perhaps of war. Askew’s voice has enough of a quaver to give the song a deeply haunting quality and emotional weight while also able to carry the melody into its melodic heights. Electric organ and synth swells alongside elegant acoustic guitar figures recall the kind of weirdo folk from the realm of music Askew helped to usher in during the late 60s and 70s. Maybe more in the vein of the likes of Comus, Mason Proffit, Pentangle, Fairport Convention. But there’s a bit of an edge with this song that feels very present and reflecting modern anxieties that echo some of those of another era. That quality lends the song a timeless quality present in the production and songwriting in the rest of Tapscott’s new EP Charlie No-Face (released December 15, 2023 on Royal Oakie Records). With contributions from members of Odawas and Sugar Candy Mountain the songs incorporates elements of lo-fi indiepop more often heard in the 2000s with an ambitious songwriting style that one might associate with late 60s art rock and folk groups including what sounds like a touch of Mellotron tones. Listen to “Police Patrol the Border” on Spotify and follow Michael James Tapscott at the links below.
The new single by loverghost “there was a hole here” is as much an abstract downtempo ambient song as existential and enigmatic, science fiction horror short. Maybe best experienced watching it in the dark and taking in its hauntingly beautiful and unusual imagery. The tones are in that saturated lo-fi production style that sounds like it was done on cassette and transferred to digital. Maybe even recorded to VHS like the visuals very well could be and then manipulated into otherworldly dimensions utilizing sources that already have great potential to convey both a tactile and human immediacy of physical space and pure emotional expression. Amid visions of animals in the dark, glitched out faces, silhouettes on a luminous backdrop and slow streaks of melody and incandescent electronic piano we hear a voice seemingly lost in reverie drift in and out of the track and as spectral as the video is you almost want to be in that blissed out emotional space disconnected from the demands of everyday life. Visually it’s reminiscent of the aesthetics of Skinamarink and perhaps even The Outwaters or Beyond the Black Rainbow but altogether it resonates with what acts like Yoga and Peaking Lights at the outer edges of its experimental soundscaping, think the more blurry boundaries of The Stargazer Lilies. But this all sounds purely electronic in its composition and its arrangements seemingly as informed by visual editing processing and techniques as those more musical. Watch the video for “there was a hole here” on YouTube.
Out of Moon’s soft rhythms and fluid melodic arrangements on “Fifteen” fit its sensitive tale of a girl coming of age and navigating family legacy. She seems to struggle with her own acting out as most teenagers tend to do in crucial moments of personal development between adolescence and adulthood trying to test the boundaries of one’s own life and working out a sense of self. She says to her father “I’m only fifteen, I’m trying out the dreams you gave me.” But he says she’s wonderful and wants to know what she’s doing because that’s what a concerned and benevolent parent does though she’s aware of how he behaved at the same age and tells him so. She also comes to terms with how she’s like her mother in various ways. In the animated music video we see set pieces of the story in a tropical location with turtles on the beach and it seems so peaceful if a touch melancholic just like the song in contrast perhaps to the family struggles depicted in the song’s narrative. One gets the sense that the song is written in retrospect and from a place of self-awareness and compassion for one’s younger self. The soulful vocals in a downtempo jazz style with expressive saxophone flourishes over the languid beats truly set a mood of reflection and personal reconciliation. Watch the video for “Fifteen” on Vimeo and follow Out of Moon at the links below.
evrshde “Fear of Falling” cover, image courtesy the artists
“Extraordinary Love” by evrshde features an electronic horn that runs through much of the song, melancholic in the middle distance. The beginning of the song has near whispered vocals for an effect like the mysterious sounds of Enigma on that 1990 debut album MCMXC a.D. But no Gregorian chants in this downtempo. The vocals quickly transition to a sound that is introspective but present in expressing features of a love that is brimming with yearning, passion and connection beyond mere attraction and consistent and enduring. The music’s layers of sensual tones and pulsing rhythms has a jazz-like quality akin to another downtempo band that first came to prominence in the 90s, Everything But The Girl. This song unites the latter’s soulful sophisti-pop with the aforementioned Enigma’s more New Age pop sound and establishes an undeniably alluring mystique. Listen to “Extraordinary Love” on Spotify and follow evrshde at the links below. The group’s 2023 album Fear of Falling dropped November 29, 2023 and is available to stream on Spotify as well.
