“Sage Creek” by Ithaca, New York’s Twin Court is the kind of song that has a softness and vulnerability that one might most often associate with a slowcore or indie folk type of band. But there’s a tonal uniqueness that may come from the band’s use of gamelan, bonang and harmonium along with the guitars. The song structure is also rather avant-garde with repeated themes to hypnotic effect and layered, interlocking rhythms that one most often hears in music out of the 1970s art rock tradition like a far more mellow and minimal Magma or Yes when the latter is in its more pastoral moments. It’s a song worth taking in full because it rewards the patient listener as the song progresses from its spare beginnings to weaving in an array of sounds in miniature orchestral fashion with GK Fulton’s vocals hitting and sustaining notes that interact with the rest of the music at unorthodox but always interesting angles giving the whole song an enigmatic character that sustains your interest until the end. Astute listeners may even here resonance with “Blue Milk” by Stereolab and/or a Linda Perhacs song in their ability to stir the imagination and demand acceptance on their idiosyncratic terms. Listen to “Sage Creek” on YouTube and follow Twin Court at the links below.
When “Sad Pisces” by aeonatan gets off the ground you feel like you’re in for a solid garage rock song but it quickly progresses into something more sonically ambitious and expansive. The crunchy and driving guitar takes on drifty atmospherics like something The Gordons or Bailter Space might have done but then when Jonatan Stenfor’s understated yet luminously melodic vocals step back the more garage rock aspect comes back to the fore as the full-on sheets of sound clear only to reassert itself soon enough. The final break toward the end of the song finds the vocals swimming in light, spacious psychedelia like a moment suspended in time and the headlong flow of the song that carries us to the end with rapid pulsing guitar work into a droning fadeout. The song’s unconventional structure and masterful use of unexpected layers of melody really give it an immersive quality that’s more creative than simply tapping into established genre tropes. Listen to “Sad Pisces” on Spotify and follow aeonatan at the links provided. Look for aeonatan’s debut album nihil due out in 2024.
Descending, piano chords with a touch of reverb and a background reverse delay tone precede ethereal vocals in “sleepy” by body / negative. In the accompanying music video we see some old footage from a wedding, presumably that of songwriter Andy Schiaffino’s parents, and in the background there are hints of children laughing and an audio source that isn’t really connected to the visuals on hand. It’s like future and present exist in the song structured a little like a repeating loop. The song feels like experiencing a waking dream and Simon Scott’s (Slowdive) mastering of the track allows its various layers resonate and intermingle in a way that might happen if you got some old stock, used reel-to-reel tape and fed that found audio material as a sound source into a mix bringing together field recordings of a campfire and the elegantly delicate vocals and instrumentation. On the surface it’s a simple and spare composition but its layers and complexity of expression and emotional nuance convey a sense of melancholic loss and affection that eases in with a heaviness when in the end we learn that the wedded couple is no longer with us. The song, featuring contributions from Midwife, is a beautiful testament to the life of the couple without having to employ heavy-handed theatrics or melodrama to capture a depth of feeling that flows throughout the song. Watch the video for “sleepy” on YouTube and follow body / negative at the links below. The Everett LP was released digitially on December 8, 2023 via Track Number Records with vinyl available for pre-order and shipping in March, 2024.
The splashes of trailing guitar scrawl match the flashes of film set lights in the video for The Fourth Wall’s “Never A Part.” Directed by both Eric Harrod and Stephen Augustin based on his concept, we see singer Augustin looking uncomfortable yet accommodating the attention from the production crew and script supervisor and director. Everyone goes through what looks like Polaroid stills from the shoot like fragments of the real person only to later burn several of the photos in a campfire. Like an act of reclaiming one’s identity from it being a fragmented product without context. The song seems to be about ties of family and blood and never quite belonging or being of a new home country or culture. Augustin’s parents immigrated from Korea and the Philippines and the new The Fourth Wall album Return Forever (due out in March 2024 on DevilDuck Records) is like nine chapters of exploring the immigrant experience and the complexities of that emerge from trying to come to terms with what is known and what is unknowable about one’s own history and how that impacts one’s own identity. The song comes out of Augustin’s imagining a conversation between his own grandmother and her grandson and gets into issues of what it means to love out of what might be perceived as some kind of family obligation and biological connections and how that might overlap with an unconditional love. We hear tension and drama in the song, urgent percussion, a cyclone of noise and melody that escalates and fades out by the song’s end. And earlier we hear those underpinnings of uncertainty and fragile shimmers and fast echos of tone held together by Augustin’s soaring vocals and seeming will to hold it all together and to comprehend some elusive truth and significance to make sense of what feels like an existential conundrum. And yet the song with all of its nervy energy ends with a kind of transcendent catharsis like an acceptance of contradictions the complete knowledge of which you may never fully understand. Watch the video for “Never A Part” on YouTube and follow The Fourth Wall at the links below.
