SubmitHub – Page 120 – Queen City Sounds and Art

“Meditation III: Philodendron” by Past Palms Gives Voice to the Spirit of Ease and Comfort of One of the Most Common of Houseplants

Ambient Music For Watering Plants is the latest EP from Past Palms. A clear nod to Brian Eno’s landmark 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports and possibly to Stevie Wonder’s 1979 soundtrack album Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” for the documentary directed by Walon Green (and based on the book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird), Past Palms utilizes textures and processed atmospheric elements with field recordings to produce a musical analog to replicate the emotions and outer life of fairly common household plants. The track “Meditation III: Philodendron” celebrates the qualities of one of the most popular and durable potted plants one finds in most homes that host such relatively domesticated flora. Its vaguely heart shaped, shiny leaves with gentle wrinkles from extending out from a central stem often found hanging over the edge of the pot in one version of the plant, a fern-like structure with distinct branches off the central stem in another. All lushly green without being overwhelming. Past Palms evokes how these plants bring a freshness to a room without being obtrusive with bright flowing tones and tactile arrangements that suggest ease and comfort. Listen to “Meditation III: Philodendron” and the rest of Ambient Music For Watering Plants on Spotify and follow Past Palms at the links provided.

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Leland And The Silver Wells Await a Spiritual Reckoning on the Moody and Mysterious “What Comes Around”

The processional pace of “What Comes Around,” the title track from Leland And The Silver Wells’ forthcoming album (out June 3 via Rubia Records) is represented well in the music video directed by Larissa Jaks. The song is driven by a brooding piano line, finely accented percussion and Leland Ettinger’s bright, forceful vocals that shift effortlessly from powerful and direct to introspective and back. The theme of the song seems obscured except that Ettinger’s lyrics hint at past transgressions and guilt followed by an impending reckoning cast in religious terms with references to the sacrament, the devil’s screams haunting the narrator and the sounds of angels gathering for a crisis of the soul and answering for a mysterious sin. Watch the video for “What Comes Around” on YouTube and follow Leland And The Silver Wells at the links below.

Ferguson’s Daughter’s “Panic Attacks In Love” Embodies the Amplified Emotions at Crucial Turning Points in a Relationship

Ferguson’s Daughter, photo by Lindsey Plotner

“Panic Attacks In Love” by Ferguson’s Daughter is not a conventional song in form, in composition, in length. In the background one hears a raw and aching conversation between, presumably, two people in a relationship who are discussing one person’s insecurities coming to the fore at what could be a crossroads in that relationship where they’re making big decisions that could change everything about the bond like moving in together as a big step and the possibility of starting a family but not wanting to be a bad parent because one person doesn’t know if she’s up to being a parent before figuring herself out some more. After all parenting while offering the potential for other kinds of growth, puts a lot of personal growth on pause for years even if you’re engaged and don’t do the obvious things wrong. In the foreground throughout is a spacious and lonely piano line that evolves and breaks from expected progressions and melodies to reflect the mood of the piece with peaks of tonal activity and lingering chord progressions like your mood when you’re going through a messy spell in your brain. It’s nearly uncomfortably vulnerable in expression but in the end cathartic for anyone who has hit that time in their lives when your sense of self isn’t as strong as maybe it was or that you’d like it to be but you’re faced with important decisions you can’t put off and heavy conversations need to be had to try to get to a place where it doesn’t all feel like loose and frayed ends. Thus the title of the track is perfect because in the throes of a panic attack everything feels like its crashing in on you and that you could die any moment for a sustained period that amplifies every feeling to the point of being acutely overwhelming. The song is from Ferguson’s Daughter’s April 2022 EP Blissed Out Blues which isn’t short on songs that pair dynamic and evocative piano composition with highly emotional lyrics and vocal delivery although the other tracks aren’t so overtly experimental as this piece. Listen to “Panic Attacks In Love” on Spotify where you can also listen to the rest of Blissed Out Blues and follow Ferguson’s Daughter on Soundcloud.