Weathered Statues is a post-punk band from Denver whose sound is more in the deathrock vein with clear roots in punk with an edge in its overall sound. The quartet got its start in the mid-2010s when singer Jennie Mather’s previous band Cloak of Organs dissolved and she, original guitarist Jason Heller and then (and current) drummer Andrew Warner reconvened as Weathered Statues, borrowing the name from the 1982 T.S.O.L. EP. The group played its first shows by spring of 2017 and was immediately striking for not really fitting in with the ascendant darkwave scene but very much in the post-punk vein of dark tones and an exceptional rhythm section. The following year the band released its debut LP Borderlands via Finnish label Svart Records and toured Finland and Europe in the wake of that release. But within a year or two Heller dropped out of the band, Andrew Warner took a bit of a hiatus during which Clusterfux guitarist Justin Lent filled in on drums before taking over on guitar when Warner returned to the fold and syncing perfectly with Bryan Flanagan’s creative and powerful bass lines.
Since the current lineup has gelled in the last few years Weathered Statues has released the Desolation EP (2019) and played numerous shows and expanding its sound some with Mather taking on the role of keyboardist as well. The band’s music hasn’t always fit in neatly with a subscene in Denver because it isn’t a darkwave band but whose emotionally resonant songs, reminiscent of Xmal Deutschland, Christian Death and Skeletal Family, is clearly adjacent to the sounds of modern darkwave and post-punk groups but its guitar tones tend to be more robust than one often hears among many bands out of that movement and Mather’s vocals more passionate. All the members of the band have been veterans of the Denver music scene with Lent as a member of the aforementioned, long running punk outfit Clusterfux, Mather and Flanagan having been members of punk group The Nervous and Warner in numerous noteworthy rock and experimental bands over the years (including Bad Luck City, Red Cloud, Snake Rattle Rattle Snake, Dormition and currently Slim Cessna’s Auto Club) which goes some way to explaining why Weathered Statues isn’t much like its presumed peers but that storied lineage has also not instilled in the members of the band a sense of resting on its laurels or riding a trend it helped to establish. Its songwriting and commanding live shows speak to deserving that recognition on their own. Expect a new Weathered Statues album by summer or fall 2024.
Listen to our interview with Jennie Mather and Justin Lent of Weathered Statues on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below. You can catch the outfit live on Saturday, December 30, 2023 at the Hi-Dive with Moon Pussy opening for Denver Americana legends Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Thursday, February 22, 2024 at HQ with Circling Over, Summer of Peril and Mood Swing Misery.
When the pedal steel bends its streaming tones into an infinite horizon in Swimming Ignorant Fire’s “Up Yonder” it seems entirely appropriate to the title. The informal melodic lines sit in the sound of a found piano gospel tape look. The net effect that of a sepia toned film with the opacity of images switching back and forth and layered on top of one another in a seamless flow of transition with the loop taking us to the end with the pedal steel in the deep background. It’s a sustained sense of wonder and mystery at what the original context of the artifact of the tape loop might be while appreciating how the exploratory performance of pedal steel seemingly draws that piano from some ambient source of collective memory impressed upon the landscape by the psychic energies of the people that lived nearby or impressed into the original spools of magnetic tape some of their own appreciation of the moment captured minus the direct human interpretive input. It’s like a strange, offbeat, alternative science fiction story in musical form and soothing in its idiosyncratic evocation of a nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced. Listen to “Up Yonder” on Spotify and follow Swim Ignorant Fire at the links below. The album Glow released on November 3, 2023 and can be accessed at the streaming links provided.
You don’t need to see the visualizer music video for “Cleanse” to feel the full impact of its tonal bathing of he psyche. But Six Missing aka TJ Dumser provided one that looks like a drone footage of ocean waves headed to shore and processed in a way that syncs with the strands of sounds flowing and interacting in the composition. Melodic drones stream and motes of melody bloom and fade in a constantly moving yet consistent in its soothing tones and subtle textures like the ocean itself. Dissonance in the track hangs and flows until it dissolves into the harmonic flow so that the song has a therapeutic quality that takes into account the static nodes in the psyche and rather than resist them, take them in as part of a bigger picture of human experience as yet another element of life that isn’t inherently a permanent state even if we can often get stuck in pools of what can feel like negative emotion. That the song isn’t pristine in its tonalities all the way through makes it that much more effective and having the visuals of the waves breaking rather than a simple, unbroken body of water smoothly flowing puts that personal immediacy of feeling in the context of an entire life or at least a period in that life. Because of that the title of the song has a deeper meaning beyond the conventional with cleanse meaning coming to terms with the totality of life and accepting the impermanence of situations, moods and conflict. Watch the video for “Cleanse” on YouTube and follow Six Missing at the links below. The new album Here For Now was released for digital download and streaming on December 15, 2023.