Church Fire, photo by Tom Murphy, concept by Church Fire
Church Fire is a trio from Denver, Colorado that formed around 2010. It’s sound is “…equal parts industrial synth pop, hyperkinetic dance punk and dreamlike ambient 8-bit EDM doom,” or so this author wrote some time back. The project began as a duo of Shannon Webber and David Samuelson originally calling itself Sew Buttons on Ice Cream and performing shows in the local underground and DIY circuit. Samuelson had been a member of art rock bands Bangtel and Dinner With Cannibals and Webber in political noise punk trio Dangerous Nonsense (which she would continue to front until the mid-2010s). The latter and Samuelson’s previous bands were welcomed by the local, weirdo art rock scene of groups with a penchant for the mutant sounds of artists like Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Chrome and Frank Zappa that once had a loose affiliation as the Denver Art Rock Collective before that fizzled out in the early 2010s.
In 2012 Church Fire dispensed with its odd assortments of instrumentation and focused on the more electronic songwriting with Webber’s commanding and emotionally electrifying vocals and stage presence and changed its performance moniker to its current form. The name seeming to reflect the band’s anti-authoritarian spirit and its always creative and earnest anti-patriarchal critique. Its developing sound then was more in line with what was going on in the nascent darkwave scene of which Church Fire was not a part and which didn’t have a strong showing in Denver. So the band garnered its own following in Denver aside from what one might presume to be its scene with always strikingly powerful live shows and its undeniably compelling dance beats, entrancing and transporting melodies and rare fusion of joy and righteous anger. All qualities that have remained an aspect of the band’s sound and performance style even as it has evolved.
Around the time Church Fire took on its then new name it shared bills with other acts emerging in new forms and under new names like The Milk Blossoms who had once been called Architect (in which Samuelson plays bass) and Mirror Fears, the solo project of Kate Warner, formerly of dream-pop/indie rock band Talk All Night. Webber and Samuelson grew up south of Denver and Warner grew up on the north side in a family that encouraged creative endeavors and with siblings who made a mark in music in their own right, her brother Andrew now in Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Weathered Statues and having been in groups like Bad Luck City and Snake Rattle Rattle Snake. There seemed to be a natural affinity and stylistic compatibility between Church Fire’s music and that of Mirror Fears. Warner had played keyboards and synth in Talk All Night but for Mirror Fears she learned electronic production/composition and principles of audio engineering (in part from doing live sound and trouble-shooting gear for a local rehearsal studio and various events) further and her emotionally rich and vulnerable voice has a unique resonance that transcends any specific musical style. In the summer of 2019 Warner had joined Church Fire and put Mirror Fears on hiatus.
As a trio Samuelson took up drums with a rigorous practice regimen that honed a precision and power suitable for the band’s existing music with Webber and Warner experimenting with combining and playing off each other’s strengths as vocalists while taking the group’s songwriting in new directions and maintaining an inspiring and engaging live show. You can go to a Church Fire and be guaranteed to see a fiery performance that invites you along for a shared catharsis. To date the band has played hundreds of shows and released four full-length albums, an EP and a few singles, all worthwhile listens with memorable songs throughout.
Listen to our interview with Church Fire on Bandcamp and follow the trio at the links below. Chances are if it’s a month, Church Fire has a show or two. But the next two shows are on Saturday, December 23, 2023 at The Broadway Roxy with The Milk Blossoms, Curta and Debthedem0 at 8:30 pm doors, 9pm show and Saturday, December 30, 2023 at The Skylark Lounge with Watch Yourself Die, Voight and Horse Girl 8 doors, 9 show.
These days a love song expressing feelings of deep connection can seem like a hackneyed pop song premise. But Midheaven’s crafting of its song “Heaven,” a testament to Andy DeLuca’s and Sarah Eiseman’s richness of affection for one another, feels like taking a journey through a hall of illuminated emotions in a dazzling pageant of sonic detail. The elegant and fragile guitar work, Eiseman’s ethereal vocals a constant presence and the human connection with the dense and dynamic procession of tones. Melodic drones, driving rhythms, thick and finely accented bass and while clearly in the realm of a shoegaze band something about the band’s attention to the electronic elements is reminiscent as much of early 90s Curve slightly more so than obvious shoegaze greats of that era. Think more like newer acts like Tamaryn, Asobi Seksu and The Lost Patrol. Like the duo took its New Wave and synthpop influences and extrapolated that style of production and dance music sensibilities into an atmospheric rock context resulting in a song that truly engulfs you with its wave of uplifting emotion which isn’t experience we get often enough in the musical parlance of modern shoegaze.