An-Ten-Nae’s Genre Bending “Raindrops On Roses (The Biggie Edition)” Brings the Legendary Rap Star Back for a Psychedelic Hip-Hop Track

An-Ten-Nae, west coast bass music producer, does something really unusual for “Raindrops On Roses (The Biggie Edition)” by doing a mashup of seemingly disparate elements that make sense in the logic of lateral thinking. He mixes together samples of childhood nursery rhyme songs, children singing Beatles’ “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” playful synth arpeggios and Biggie Smalls speaking words assembled together in the beat so that it sounds like he’s deftly referencing raindrops and mixing it in with mention of microdots. It’s a free association recontextualization of bits of music and ideas not unlike something you’d hear from Girl Talk or DJ Shadow but here more overtly psychedelic with Biggie living on not as a hologram but as the inevitable sample for the quality of his voice that brought to his own music a gritty authenticity. Sitting in the track as his voice does here it expands narrow notions of musical genre and really is this a hip-hop or EDM track? Too weird for either alone but something you could definitely hear in someone’s set when they’re chilling out for a moment before going hard again or whatever it is people say they do now. Listen to “Raindrops On Roses (The Biggie Edition)” on Soundcloud and follow An-Ten-Nae at the links below.

An-Ten-Nae on Instagram

“Dijomen Resurrects the Youthful Excitement for a New Day on “43”

“43” rewards your patience as Dijomen builds the track from a melodic haze and fingers of tones flaring forth, voices heard in the middle distance and touches of sonic texture. It has a dynamic like slowly waking up in the early morning and a time lapse as full daylight is hitting and the outside world and the dream world overlap in your brain so that what could be the sound of a nearby playground and memories thereof triggered by those sounds blend together as a unified experience and a deep memory of being up in the morning excited for the day which too often isn’t the case in everyday adult life even though you wish it could be. But this song gives that experience back to you with its expansive energy. Listen to “43” on Spotify and follow Dijomen at the links below.

Dijomen on Instagram

Colatura Asks If We’re Comfortable With Being Rendered Into Monetizable Data on “R U Content”

Colatura’s single “R U Content” mixes the gritty and granular sound texture with ethereal and introspective tones in an expansive dynamic that the trio augments with bends and accents. The result is a song that has a simple appeal but a great deal of variation that suits well the subject of the song which is the commodification of our lives in a very mediated age when most people with a modern phone or computer is on social media with the lure of instant, low rent gratification of engagement from friends, acquaintances and strangers. It’s not really living but the illusion, the projection of life. And that projection, the superficial data of our lives that we share knowingly or otherwise, is monetized and becomes part of a mass feedback loop and in another era would have been described in a way parallel to that of a psyop. The chorus of “Are you content, or are you just content, there’s no way of knowing, what are we doing?” speaks so well to a fairly sophisticated assessment to where so much of the culture is now in trusting large tech companies with the building blocks of our identity and allowing ourselves to be manipulated in ways we don’t full understand. The proof is in how conspiracy theories have spread in social media and how the algorithm can be set to prioritize content that is the opposite of what you might actually believe or need to see. And that question I the chorus of are we content as in satisfied with the situation as it is and can we consent for our lives to be content without compensation? Would we want it to be a product even if we could be compensated? Maybe if you’re an influencer you say yes but it has to be a bummer for anyone at some point. Colatura’s music is appealing in a broad sense of it being somewhere in the realm of shoegaze but with this song it’s like an experimental pop song in aim and execution. Watch the video for “R U Content” on YouTube and connect with Colatura at the links below.

Colatura on TikTok

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colaturaband.com

Little Destroyer Offers a Story of a Phone Order Service to Manage Creeps on “hitman”

Little Destroyer, photo by Heather Saitz

Little Destroyer seems to invoke the loose structure and tonal strategy of “Kool Thing” by Sonic Youth on its song “hitman” with an undeniable groove with grit and a sense of menace flowing through it. In Connor McGuire’s video treatment for the song we see that rarest of devices in many cities now: the pay phone. But the song is told from the perspective of a woman who got beyond fed up with all the sexual harassment thrown her way through various means from verbal and not so verbal street assault and unwelcome DMs and attention from creeps who won’t take no for an answer. So what is a woman to do? Why be a hitman, of course, and that word specifically because she would invert the usual meaning a little and offer her services to take out the usual perpetrators of unwanted sexual contact or intent thereof. So people use the pay phone at Kingsgate Mall (in Vancouver, BC, presumably) to get in touch with the “hitman” who will take care of business because, the vocalist of Little Destroyer, Allie Sheldan, sings, “Everybody swears I’m the villain but everybody wants to hire a hitman.” While there is surely more than a tiny bit of irony in the story as a story but when clowns are out acting the fool someone should probably set that boundary in no uncertain terms sometime because, a wise, or at least hard boiled, man named Harry Callahan once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” This song is punk in the way maybe an early riot grrrl band would be but more like something you’d hear out of L7 like “Shitlist” or “Fast and Frightening.” All in all ferociously elegant. Watch the video for “hitman” on YouTube and follow Little Destroyer on Spotify linked below.

