The pounding drums and distorted synths have a very stark and moody aspect at the beginning of “Message of Mercy” by Pain in the Yeahs. It’s industrial feel is reminiscent of when Nine Inch Nails covered Joy Division. The spectral synth melody fits in with a song that is both bleakly melancholic and defiantly expansive. The sound is futuristic like the kind of music that would have emerged in Oceania after the fall of the regime that propped up the image figurehead of Big Brother—all strong rhythmic lines and uncompromising and widely emotional expression but one tempered by decades of having had to be more buttoned up than is natural meaning there is a quality to the music that seems to have come up from a time of pent up incubation of a creative project with lots of development and close attention to how the beats and production would make the music come across as emphatically intentional. Listen to “Message of Mercy” on Spotify and follow Pain in the Yeahs at the links below. The sophomore album from the Virginia-based project Deep Sigh Sci-Fi released on July 21, 2023.
The A Place to Bury Strangers remix of “The Door” by New Orleans-based jangle/psychedelic rock band Silver Synthetic is like an alternate dimension version of the band. Along with Jessica Bizer’s visualizer for the remix one sees a brighter, more colorful world full of vivid and resonant detail. The beautiful, Byrds-esque guitar work of the original seems to have been transformed into high energy but blissed out, borderline 8-bit forms like the song reinterpreted by a video game music developer who tried to make a rendition for original Nintendo but pushing the limitations of that sound engine to the limits and even sped up the vocals a bit to match the ebullient pace of the remix. It’s almost unrecognizable except for the core melody. It’s a fascinating transformation that one wishes one could witness live but naturally this version is the product of imaginative production and reinvisioning the possibilities of the song in a way that could only really be accomplished in the box. Watch the video for “The Door (A Place to Bury Strangers Remix)” on YouTube and follow Silver Synthetic at the links below.
Towne & Stevens is a band including Rogers Stevens and Nathan Towne of Blind Melon. Their 2023 self-titled debut is a collection of songs informed by introspective songs warm with pastoral overtones. The video for the single “Please Hold the Line” looks like something from an existential indie film starring Bill Murray but with Stevens singing into the rear view mirror looking both resigned and uneasy which fits a song seemingly about the thoughts that pass through your head when you’re on your way to meet with someone with whom you’re going to have to have a deep and potentially intense but necessary conversation because many difficult meetings with people can’t and shouldn’t be avoided but met with integrity, sensitivity and nuance. This song captures the feeling of going there not knowing how it’s going to go down. The orchestral horns and lingering guitar leads paired with minimal piano and percussion with expressive and wide-ranging vocals all come together to give the song a sense of easing the inevitable while embodying the complexity of emotions at the core of the song. Watch the video for “Please Hold the Line” on YouTube and follow Towne & Stevens at the links below.
The video treatment for Cold Venus Revisited’s “Keep Breathing” is a resonant complement to its shivering drones and processional rhythm. Shot in black and white with an enigmatic figure standing next to a river, images of flocks of birds flying and close-up of an eye with a ripple on water superimposed over the top. In moments its reminiscent of an incredibly gloomy Mazzy Star song with even more introspective vocals and the group says it’s a “love song for very sad people.” There’s a stark beauty to the song that is framed by a moody bass line and finely and firmly accented drums that gives it a mysterious power and sense of doomed romance that sticks with you. Watch the video for “Keep Breathing” from the Prague-based post-punk band Cold Venus Revisited and follow the group at the links provided.
“Departure” rushes into sonic frame with a flood of white noise flowing like a rapid wind. It feels like both an overwhelming saturation of emotional experiences and when that palpable, granular sound clears one hears a deep, melodic tone echoing in the distance like a beacon in the darkness more felt than seen. There is a dynamic to this song that makes one think of walking out of a space of dark, fog-enshrouded night toward something unknown but discernible like the haze of a city on the horizon. As the track progresses the quality of sound seems more luminous than simply a textural inundation of noise and in the end sonic miasma dissipates. Emotionally, Cementation Anxiety has crafted a piece that is indeed like a departure from weighty stasis and density of emotional resonances to one of restful if not soothing clarity, like a purge of the crush of painful memories hitting all at once and then being able to let them go. Listen to “Departure” on YouTube and follow Cementation Anxiety at the links below.
Harmony Rose of The Milk Blossoms at Titwrench, October 3, 2021, photo by Tom Murphy
Harmony Rose is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist in indie pop band The Milk Blossoms. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Rose’s family moved to rural Colorado during her elementary school years and she attended high school in Durango. It was there that she met and befriended her future bandmate Michelle Rocqet. Right out of high school Rose moved to Portland, Oregon for about a year and began her initial forays into songwriting before ultimately landing in Denver where she lived with a friend at a house show venue putting her in the right place at the right time to be involved with one of the peak periods of DIY music culture in the Mile High City. As circumstance would have it Rocqet was looking for a place to live shortly afterward and moved into the same house where the two formed the foundation of the band that would come to be called The Milk Blossoms. Initially calling their collective project Architect, the band became something of a staple in the DIY music world and as their music and songwriting developed they changed the name to The Milk Blossoms. With the addition of multi-instrumentalist Blair Larson, The Milk Blossoms definitely made their mark on the local scene and their unique and emotionally rich melodies and vulnerable songwriting struck a chord well beyond the DIY music world with the then trio having been a featured artist on live radio shows and the Sounds on 29th program in 2016 on Rocky Mountain PBS.
