On its new single “Breathe,” Helsinki’s Skinjobs injects some more grit into its bright, atmospheric melodies. Fitting for a song that explores the nature of a relationship with complicated dynamics that go beyond the boundaries of the traditional relationship and traditional conceptualizations of what relationships should be. Katja Laaksonen’s vocals are commanding and controlled, directed and pointed in deflating the hypocrisy of conventional sexual mores through highlighting how people often really live while articulating the rawness and undeniability of attraction. It’s a subject often written about in rock music but rarely so candidly and unapologetically. The fiery music bursting about the words and raw noise searing the edges of the song are the perfect manifestation of the lyrics. Listen to “Breathe” on Soundcloud, watch the lyric video on YouTube and follow Skinjobs at the links provided.
The dusky, downtempo synth melody on “5 AM” that is the backdrop to KYENORD’s Linn Östlund’s resigned vocals evokes that feeling when you’ve been up all night thinking too much about a tough decision long considered to end a relationship. The sense impressions are vivid with words about how the lover in question is always cold because their circulation is worse than that of the narrator and that they’re “holding me but it never helps.” The sample of raindrops and the way the tones steam into the fog of night before the dawn can interrupt the introspective and mournful but weary mood that has paradoxically allowed a moment of emotional clarity to become undeniable. The experience depicted seems so specific in the details but perhaps relatable to anyone who has been in a long term relationship that seems to no longer make sense and all of the things that should have been warning signs that it wouldn’t work out drift into your psyche one night making your soul restless deep into the night. “5 AM” is the first track from the new KYENORD EP Mellow Drama and you can listen to the song on Soundcloud and the rest of the EP on Spotify.
A cosmic wind as white noise pitched to have an abstractly tonal quality ushers in the intertwining lines of distorted, textural synth and phasing melody of “Quasar” by Mingo. The oscillating undertones suggest a trip through the depths of space with bright objects giving off even repeating signals that intersect with other signals like an intergalactic symphony. Utilizing a similar structure and dynamic as mid-70s Tangerine Dream, Mingo uses loops and sequencing and adding effects in real time to take the raw material of electronic sounds and using the processing end as a compositional tool. Did he take a mathematical model of an actual quasar and use it to craft an element of the music like the rhythmic, gritty synth part? Maybe not, but it sounds as though Mingo modeled various phenomena in space and orchestrated their character together for this transporting and playful track. Listen to “Quasar” on Soundcloud and follow Mingo, a contributor to NPR music programs Hearts of Space and Star’s End, at the links below.
Will Samson’s album Paralanguage, due out December 6 through Wichita/PIAS, was inspired by his first and only experiment with microdosing psilocybin in the wake of his father’s death in 2012. The songwriter fell into a long spell of despair and psychic unmoorment and having learned about the controversial use of psilocybin as a treatment for persistent psychological trauma he underwent a program of taking in the substance under controlled conditions. The lead single from the album “Ochre Alps” features nearly falsetto vocals and strings that are at once doleful and soothing as if releasing pain through the musical equivalent of sublimation. It sounds like motes of early morning sunlight and waking feeling lighter than you did the night before. Musically it sits at the intersections of folk, modern classical and indie pop. The accompanying music video features two blindfolded figures that are figuring out how to interact with their environment with a new set of parameters with which to do so. It is symbolic, perhaps, of Samson’s own experience with his wife in learning to reconnect with the world on different terms with some of the anguish of his loss evaporated in the light of a new kind of mental clarity. Listen to “Ochre Alps” on Soundcloud, watch the poetic video on YouTube and follow Will Samson at the links provided.
The pacing of State Park Ranger’s “The Will (featuring Cowbaby)” feels like an evolving sketch with details added as the picture and melody develop organically. It sounds almost as though we’re hearing the song being written as it goes, guided by an intuitive process and deep listening between the artists. It’s an impressionistic compositional style that subverts most current trends of songwriting in the realm of folk or indie alternative. There is no verse chorus interchange, rather the song’s progress travels in one direction exploring the Nietzschean concept of “the will” in the words but fleshing it out musically in an abstract form of indie pop like an even more subdued and introspective Neutral Milk Hotel. We hear familiar sounds but employed and set out in a way that dares not to follow the same musical paths we’ve been conditioned to hearing when that palette of sounds is utilized. That alone makes this song a fascinating listen as it does end and concludes but doesn’t resolve in a conventional sense making it similar in a way to some of Nietzsche’s enigmatic epigrams. Listen to the song on Spotify and follow State Park Rangers at the links provided.
Peter Arvidson’s “Stand Your Ground” sounds like a mixture of 80s popular music weaving together jangle/college rock, synth pop and anthemic New Wave. Some unusual mix of The Smithereens, Let’s Active and A Flock of Seagulls. Its electronics bring together chiptune elements with more vintage synths melodies to give it a retro-modern vibe so that it would be difficult to identify its musical era except for the fact that pretty much no one was mixing all those styles in songwriting until recent years. And yet, the song doesn’t feel kitschy, its message about self-empowerment and staying focused on our goals in the face of challenges sincere. One imagines this song in a current independent cinema comedy story about heroic nerds in an unironic fashion the way the music of Survivor was employed in a 1980s Sylvester Stallone vehicle. Listen to “Stand Your Ground” on Spotify and follow Peter Arvidson at the links below.
