SubmitHub – Page 59 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Alunawolf and HyperXa Infuse Hazy Hyperpop Single “Like You Hate Me” With a Sultry and Vibrant Sense of Yearning and Desire

Alunawolf worked with producer HyperXa on the sultry hyper-pop inflected single “Like You Hate Me.” The singer’s vocals sound swim in dark atmospheres shimmering with light motes of tone and swells of luminous melody as she relates hours spent yearning for her lover. The lyrics express a certain kind of tension and desire where we hear how she’s reluctant to let herself feel such a heightened level of desire for someone. And thus the lyric “Love you like you hate me” makes a certain kind of sense contrasting those feelings that for many people are two sides of the same coin of emotional intensity. And in lines like “Love you like an animal/eat you like a cannibal” we hear that base level of attraction that can take you by surprise in a way you can resist because it’s not rational or go with it. Alunawolf in this song decides to go with instinct and pleasure. HyperXa’s beats and layers of atmosphere give the song a futuristic feel like it’s from a time and place that should have come to pass had our civilization taken a different path the past few decades and a club hit for a time that should have been now in a world free of austerity. And it’s that spirit the song delivers. Fans of Dua Lipa and Charli XCX may find some of that emotional and sonic kinship here. Listen to “Like You Hate Me” on Spotify and follow Alunawolf on Instagram.

“A Fallen Angel Weeping” by Lost Ark is Like Moments Spent in a Neglected Gallery of Noise Generating Sculptures in the Dead of Night

With the soft shimmer of crystalline chimes and an enigmatic, mechanical beat and melancholic strings to usher in Lost Ark’s “A Fallen Angel Weeping,” the song feels more like a cinematic experience than one more musical. The percussive details convey a depth and distance like what you’re hearing is the sound of a gallery for sound generating sculptures with its own soundtrack so that the assembled sounds create their own complementary orchestra of noise. When the beat stops a little more than three and a half minutes into the song it’s like some essential feature has left the gallery and the sounds wind down with a descending drone, a single bell tone seeming to count down on notes on a scale and in the distance we hear a voice repeating the words “falling down” before it too disappears and later on a voice with an aspect like words put through a reverse delay signals the end of the song. In retrospect its a bit like a spooky and haunted Art of Noise song and one not attached to any particular genre of music that demands and commands attention on its own terms. Listen to “A Fallen Angel Weeping” on Spotify. The Lost Ark compilation Primus Impunctus from which the song is drawn became available on November 6, 2023.

Jack Quinn’s Expansive Ambient Song “Poppies” is the Sound of the Mind Stirring Slowly to Full Wakefulness

Jack Quinn’s ambient composition “Poppies” draws your attention immediate by evoking a sense of something mysterious yet calming coming into your consciousness perhaps unnoticed in your everyday life for some time. The crystalline piano echoes of melody hang in the cloudy drone like faint rays of sunshine through a springtime fog but experienced on a rare warm day in late winter. It sounds like something opening up in your brain after a long period of feeling like you’ve been coasting through moods of being adrift in your own life. It is the sound of a manifesting clarity found in a stretch of tranquility in a time of daily disruptions and angst. The drawn out sounds trailing into the distance and the swells of guitar meshing effortlessly through the piano is like a calm awakening. Fans of Eno’s early 80s period in particular his collaborations with avant-garde pianist Harold Budd will resonate deeply with this song. Listen to “Poppies” on Spotify and follow Jack Quinn at the links below. Look for Quinn’s new album Music For Painting due out on December 8, 2023.

