“Whiteout” by Chicago’s Engine Summer might be about trying to be present when the temptation to dissociate for various reasons looms. But who can be sure when the voice singing those verses that might reveal some linear interpretation of the song seems caught up in a headlong rush through furiously distorting bursts of processed electronic fuzz guided by an urgent and accented bass line with drums dropping in and out to ground the rapid cycle buzzes that feel like they’re about to burst before starting all over and the sounds of an 8-bit computer system getting hyped on something. It’s like the people in the band are imagining what it might be like to live inside an old arcade game at peak activity in the 80s during a tournament and then turned that into this song. But that is the vibe for the rest of the band’s 2023 album MAXIMUM SHPBAG WEEKEND which it unleashed in all its weirdo post-punk glory on December 6, 2023. For the record apparently monophonic synth frequently replaced the guitar lending the whole affair a brilliantly retro-futurist edge the way early chillwave artists and their ilk rediscovered the least glamorous, and largely neglected, synths of the 80s and repurposed them to not just capture an older synthpop sound but to utilize that sound to express modern melancholia. Engine Summer took a similar path but bring to us a gritty atmosphere that provides a scuzzy psychedelic flavor reminiscent of Jay Reatard’s old band Lost Sounds and expressing a catharsis of current anxiety and desperation. Fans of Genesis Owusu’s 2023 album Struggler will find resonance here as well. Listen to “Whiteout” on Spotify and follow Engine Summer at the links below. Did the band name itself after John Crowley’s brilliant 1979 post-apocalyptic novel? Possibly not but it would be cooler if it did.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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