Desert Liminal – Queen City Sounds and Art

Desert Liminal, photo courtesy the artists

Desert Liminal’s melancholic and trailing tones on “Kid Detroit” convey a sense of an earlier period of one’s life that one looks back on with feelings of nostalgia but through the lens of one’scurrent perspective. It flows with the kind of romance of wish you could go back to that earlier period of your life and re-write parts of it like it was a movie and maybe that would put your later life in a better place. Yet one senses that in the song the knowledge that such playing with time and one’s own life’s narrative while attractive and something to occupy some idle time might take away the person you are today and the lessons and achievements however taken for granted that opened the window to even entertain improving your backstory. When the song waxes uplifting and hopeful it’s like an embrace of one’s whole self including the mistakes, flaws, wrong turns and misfortunes that didn’t sink you maybe, just maybe, improved your life in ways you don’t yet understand and in many that you do. And yet there’s no harm in thinking in ways that you can enact today with one’s current level of self-awareness if you choose to lean into it rather than run from it into fantasy. The dynamic piano work and overdriven guitar help to anchor the introspective vocals and to orchestrate an undeniable push and pull of mood that bring the song’s themes into focus in a way that lends this dream pop song some grit. Listen to “Kid Detroit” on Spotify and follow Desert Liminal at the links below. The band’s new album Black Ocean is out October 18, 2024 via Whited Sepulchre Records on streaming, digital download and limited edition vinyl.

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“Flicker Screen,” the latest single from Desert Liminal’s 2021 album Glass Fate, comes on like a parallel universe version of Chromatics: Lush, warm vocals, ghostly atmospherics and strong melodic lines on the piano paired with assertive yet finely accented percussion. It’s a song whose emotional flavor is nostalgic because it’s about memory, identity, our cognitive orientation and aspirations. The flicker screen of the title invokes the mechanics of cinema and how those mediated and highly processed images can embed themselves in your imagination though as your own interpretation of events and when you impose that type of understanding and interpretation on living people who don’t live episodically within neat frame lines and according to a script with a narrative through line or according to a cohesive aesthetic to suit anyone’s tastes. Yet the song isn’t a stripping back of a romanticized view of the world. It does employ hazy layers of atmosphere and an introspective vocal delivery but its yearning for something better and more organic and thus more unpredictable and un-controlling in which everyone involved can be who they are authentically. Listen to “Flicker Screen” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of Glass Fate and follow the band at the links provided.