“Body Origami” by the duo paintbrush sounds like the theme music for a spa in some alternate universe where one’s health is treated holistically with an integrated physical and emotional approach. Perfect for a song from an EP called Wellness Package. When you walk in, soft lighting and calming, hazy melodies and lush beats float through the air conveying a sense of non-invasive intimacy. The main music-making instrument for the song is the Synplant which is a soft synth that is designed to allow your musical ideas evolve in natural directions suggested by your composition. The song is a frank but tender and delicate love song that uses the metaphor of origami for the art of consensual love in the physical and emotional sense. In an era where comedian Robert Klein joked there is no double entendre, just entendre, there is a classiness in paintbrush’s charming take on the subject matter. You can to “Body Origami” on Soundcloud and follow paintbrush at any of the links below where you will find a route to check out more of Wellness Package.
Georgia Weber and The Sleeved Hearts, photo courtesy the artists
The translucent imagery of Georgia Weber and The Sleeved Hearts in Sonny Ratcliff’s video for the band’s new single “Parachute” is the perfect visual analogue to the song and its themes. Going from ethereal introspection to strong rhythms and a more determined pace “Parachute” is a song about learning to build your own means of keeping from going into your own life’s freefall. It’s about being transparent with yourself and honest, observing the layers of distance you make for yourself and your own truth and then being willing to reach within for the capacity to not just float with the currents but to weather them and steer your own path. Weber talks about visualizing this path and making a conscious choice to make the life you want rather than the one that most readily and easily presents itself. The intricate melodies and classical sensibility accomplished with bandmates Kenji Herbert on guitar and Nathan Ellman Bell on drums finds Weber striking a tricky balance of delicate yet directed and compassionate rather than self-coddling. Watch the video on YouTube and follow Georgia Weber and The Sleeved Hearts at the links provided. Also look out for the group’s debut full length Keeping It Real due out October 4, 2019.
Rather than offer the tired bootstrap type talk favored by people with no real understanding of other humans, on its latest single “Bones,” The Bergamot offers a poetic insight into personal struggle without platitudes. The opening lines sets the stage for the rest of the song with a simple metaphor of how can you really get up or get anything done as a human without the internal emotional framework to do so. What do you do when things most of us take for granted aren’t there? The metaphor could stand for being in a state of depression, addiction, chronic illness or any state of mind and/or body that puts us in a place where we don’t or don’t feel like we have the internal support to get up and going on our own without help. What the song doesn’t do is patronize in its hushed, melodic atmospheres. It doesn’t offer pithy, mealy-mouthed wisdom. But most importantly it offers an attempt at understanding without judgment or a sense that the songwriters feel like they have it figured out. The Bergamot’s Nathaniel Paul Hoff has some experience with the subject matter as his brother attempted suicide nearly three years ago following a stint in rehab. Rather than take an ableist perspective, Hoff and the band crafted a song that is flush with emotion but also a message of taking it easy on yourself even as you try to get and do better and to not have unrealistic expectations about where you are so that you don’t set impossible bars to reach. It’s essentially a message of self-kindness and one that is deft and avoiding the pitfalls, the hubris and the bravado that comes with too many attempts by people doing well or with healthy coping mechanisms trying to help others whose circumstances they don’t understand and how one can be winnowed to nothing inside with nothing to snap back with. The Bergamot with this song seem to suggest a program of patience, gentleness and active listening to what your body and mind are telling you. Listen to “Bones” on Soundcloud or on the recently released album Mayflies, which released on September 19, 2019.
Blind The Thin King’s aim is to make music that sounds like something from a lost or extra-terrestrial civilization or found by a far future society with no known cultural connection to our own—to make something for which the social and technological context is unknown. So the project’s latest single “Cloak of Misanthrope” comes across like the discovery of a music storage device that contained the information throughout an optical storage matrix that was found in pieces and through which we’re stimulating the crystalline structure to elicit sounds and we get a fascinating collage of tones, textures and a rhythm not based on anything normal but out of the cadence of seemingly random sonic data. Instead of a Hari Seldon type figure giving us the finest music of the era from the arts equivalent of Foundation, we get something like an even more corrupted, more randomized flow of sounds than the Elvis Presley hologram performance from Blade Runner 2049. It’s supposed to be challenging, it’s maybe even supposed to be off putting but there’s something about this track that keeps you listening, a sonic puzzle that tantalizes because some of the pieces are missing but if you pay close enough attention you will figure out the unifying element. Perhaps the connectors can be found across the Four Hymns LP from which “Cloak of Misanthrope” is taken. But even if not, “Cloak of Misanthrope” has an appeal similar to artifacts of ancient civilizations we don’t fully understand or the electronic transmissions from numbers stations. Yet there is a strange and haunting coherency to the song that is undeniable. Listen on Soundcloud and follow Blind The Thin King further there as well.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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