To date, The Milk Blossoms have two albums Worrier (2015) and Dry Heave The Heavenly (2018) with a third featuring the new lineup due out in 2024. The immediacy of the songs The Milk Blossoms has been striking in both the music itself and the thoughtful and emotionally resonant lyrics from the beginning but with the new set of songs, Rose feels like she has focused more on the discipline of her craft in singing to a click track to bring more consistency to the recording process. Although Rocqet stepped away from the band in 2023 to focus more on her academic pursuits and professional opportunities in New York City, she had been active in the production of the new album which includes contributions from current members William Overton (keyboards, formerly of Loanword), David Samuelson (bass, member of Church Fire and formerly of Bangtel and Culture Pig) and Tyler Lindgren (drums, engineering, formerly of Holophrase and True Aristocrats). Whatever the configuration at the heart of the music of The Milk Blossoms is a delicacy of feeling and unexpectedly powerful emotional impact on the recordings and especially in the live setting.
Listen to our interview with Harmony Rose on Bandcamp and catch The Milk Blossoms at The Black Buzzard on Friday, September 15, 2023 with Isadora Eden and Bell Mine. For more information regarding The Milk Blossoms, visit one of the links below the interview.
Ringing immediately takes us down unpredictable musical paths from the beginning of “Stairwell.” Its loping chords like a slowcore Pavement and warped dissonance give way to huge, bombastic riffing without losing the casual, slackery attitude for peak moments before sliding back into introspective sketches of song in the outro. The song constantly feels like it’s going to fall over and coupled with its vulnerable and fragile structures there’s a sustained sense of weightiness to the meditative vocal delivery and what some might consider atonal guitar riffs. It shouldn’t work and for many people it won’t if they’re put off by the aforementioned Pavement or when Dinosaur Jr heads into territory disregarding the rules of how melodies should work or the directions rhythms are supposed to go. Much less how homespun and idiosyncratic Duster often sounds and how its own lo-fi splintery atmospheres lend themselves well to the dynamic not being dependent on symmetric song structures. Listen to “Stairwell” on Spotify where you can also find he rest of the Is It Light Out Where You Are? EP which released on August 9, 2023 via Julia’s War and Candlepin Records.
The Boy Traveler aka Daniel Jacob Sternbaum reissued his 2008 self-titled EP in July 2023 as it hadn’t been available for a decade. He’d just finished touring with Sonny Moore (aka Skrillex) during the travels for which they’d listened to numerous artists but Aphex Twin, Justice and Radiohead in particular sparked a creative direction for the four-song EP. Lead track “January 07” featured Ryan Star. The song features finely modulated beats and luminous, downtempo keyboard work and vocals that sound like someone singing while in a trance state. The lyrics are from a poem that Star had written with his vocal performance and its trailing tones serving as an unconventional framework for a song that is somewhere between an IDM track and a haunted trance composition. Sonically it has the hallmarks of a 90s and 2000s left field electronic song yet the mood and sound seem to fit in with the current era like trip-hop with more of the specter of dystopian disaster hanging over it lending it a proper tinge of desperate undertones. Listen to “January 07 ft. Ryan Star” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the EP and follow The Boy Traveler at the links below.
Teen Mortgage take an unorthodox approach toward the subject of class and income inequality on “Oligarchy.” There’s the fuzzy and crunchy guitar sound and the stark vocal approach that provide nice bit of caustic sonic quality appropriate for the song but then the percussion is both traditional drums but also electronics and in the guitar riff there are melodic flares that accent the rhythm so that the undeniable punk style and fury here has a wider than average range of sonic expression even at its one minute fifty-one seconds length. The lyrics outline the stark class differences and the gross hypocrisy baked into an economic and political system that was designed from the beginning of the nation to favor elite power with little concessions along the way to keep the lower classes from outright overthrowing and liquidating elite power. You hear a lot of nonsense about a two-tiered justice system when an ex-president commits multitudes of crimes including seditious conspiracy or oligarchs commit acts of war and undermining national interest with their own form of unilateral executive action but Teen Mortgage in singing “because corporate flaws they make all the laws” points out what a two-tiered justice system really looks like and which has been carried out from the founding of most if not all modern nations: one set of laws and consequences for the rich and another to keep the not-rich in line with a system of punishments to which the wealthy are rarely subjected. Teen Mortgage just packed a lot of actual history into its catchy and energetic punk song with poetic concision. We all live in a corporate controlled world and have to use the tools and currencies open to us but it’s our choice whether or not to buy into it, as it were, and identify with the interests of the elite. Listen to “Oligarchy” on Spotify and follow Teen Mortgage at the links below.
Vinyl Williams sounds like he’s free associating a lo-fi, AM radio-esque sound with psychedelic garage rock, shimmery post-punk and intricate math rock pop on “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” And in the process he drops in twists, turns and swirls like he’s live mixing analog tape and leaving in where there might be a warp and using that as a transition between stanzas of lyrics about how we psych ourselves into following a path we believe is inevitable but really there are a multitude of options open to us and we need not be committed to something that isn’t going to work for us or lead to undesirable ends. The line “We don’t have a single way to know” is the key to what Vinyl Williams is expressing here in his borderline whisper of a voice like he’s already let himself get locked into periods of tunnel vision and needs a reminder that it’s not required to keep going down that tunnel. Listen to “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” on Spotify and follow Vinyl Williams at the links below. The latest Vinyl Williams album Aeterna emerged on August 4, 2023.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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