Lene Lovich – Queen City Sounds and Art

Mary Ocher’s single “Sympathize (featuring Your Government)” is well represented in the music video that shows the artist floating in a turquoise ocean on a rubber raft looking like a character from the end of The Lord of the Rings who has returned from the Undying Lands in white robes and rams horns. Nearby a cluster of refugees from the ravaged world frolic on an island of junk with a “For Sale” sign while industrialists in a red ship demonstrate their designs on what’s left of normal people. All while Ocher sings “Sympathize with us!” in entreatment to the basic humanity of those who might just snuff out what there is left of a world not completely unconquered by rapacious economic interests. Musically Ocher’s operatic vocals and beautiful pulses of synth melody and circular rhythms are reminiscent of something Lene Lovich or Nina Hagen might have written for one of Jim Jarmusch’s or Wim Wenders’ more eccentric and engrossing globe hopping films. Watch the video for “Sympathize” on YouTube and follow Mary Ocher at the links below. Her new album Your Guide to Revolution releases on June 14 in the EU and in the rest of the world on July 19 via Underground Institute.

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Mary Ocher on Instagram

On the single “Burning Building” Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys tell the tale of a person who is living with a dysfunctional situation but yearning to escape. Across the song we learn that our narrator rationalizes to him or herself the normalcy of living inside the closing walls of an unsustainable mode of existence as evidenced by the lines “I’m watching the world from a burning building” and “It’s the only home I know.” When the precariousness of life is always threatening to you and you learn to survive and are always in survival mode it can do a number on your head and your ability to function outside of that context without trying to recreate it even when you don’t need to. The angular and even mechanical dynamics of the song are reminiscent of a Lene Lovich song gone industrial and it suits perfectly the ritualistic and maddening manner of knowing things aren’t right but not seeming to be able to do something to remove oneself from a way of life that will, yes, crash and burn and maybe take you with it. But that nugget of an impulse to change is there and it’s kind of the hook of the song. Listen to “Burning Building” on Spotify and follow Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys at the links below.