Showtime Ramon brings an unexpected musical and rhetorical complexity to “84 Dan Marino.” Yes, in the music video we see beautiful women and a cool sports car, Ramon delivers an expertly crafted line of swagger and braggadocio like you might expect to see and hear in a mainstream hip-hop banger. But the visual aesthetics of the video is like something from a gritty, 80s thriller including he leads on screen from a film reel and scratches and pops and glitches in the print. It complements the darkly pulsing synthwave beat and the gorgeously evocative melodic splashes that linger like music from an existential horror film of today tapping into the aforementioned 80s vibe. Like Anthony Scott Burns and Nicolas Winding Refn but reaching to an even more lo-fi feel, like Ramon took in more than a few Michael Mann, William Friedkin and Brian De Palma films and absorbed the essence of moods and themes of those movies in writing this song. It has that starkness, menace and a core of melancholia that makes them all effective and “84 Dan Marino” exudes a similar energy. The key line to the song to give it the proper context, or so it seems is when Ramon raps “Lost my best friend now I spit with pain.” With those words, referencing the unsolved murder of Ramon’s best friend, the display of success, luxury, vitality, the promise of pleasure all comes into focus as where your head may need to be so your heart doesn’t sink into oblivion. Not to escape those feelings of loss and despair but to survive them. Ramon makes the processing of the darkest times of our lives feel like an adventure, a chapter of life and an affirmation of what makes being alive feel so significant and good. The song hits hard yet reminds you of the good things in life. Watch the video for “84 Dan Marino” on YouTube and follow Mexican American rapper, and proud Capricorn, Showtime Ramon at the links provided.
Winter is upon us at the time of the writing of this review but Alex McArtor’s single “Endless Summer” and its warmly nostalgic melodies is an escape to a another headspace. The guitar line traces the melody downward and highlights the edges of the mood of the song that is a collection of the best memories of times of travel, indulging pleasures, loving and being loved, savoring the companionship of a partner in these adventures. McArtor’s slightly husky voice embodying the synthesis of the cumulative feelings contained within all of those snapshots of carefree times. The guitar work between passages traces a downward arc in luminous single notes and evocative slides accented by subtle bass and drums. Altogether the song draws you in and whether or not you’ve shared some of the specific nuggets of cherished memories it is a song about holding onto those perfect memories in your mind to sustain you through more challenging times. Listen to “Endless Summer,” produced by Benny Cassette, on Spotify and follow Alex McArtor at the links below.
Recriminations and spite run through Springworks’ lates single “We Are Not Amused.” The band regularly finds old industrial film footage, commercials and public domain reels in crafting the music videos to accompany its songs and for this it looks like a family conflict and one more in the workplace while women dance for some television show from the 60s that would play popular music like Hullaballoo or Shindig! The song is a lo-fi power pop number akin to a bubblegum pop band of that late 60s era but the lyrics relate what sounds like a serious conflict of some sort that was challenging to resolve in which both parties probably won’t see eye to eye and get some mutually agreeable resolution. And that happens in life and you have to find some way to process those feelings. The line “The steam-uh/Evaporating into/Pistons/To make it up that hill/And this song/Replacing urge to kill” outlines a path to transmuting rage into something productive which, unfortunately, doesn’t happen enough in the world. But in the distorted guitar crunch and buoyant melodies of this song there’s something that honors the anger while putting that energy to use and make something out of it you’d rather have in the world and maybe someone will hear it and pull back from the precipice just a little. Watch the video for “We Are Not Amused” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.
Noh Kitty sets “Numbers and Letters” in a universe of music that feels both baroque and of a fascinating fusion of 8-bit aesthetics and the electronic and acoustic indie pop that we hear in the 2000s work of The Blow. But the synth sounds that run through the song on the more rhythmic end is like something heard on the periphery of a Kraftwerk song. The main keyboard/synth melody, though, has an aspect like a classical piece played on a toy keyboard. The vocals, though, carry a more conventional melody and convey a narrative that seems to be about the cycle of life and seasons and the mathematical underpinnings and cultural signifiers we identify and employ to make sense of the world as we experience it. It’s like a Medieval fairy tale poem as told through the kind of music one might expect from a songwriter that sequestered herself with intentionally limited access to other music and instruments to craft an intricate art pop song to create a unique and idiosyncratic work. And “Numbers and Letters” has that aspect of no obvious musical influences or inspirations. Listen for yourself on Spotify and follow the Denver-based Noh Kitty on Instagram.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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