Tag: GOWNS (band)

The video and the song “Suburbs” by Shadow Creek are perfect companions in capturing the surreal blandness of suburbs. Yet how hypnotic and meditative so many of them can be because the builders for many are the same company nationwide and the designs of houses so similar for blocks and blocks in large spaces. In the song there’s a lyrics about watching the sky because it offers the most variety while itself composed of familiar elements just like the seasons mentioned in the song as well. The music is a steady electronic beat with a warping inconsistent flow and haunting vocals. One gets the sense of shifting in and out of reality and a sense of being trapped in a soporific existence of repetitive, almost ritualistic existence. The line “Life goes by in the suburbs” certainly describes American suburbs from the mid-to-late 70s when a certain variety started to spring up seemingly everywhere and even through to today despite how fractured the economy has become and how city living has been transformed by a particularly insidious form of gentrification that has had a suburbanization effect in the city with suburbs existing as they always have like bedroom communities with their own universe of infrastructure for living and growing up with little real culture germinating in any of them. Shadow Creek hails from in and around Houston, one of the most geographically expansive cities in America and thus its own suburbs must simply sprawl in a way that seems like a supernatural dystopian movie. But anyone that lives in a city with robust suburbs and has grown up in them recognizes the feel Shadow Creek has created with the song that’s as much music as it is sound design to experience. You feel like you can get lost in the song like one of the labyrinthine subdivisions designed more for efficiency of land use than utility and that’s the point, while it is vaguely soothing there is an undertone of unease that gives the song an appealing edge in acknowledging that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the suburbs but there is something unsatisfying to them and be their very nature incomplete in serving the the full cultural and social needs of everyone. Fans of Indian Jewelry/Studded Left and GOWNS will find something resonant here. Watch the video for “Suburbs” on YouTube and follow Shadow Creek on Spotify.