SubmitHub – Page 70 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Pain in the Yeahs Deliver Synth-Driven Post-punk Song “Message of Mercy” With a Liberating Sense of Conviction

The pounding drums and distorted synths have a very stark and moody aspect at the beginning of “Message of Mercy” by Pain in the Yeahs. It’s industrial feel is reminiscent of when Nine Inch Nails covered Joy Division. The spectral synth melody fits in with a song that is both bleakly melancholic and defiantly expansive. The sound is futuristic like the kind of music that would have emerged in Oceania after the fall of the regime that propped up the image figurehead of Big Brother—all strong rhythmic lines and uncompromising and widely emotional expression but one tempered by decades of having had to be more buttoned up than is natural meaning there is a quality to the music that seems to have come up from a time of pent up incubation of a creative project with lots of development and close attention to how the beats and production would make the music come across as emphatically intentional. Listen to “Message of Mercy” on Spotify and follow Pain in the Yeahs at the links below. The sophomore album from the Virginia-based project Deep Sigh Sci-Fi released on July 21, 2023.

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Towne & Stevens’ Pastoral and Orchestral “Please Hold the Line” Captures the Unease and Exhilaration of Anticipating a Difficult Conversation

Towne & Stevens, photo courtesy the artists

Towne & Stevens is a band including Rogers Stevens and Nathan Towne of Blind Melon. Their 2023 self-titled debut is a collection of songs informed by introspective songs warm with pastoral overtones. The video for the single “Please Hold the Line” looks like something from an existential indie film starring Bill Murray but with Stevens singing into the rear view mirror looking both resigned and uneasy which fits a song seemingly about the thoughts that pass through your head when you’re on your way to meet with someone with whom you’re going to have to have a deep and potentially intense but necessary conversation because many difficult meetings with people can’t and shouldn’t be avoided but met with integrity, sensitivity and nuance. This song captures the feeling of going there not knowing how it’s going to go down. The orchestral horns and lingering guitar leads paired with minimal piano and percussion with expressive and wide-ranging vocals all come together to give the song a sense of easing the inevitable while embodying the complexity of emotions at the core of the song. Watch the video for “Please Hold the Line” on YouTube and follow Towne & Stevens at the links below.

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Cold Venus Revisited’s Darkly Mysterious Video for Its Post-punk Song “Keep Breathing” is a Love Song for the Melancholic

Cold Venus Revisited, photo courtesy the artists

The video treatment for Cold Venus Revisited’s “Keep Breathing” is a resonant complement to its shivering drones and processional rhythm. Shot in black and white with an enigmatic figure standing next to a river, images of flocks of birds flying and close-up of an eye with a ripple on water superimposed over the top. In moments its reminiscent of an incredibly gloomy Mazzy Star song with even more introspective vocals and the group says it’s a “love song for very sad people.” There’s a stark beauty to the song that is framed by a moody bass line and finely and firmly accented drums that gives it a mysterious power and sense of doomed romance that sticks with you. Watch the video for “Keep Breathing” from the Prague-based post-punk band Cold Venus Revisited and follow the group at the links provided.

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Cementation Anxiety Guides Us From Heavy Emotional Textures to a Bright and Gentle Catharsis on Ambient Drone Song “Departure”

Cementation Anxiety, photo courtesy the artist

“Departure” rushes into sonic frame with a flood of white noise flowing like a rapid wind. It feels like both an overwhelming saturation of emotional experiences and when that palpable, granular sound clears one hears a deep, melodic tone echoing in the distance like a beacon in the darkness more felt than seen. There is a dynamic to this song that makes one think of walking out of a space of dark, fog-enshrouded night toward something unknown but discernible like the haze of a city on the horizon. As the track progresses the quality of sound seems more luminous than simply a textural inundation of noise and in the end sonic miasma dissipates. Emotionally, Cementation Anxiety has crafted a piece that is indeed like a departure from weighty stasis and density of emotional resonances to one of restful if not soothing clarity, like a purge of the crush of painful memories hitting all at once and then being able to let them go. Listen to “Departure” on YouTube and follow Cementation Anxiety at the links below.

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The Boy Traveler’s “January 07 ft. Ryan Star” is a Broodingly Luminous Downtempo IDM Song That Highlights the Modern Resonance of the Reissue of His 2008 Self-Titled EP

The Boy Traveler, photo courtesy the artist

The Boy Traveler aka Daniel Jacob Sternbaum reissued his 2008 self-titled EP in July 2023 as it hadn’t been available for a decade. He’d just finished touring with Sonny Moore (aka Skrillex) during the travels for which they’d listened to numerous artists but Aphex Twin, Justice and Radiohead in particular sparked a creative direction for the four-song EP. Lead track “January 07” featured Ryan Star. The song features finely modulated beats and luminous, downtempo keyboard work and vocals that sound like someone singing while in a trance state. The lyrics are from a poem that Star had written with his vocal performance and its trailing tones serving as an unconventional framework for a song that is somewhere between an IDM track and a haunted trance composition. Sonically it has the hallmarks of a 90s and 2000s left field electronic song yet the mood and sound seem to fit in with the current era like trip-hop with more of the specter of dystopian disaster hanging over it lending it a proper tinge of desperate undertones. Listen to “January 07 ft. Ryan Star” on Spotify where you can listen to the rest of the EP and follow The Boy Traveler at the links below.