“Trapped in Deluded and Helpless Loops” by South African experimental music project Khodumodumo is like an audio horror short film. In the beginning urgent, noisy sound and the sound of breathing and the sound of some object hitting another can be heard like what you would expect in a scene before the opening credits. But then that noisy sound hovers in and out in the background at varying distances in the background. We hear knocking, the scream of a small creature, more labored breathing, an out of tune stringed instrument being struck, spooky, old synths in a gleaming sound like the audio equivalent of a flickering chandelier in an ancient house. And in the end a sound like the buzzing white noise of an amp connected to a cable that has been disconnected from a guitar. The latter suggesting all we’ve heard has been part of a monstrous single instrument, a musical Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare machine. And that’s the sort of unique listening experience, all conceived with differing sound palettes, textures and emotional resonances, to be had on the Khodumodumo album What The Fuck Are You Doing This Side? which released on December 8, 2023. Listen to “Trapped in Deluded and Helpless Loops” below and give a listen to the rest of the album on Bandcamp also linked below.
Employing a classic framing of early hardcore in its lyrics for “Don’t Think Too Much,” Red Kate without needing to name a particular political orientation or movement takes down a mindset that was once too common and has become even more entrenched in the public discourse now. Musically the hard charging song burns in short bursts and thrilling runs reminiscent of D.O.A. and Australian proto-punk and pub rock. But the lyrics are sketched out in short phrases and extended musings and eschews choruses and sloganeering completely. Which is a clever approach to a song aimed at the ignorance and overconfidence of all these “independent thinkers” and people who do “their own research” without considering they’re approaching it all not disinterestedly with the aim of arriving at some more actual truth but in that confirmation bias mode with conspiratorial thinking that only ever seems to serve the goals and interests of authoritarian leaders, national and global capital and narrow interpretations of tradition, culture and religion. Red Kate even comments on how none of that thinking has to have consistency to command faith from a certain stripe of person, not when you have the desired answer in mind and you romanticize being a rebel and a “patriot” even though you’re a stooge. Maybe there’s no helping some people even confronting them in the much more friendly if aggressive manner of Red Kate in this song and its challenge to cast aside determined efforts at self-oppression but there is room for music that speaks to persistent frustrations in a spirit of solidarity. Listen to “Don’t Think Too Much” on Spotify and follow Kansas City, Missouri’s Red Kate at the links below. The group’s latest album Exit Strategy dropped November 22, 2023 on digital download, streaming, CD and limited edition vinyl..
Debbie Christ’s “I’ve Got Time” spins a tale of how in life you don’t get a lot of good guidance and you kind of have to figure out your own way with few solid role models. And the more you go through life you find out that you’re expected to conform to some diminished version of those notions you get, at least as a North American, that you can grow up to be whatever you want and to dream big, reach for that American dream. But Clara Harwood aka Debbie Christ is a Canadian so that narrative is a little different but when she sings “How can anybody run without knowing how to walk?” while contemplating how to achieve her dreams and concluding, in the choruses, “I’ve got time/But how much?” The song and Harwood’s vocals hearken back to that 1980 debut X album Los Angeles and its portraits of a city where people go to seek out their dreams only to find out the reality is much more complex and disheartening and bleak than you may have been lead to believe. “I’ve Got Time” in particular in moments is reminiscent of “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not” and how it’s propulsive and if it’s punk it’s as steeped in poetry and guitar sounds well beyond stereotypes of the genre. And that touch of croon and cyclical song structure that is as exciting as it is entrancing is there as well. Clearly Debbie Christ is aware that it’s important to have dreams and aspirations to guide you but that too often you’re not going to have them handed to you, you’re better off creating them from a place genuine to you and your best interests because it’s too easy to be off on a fool’s errand sold to you as your own heart’s desire. Listen to “I’ve Got Time” on Spotify and follow Debbie Christ on Instagram.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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