Jack Quinn on Instagram

Middle Sattre Exposes and Exorcises Some of the Contradictions and Gross Hypocrisies of a Theocratic Culture on Starkly Gorgeous Ambient Folk Song “Pornography”

In titling the song “Pornography” Hunter Prueger of Middle Sattre references a couple of instances of adults sexualizing a child in the name of modesty or chastity. Setting the these stories against a backdrop of acoustic wall of sound gives it a gentle yet intense quality that conveys a sense of compassion for the victim of that kind of attention. We hear melodic drones that sit in the background and give an evolving emotional undercurrent to the music but when it combines with the horns at the end it is starkly chilling playing over the recording of a middle aged man lecturing young women about the way they dress and how it can attract unwanted attention, the sort he is giving out. It’s a haunting yet poignant telling of a small sampling of the sorts of situations Prueger saw coming up queer and Mormon. That tension informs the forthcoming Middle Sattre album Tendencies due out on February 9, 2024. Fans of Elliott Smith’s fragile and emotionally refined songwriting and Microphones’ fusion of avant-garde folk and ambient soundscapes will surely find “Pornography” fascinating as well as the rest of Tendencies. Listen to “Pornography” on Spotify and follow Middle Sattre at the links below.

Middle Sattre on Facebook

Middle Sattre on Instagram

Elena Ross’ “With You” is a Beautifully Cinematic Pop Passage Into a Dark Forest of Tragic Romance

Elena Ross begins “With You” like a walk in the forest with the sounds of birds and the sounds of twigs breaking underfoot and a brush of bell sounds. When her clear and melodious vocals come in with a spare piano figure underneath it’s like coming into a clearing and having a moment to take in a moment of absolute tranquility and the time to indulge reliving a memory, a cherished moment like a living daydream. The piano melody expands and strings enter with a touch of synth tone to lend the song a touch of heartbreak at simply having to remember a fond time with someone you love but holding onto that yearning. The song was inspired by Slavic folk fairy tales and sonically dwells in dark, haunted woods minus a sense of menace. But it does retain a sense of tragic romance and the cinematic. Listen to “With You” on Spotify and follow Elena Ross at the links below.

Elena Ross LinkTree

Elena Ross on Instagram

Elena Ross website

CATBEAR’s Lush and Romantic “Higher” is a Synthpop Song About the Virtues of Undistracted Conversation

CATBEAR’s “Higher” is inspired by a time before video calls when people only heard a voice on the other end of a phone and you only had words and your imagination in connecting with people. A time when maybe you would actually talk with friends and lovers for long periods of time late into the night discussing whatever came to mind without the distraction of visuals or the pressure to share anything. Your focus could and would be just on that moment and the undeniable emotional bond of it almost as pure as that could be. The music has a retro synthpop feel with the hazy synths and infinite horizons that matches well with the romance inherent to the song’s lyrics and concept with soulful and soothing vocals that are lush and introspective that lead you through a journey into a moment of emotional intimacy and deep affection, something that seemed more attainable decades ago and could be again if everyone involved were committed to not being on call or on demand to the social and economic forces of our current era even if only for a night or a day. CATBEAR makes that seem not only possible but inherently desirable with this song. Listen to “Higher” on Spotify and follow London synthpop duo CATBEAR at the links provided.

Bad Veins Imbues Synthpop Single “Wendy” With a Powerful Sense of Regret, Heatache and Hope

After eight years of no obvious new music issued into the world Cincinnati, Ohio-based indie-pop band Bad Veins gives us “Wendy” from its new album Imposter (released on December 1, 2023 via Dynamite Music). The visual concept of the video (as directed by Cat Rider) for song seems to be one of a man watching old VHS camcorder footage of the titular character to whom the yearning and melancholic lyrics are directed. He stands against the screen singing as the images wash over him as the memories swirl in his mind and break his heart. It sounds like the relationship was one currently on a break because our narrator had a bit of an emotional disruption. The lines “One thing I know/If I hang around/The undertow will take me down/Wendy I grow more afraid of drifting further everyday/I never meant to come undone/I never thought I’d miss someone like I miss you, Wendy” pack a lot of meaning into such a small space. The song has that kind of energy like John Waite had on his 1982 hit “Change” but the sounds are the more hazy synthpop of that era and it perfectly suits the mood of regret and hope that songwriter Benjamin Davis captures so poignantly in this song. Has the narrator ruined things in that bond forever with his mental health issues or is there a more positive resolution? Who can say but the heartache is palpable and immediate and that’s what makes the song so compelling because so many of us have been there at some point in our lives. Watch the video for “Wendy” on YouTube and follow Bad Veins at the links below.