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Teen Mortgage Takes Aim at Elite Power With Grunge Punk Song “Oligarchy”

Teen Mortgage, photo courtesy the artists

Teen Mortgage take an unorthodox approach toward the subject of class and income inequality on “Oligarchy.” There’s the fuzzy and crunchy guitar sound and the stark vocal approach that provide nice bit of caustic sonic quality appropriate for the song but then the percussion is both traditional drums but also electronics and in the guitar riff there are melodic flares that accent the rhythm so that the undeniable punk style and fury here has a wider than average range of sonic expression even at its one minute fifty-one seconds length. The lyrics outline the stark class differences and the gross hypocrisy baked into an economic and political system that was designed from the beginning of the nation to favor elite power with little concessions along the way to keep the lower classes from outright overthrowing and liquidating elite power. You hear a lot of nonsense about a two-tiered justice system when an ex-president commits multitudes of crimes including seditious conspiracy or oligarchs commit acts of war and undermining national interest with their own form of unilateral executive action but Teen Mortgage in singing “because corporate flaws they make all the laws” points out what a two-tiered justice system really looks like and which has been carried out from the founding of most if not all modern nations: one set of laws and consequences for the rich and another to keep the not-rich in line with a system of punishments to which the wealthy are rarely subjected. Teen Mortgage just packed a lot of actual history into its catchy and energetic punk song with poetic concision. We all live in a corporate controlled world and have to use the tools and currencies open to us but it’s our choice whether or not to buy into it, as it were, and identify with the interests of the elite. Listen to “Oligarchy” on Spotify and follow Teen Mortgage at the links below.

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Vinyl Williams Gently Reminds Us and Himself That We Don’t Need to Surrender to What We Believes is Inevitable on Psych Pop Single “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy”

Vinyl Williams sounds like he’s free associating a lo-fi, AM radio-esque sound with psychedelic garage rock, shimmery post-punk and intricate math rock pop on “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” And in the process he drops in twists, turns and swirls like he’s live mixing analog tape and leaving in where there might be a warp and using that as a transition between stanzas of lyrics about how we psych ourselves into following a path we believe is inevitable but really there are a multitude of options open to us and we need not be committed to something that isn’t going to work for us or lead to undesirable ends. The line “We don’t have a single way to know” is the key to what Vinyl Williams is expressing here in his borderline whisper of a voice like he’s already let himself get locked into periods of tunnel vision and needs a reminder that it’s not required to keep going down that tunnel. Listen to “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” on Spotify and follow Vinyl Williams at the links below. The latest Vinyl Williams album Aeterna emerged on August 4, 2023.

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Consumer Culture’s Unhinged, Psychedelic Noise Rock Ripper “Knives” is a Caustic Fusion of Psychedelia and Straightedge

Consumer Culture packs a lot of vitriol and thrilling ill will into one minute, twelve seconds run time of “Knives.” The grinding, noisy sounds could just as well be a modern hardcore song but there’s something more frayed around the edges and unhinged and the spooky, spectral synth that haunts the last third of the song. It seethes and pulses with an insistence and the lyrics are so psychotically nihilistic it is borderline in the realm of a Brainbombs song if the latter was more into straightedge hardcore. This is a quality one hears across the concise mayhem of the rest of Consumer Culture’s latest album The Future is A Pile of Bodies (released on July 21, 2023 on The Ghost is Clear Records). It’s just too weird to be hardcore and too punk to be some experimental psychedelic rock band. Think something like Flipper sped up and edited to the bare essentials. Listen to “Knives” on Spotify and follow Consumer Culture from Baltimore at the links below.

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Springworks’ Psychedelic Folk Song “Rest Stop Painter” is an Exploration of the Sights and Sounds That Anchor Our Memories and Resonate Through Time

Springworks paired a collage of old educational videos with a song that sounds like it was written in another era in crafting “Rest Stop Painter.” The song is about images we might run into in passing in traveling in our youth or adulthood that resonate strongly with us for whatever reasons might anchor those visuals in our memory. Maybe it’s a bit of architecture, or a work of public art or merely a setting that in whatever alchemy of happenstance forms a picture that stays with you. It is these sorts of memories whether visual, in sound or through other senses that help to form our cognitive framework and the ways in which we respond to the world around us. These are the points of stimuli that are the anchors to the flow of information that makes up reality as we know it. The song itself is somewhere betwixt lo-fi psychedelic folk and outsider indiepop with minimal percussion, what sounds like melodica, synth, gently processed guitar and spare yet expressive vocals that clearly have a touch of production on them as well. And there is a quality to the song that sounds familiar and as mentioned before it has an aspect that is reminiscent of an earlier period in pop music development precisely because the lo-fi aesthetic is so well executed it draws across decades with stylistic touchstones much like the imagery in the video and the lyrics that anchor the song in the lived experience of being drawn to the points of memory that endure with us the most. Watch the video for “Rest Stop Painter” on YouTube and follow Springworks at the links provided.

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Phosphone’s Dark Dream Pop Single “Black Sheep” is a Song About Shedding Bad Habits of Being

There is a delicate urgency that drives Phosphene’s “Black Sheep.” Guitar and percussion keep the melody and rhythm lean and spacious as Rachel Frankel sings in warm yet melancholic tones a story of almost folkloric dimensions of shame and oppression and in the end a memory of a moment of escaping from that dynamic or situation born of a legacy of familial and cultural indoctrination and/or resulting internalized behaviors. The song hits like folk-inflected, dark dream pop and its clear lines of melody shimmer in moments with the energy of shaking off a momentary chill or the echoes of bad habits coming to haunt your present. When the instrumentation of the song interact like weather phenomena across the song it brings a physicality to a song in a style that might otherwise feel as ethereal as it generates a lightly bracing mood. Watch the evocative black and white video for “Black Sheep” on YouTube and follow the Portland, Oregon-based band at the links below. Phosphene’s new album Transmute releases on September 15, 2023.