Donzii’s “Rightway Highway” is an No Wave Funk Post-Punk Anthem for Non-Conformists Everywhere

Donzii is a bit of a favorite among connoisseurs of underground post-punk and its new single “Rightway Highway” with its retro style VHS glitched music video by Domingo Castillo is fine example of where the band is going with its forthcoming full-length debut (out on Grey Market Records later this year). Danny Heinze’s bent and clipped guitar lines dub style, Dennis Fuller’s minimal yet intricate and driving bass lines and of course Jenna Balfe’s nearly deadpan but theatrical and expressive vocals running through a backdrop of what looks like an amusement park in south Florida from which the trio hails. Fans of Bush Tetras will appreciate the way Donzii handles its rhythm scheme and mutant melodies as well as the poetry of the lyrics discussing a desire to escape from a wack situation where a person who wants to give back and not just take doesn’t fit in as elaborated upon and summed up with the line “if you can’t find the right way save it for another day, I’m just a runaway looking for the freeway.” It’s string of words that captures the sense that maybe until you have your plan for making your exit you can hold in your heart the sense that you are fine with being a weirdo in a place that isn’t so welcoming of them and your opportunity will come. Maybe that isn’t the actual sense of the song but music like Donzii’s resonates with that of bands like Suburban Lawns, Lithics and Ganser because it isn’t trying to fit into the confines of a narrow style and that in itself suggests it’s music for non-conformists in general with words giving comfort to their kind wherever the songs are heard. Watch the video for “Rightway Highway” on YouTube and follow Donzii at the links below.

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Ellie Madeland Begins to Uncoil Memories of Childhood Emotional Trauma on “Mother Mother”

“Mother Mother” was inspired by songwriter Ellie Madeland’s discovery of a collection of letters between her as a child and her mother written after her parents announced they were getting divorced. The resonating synth line that opens the track before Madeland asks “Mother, mother, where do I go?” establishes a mood of deep reflection. Gentle William’s production is reminiscent ever so slightly of Madonna’s 1986 song “Live to Tell” and its tone of resigned sorrow and loss. Madeland’s vulnerable and raw yet reflective vocal delivery helps the poetry of of lines like “black spots, regrets, I needed a friend in the end” hit harder as Madeland’s words create a powerful emotional memory of a childhood disrupted by the confusion of witnessing her parents split with seemingly not the level of emotional support she needed from someone she felt she could trust. The soundscape is gorgeous and that still doesn’t really blunt the pain Madeland evokes so well while tapping into primal memories that can linger for a lifetime but in exploring them and really feeling them and processing them creatively or hearing that ache in a song has a chance of uncoiling that knot in the psyche. Listen to “Mother Mother” on Soundcloud and follow Ellie Madeland at the links below.

Ellie Madeland on Facebook

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elliemadeland.com

Ruben Pol and Matthijs Pol Have a Retro-Flavored Synth Pop Dance Club Hit About Living in Your Authentic Feelings in “Comme Ça”

Ruben Pol and his brother Matthijs Pol have with the single “Comme Ça” a fast-paced synth pop song reminiscent of early Depeche Mode and Re-Flex. Maybe a touch of Flock of Seagulls. The slight distortion on the main synth line and splashes of tone accented by a subtle bass line and a touch of reverb on the vocals make it sound like something from dance club circa 1984 before the music fully entered the mainstream over the following few years. Expert drum programming or sampling lend the track a liveliness that matches the emotional urgency of Pol’s vocals as he sings about not hiding from your feelings or covering them over with a pose to fit in or to conform to arbitrary standards of personal comportment and being willing to express them with a vital authenticity because it feels more right than living with a façade of cool detachment. Listen to “Comme Ça” on Spotify and follow Ruben Pol at the links below.