Bad Veins on TikTok

Bad Veins on Facebook

Bad Veins on Twitter

Bad Veins on Instagram

Bad Veins on Threads

Beige Banquet’s Angular and Urgent Post-punk Single “Animals” is Comment on How We’re All the Same While Distressed

Beige Banquet, photo courtesy the artists

London-based post-punk band Beige Banquet is set to release its debut album in 2024 as a full band and its first recorded in a studio to capture its full live forcefulness and sonics beyond the limitations of the bedroom recordings of its earlier releases. The first single of the album is the frenetic and headlong “Animals.” The song creates a powerful emotional resonance with its propulsive bass line and urgent, noisy, searing guitar shimmer, splayed and finely accented drums with Tom Brierley’s vocal lines as descriptive statements about how at our base all humans are animals that respond to environmental pressures and stimuli in a similar fashion especially under pressure and in a state of stress and discomfort. Fans of the more discordant end of shame and the angular side of JOHN (TIMES TWO) will likely find some musical spiritual kindred here. Listen to “Animals” on Spotify and follow Beige Banquet at the links below.

Beige Banquet on Bandcamp

Beige Banquet on Instagram

“Recent Mineral” by Church Chords is an Enchanting and Mysterious Blend of Krautrock, Bossa Nova and Noise

Church Chords’ forthcoming album elvis, he was Schlager (out February 26, 2024 on Otherly Love Records) sounds like an ambitious, experimental post-punk album years in the making with numerous collaborators that songwriter and producer Stephen Buono brought together after the manner of a hip-hop producer. And you get a taste of what’s in store with the single “Recent Mineral” with the quietly sultry vocals of Genevieve Artadi who sings in Portuguese. What are the lyrics about? Might have to ask someone that understands the language or wait for the full release of the record. But you don’t need to know in order to really be taken in by the finely accented percussion and hypnotic arrangements of texture tones, slashes of echoing, stretching, warping guitar altogether reminiscent of Young Marble Giants, Faust and an abstract Bossa Nova band mixing it up to make a song that is entrancing and mysterious and you wouldn’t think overmuch about if it was in a movie like something Jim Jarmusch or Sofia Coppola would produce.

Church Chords on YouTube

Church Chords on Instagram

Unverkalt Conjures a Haunted Sense of Menace on the Gritty and Darkly Atmospheric “Mr. Monster”

In the writing of its new album A Lump of Death: A Chaos of Dead Lovers, Greek experimental metal band Unverkalt took its cues from events of the 1970s involving cults, criminal acts and serial killers that seemed to be in the news on the regular in that decade. The songs have a darkly haunted quality and its atmospheric parts have a distorted and gritty quality that lends a menacing air of the macabre to every track with vocals that are part epic and melodic and at times reminiscent of Cranes. It’s truly a different kind of record in the world of heavy music and doesn’t fit in the usual subgenres. The single “Mr. Monster” begins with a buzzing, hovering sound that might be a synth or a looped guitar part. But then hanging guitar chords come in with softly pounding drums and vocals delivering a story that seems to be that of a person who feels conflicted and yet eerily accepting of someone who commits unspeakable acts against others and feels compelled against their will to engage in lethal behavior. The pulsing synth sound in the song hits like a flickering light in a dark room illuminating the activities with the starkness of a strobe imposing a visual sense of slow motion. And the song does sit suspended like that for moments before it floods with all the guitars, vocals, drums and electronic sounds in a dramatic denouement. Fans of SubRosa/The Keening/The Otolith, Faetooth and Windhand will greatly appreciate Unverkalt’s unorthodox and creative approach to crafting evocative heavy music. Listen to “Mr. Monster” on Spotify and follow Unverkalt at the links below. A Lump of Death: A Chaos of Dead Lovers was released on October 20, 2023 via Argonautica Records on digtal download, streaming, vinyl and CD.