“Big Blue” by Deniz Cuylan sounds like music from a cult fantasy story from Iceland. The sequenced bell tones carrying rhythm and some of the melody seem to run out ahead of the main section of the story like guiding lights along a pathway at night. Strings and harmonic tones course through the song like winds of tone creating a dream like, otherworldly mood as Sarah La Puerta’s elfin vocals provide a warm human emotional coloring relating a story of a garden in the ocean as a metaphor for a cultivated inner life and shared experiences. It’s a song that is both soothing while acknowledging melancholic moods and personal emotional challenges with its gentle, layered textures and hypnotic interweave of near abstract melody. Listen to “Big Blue” on Spotify and follow Deniz Cuylan at the links below.
“One More Thing To Say” is the title track to The Wheel Workers’ forthcoming album. Originally written in 2006 with the album essentially unfinished when the band broke up for awhile. But 20 years later with reworked and re-recorded songs it turns out the themes of authoritarianism are unfortunately even more relevant now with fascism ascendant globally. The song with its layers of atmosphere and melody around a solid rhythm and expert pacing is somehow reminiscent of a psychedelic pop band of the 90s coupled with King Crimson circa “Elephant Talk” or Hawkwind in the period represented by the album Quark, Strangeness and Charm. Spectral bell tones drift through as a melody while guitars sketch textures and Steven Higginboth sings about a world being dismantled by power mad political leaders who seem to be guided by nothing but ego and self-dealing but feigning vision except that execution of which is chaos and destruction. Higginbotham’s equally introspective and passionate vocals are reminiscent of Peter Gabriel in moments adding to the art rock feel of the song. But it is a song for the current moment sounding both on edge and clinging to the faintest of hope to navigate perilous times. The music video is part animated and collage stop motion depicting Ruben Ramires traversing the troubled earth and witnessing war erupting and perhaps the final conflict that ends everything. Surely a legitimate concern when a certain American president is talking about using nuclear weapons and the leader of a nation formerly part of the most powerful “communist” nation on earth is hinting and the same. We can only hope none of that comes to pass and that more humane heads prevail. Though the song has a touch of menace and urgency it also suggests that being aware and taking action with a little luck might get us through to better times. Watch the video for “One More Thing To Say” on YouTube and follow The Wheel Workers at the links provided.
Hissuae breathes a sense of the intimate and cinematic into “Guilty Pleasure” with her ethereal and vulnerable vocals. The song’s arrangements are orchestral and minimal in their intertwining of sweeping piano and percussion so that the song feels like an immersive, living entity in the listening. In the background the barest touch of synth lends an otherworldly quality that puts the more human elements in the foreground and catches one’s full attention. The singer-songwriter’s singing style is reminiscent of the ways Kate Bush and Loreena McKennitt could intermingle the personal with the mythical in fine nuances of vocal expression. For a song that seems to be about transcending mundane, everyday existence that is the perfect tonal mode for the song to take. Listen to “Guilty Pleasure” on Spotify and connect with Hissuae on Bandcamp.
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