SubmitHub – Page 77 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Urbanistic’sDream’s Synthwave Pop Song “Time Is Now” Encourages Us to Find Joy Through the Tough Times Because All We Are Promised Is The Present

Urbanistic’sDream, photo courtesy the artist

Alina Skiffska wrote “Time Is Now” for her Urbanistic’sDream project in Kyiv during the air alerts and blackouts in 2022. But the synthpop song is reminiscent of something that might have come out of the 1980s with the processed guitar sound and fusion of R&B and what was then called New Wave. And because of that it has a spirit and sound of unvarnished hopefulness and scrappy attitude. The words are forward looking, “Time is now/to be daring/Time is now, Time is now/forget your failing/The future is here in these neon lights.” Its bright melodies and upbeat rhythms infused with a steadfast energy is fitting for a song in which the songwriter has adopted an attitude of not being held back by the past or being discouraged by setbacks or defeats because one has to be in it for the long haul when you’re striving for not just your freedom but your very lives. Even without the context of the artist being from Ukraine and based out of Kyiv “Time Is Now” has the quality of a classic modern electronic pop song that encourages one to live your best life and push through your challenges even in times when you’re not feeling it because you’re living for a time when things won’t be so tough and and you can enjoy yourself even when they are because often enough now is all we are guaranteed. Listen to “Time Is Now” on Spotify and follow Urbanistic’sDream at the links provided.

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Stunts Breathe Life Into a Troubled Relationship Through Speaking the Poetic Truth on Baroque Pop Single “Sticky”

Stunts conjure an era of music in its single “Sticky” where cabaret folk and vulnerable indie singer-songwriter sensibilities seemed to complement each other perfectly. Think late 90s and early 2000s America and Europe. But Stunts hail from a city south of Sydney, Australia called Wollongong yet Matty and Racey have roots in that aforementioned musical time period and bring an emotional authenticity to a song that gets very raw and real about what it is to live as a human in a time of great turmoil and challenges, in which an ambient angst and anxiety and yes exhaustion in navigating it all can take an underlying toll on everyone and their relationships which can at the best of times be a work in progress. With spare spare guitar, male and female vocals in resonant harmony and taking lines throughout, “Sticky” gets to it with the opening lines “We’re fucking numb/And I come and I come, for fun and I’m done/We’ve been fucking sad, and I’m bad/And you’re mad and I’m sad because I’m bad.”Without having to spell it out explicitly the songwriters poetically capture how because you want things to work out sometime you will put aside the discomfort and the hard questions and conversations until you’re spent. But in this song those coping mechanisms and real feelings and lack thereof (a problem in its own right) are expressed until the key question comes up, “Are we ok? Not the easiest thing to say/Are we ok?/I think we’re ok, today.” And the answer in the melancholic outro chorus is that by being honest with how things feel in the moment that it’s okay to not be okay, as the modern expression goes. The song could be incredibly sad but its rhythms and swells of sound bringing in percussion and a more lively guitar riff express a will to get through these times now that the truth can be expressed without feeling like it has to be hidden and maybe, just maybe, this partnership is worth sticking it out. Listen to “Sticky” on Spotify, where you can listen to the group’s new album Housework (released April 7, 2023) and follow Stunts at the links below.

Robots of the 80s Give Us a Glimpse Into the Wondrous World of Sentient Musical Machines From Its Album Chance of a Lifetime in the Video For “I Want To Be”

Robots of the 80s, photo courtesy the artists

Robots of the 80s introduce us to a wondrous yet dystopian vision of science fiction future in the video for “I Want To Be.” The song with its saturated synth melody and strong rhythms is almost like a sequel to Kraftwerk’s 1978 song “The Robots” with a more modern compositional sensibility and decades of the development of dance beats informing the sequencing of the song. We see the robot in a factory dancing among other robots on an kind of assembly line but this robot attains self-awareness and depicted in both full graphics and the more white outlines in wire framing style the robot speaks to how it wants to be a robot and doesn’t want to be a man but that it wants to be free, presumably to be what a robot is and what it can be free of needing to identify with the human context of existence that instigated it coming into being. The video designed, directed, animated and produced by Lorenz Foth with a robot design for the main character Rael by Dr. Chao Wang is both retrofuturistic and of the moment in terms of how the animations manifest more like an advanced MMO rather than something that would have emerged in the 1980s, project name aside, but with the aesthetics of that decade. It’s a fascinating watch and listen and the first single from the band’s new album Chance of a Lifetime which released on June 2, 2023. Watch the video for “I Want to Be” on YouTube and follow Robots of the 80s at the links below.

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Madam Bandit Traverses the Path of Working Through Arbitrary Social Standards in the Striking Music Video for Vulnerable Indie Pop Song “Happiness”

Madam Bandit strikes a particularly intimate tone in “Happiness.” It has a spare beat, minimal guitar and hushed synths with the focus on her journal entry style lyrics. In the music video we see her putting on makeup and then removing it in time with the arc of the story of the lyrics as she goes from the true self to the artificial appearance and back to embracing an expanded, genuine self. The songwriter had apparently grown up in a strict religious community with its dictates on behavior and appearance and left it and in doing so there’s the risk of feeling alone and disconnected from the world you knew. But the song works beyond the specific context because it’s one about personal liberation and we all go through our own paths to self-discovery and psychological liberation in life if we’re fortunate enough to come to the realization that we don’t need to conform to strict standards if we don’t want to and we can find out place in the world and we don’t have to tie our own sense of self and ability to experience happiness to fitting in with a strict religious community’s mores or those of the mainstream society marketed to us endlessly in mass media and culture. Madam Bandit’s poignantly haunting song reflects the fragility and vulnerability of the uncertainty and insecurity one can feel before attaining the self-knowledge and experience to know there’s much more to the world and to life than where and how you were raised and how you’ve enculturated yourself to conform to arbitrary standards not that many people care about either and often actively or at least passively dislike. Watch the video for “Happiness” on YouTube and follow Madam Bandit at the links below.

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Girl As Wave Projects an Aspirational Will to a Better and More Fulfilling Life on Synthpop Song “Future Version”

Girl As Wave threads together musical ideas of the past with production methods of the present in crafting the synth pop aesthetic of “Future Version.” Reminiscent of early, electroclash period Ladytron and early Boy Harsher, the song expresses a yearning for something better, “always searching for the future version” of her self, of her life but it always seems “out of reach” yet there is a sense in the song that she isn’t completely sure what this vision of a more fulfilling tomorrow and person to become might be whether “someone on TV” or “someone in my head” and you hear the weary frustration of that in the song but also a will to keep going and in the song’s saturated tones and upbeat melody there is more than a glimmer of hope for something for which to strive rather than no hope at all. Listen to “Future Version” on Spotify and follow Girl As Wave at the links provided.

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Janna Pelle Indulges the Comforting Reverie of the Lingering Romantic Feelings for a Lost Love on “Know Too Much”

There is a hazy softness to the synths in Janna Pelle’s “Know Too Much” that is matched in the spacious production on her vocals in the beginning of the song And repeated again later on into the song to express musically the lyrics in which the singer reflects on being haunted by the memories of a lost love. But this granular tone clears up in the part of the song near the beginning when the fog of lingering love for someone in her past parts for a moment only to be enveloped by the spell of romantic reverie once again because even though it’s past-tense there is something comforting and pleasant in revisiting that feeling when you know you can step out of it at the proper time. The finely accented drums act as an emotional anchor throughout the dreamlike atmosphere of the song and it is the percussion that cuts through with the greatest clarity throughout. The title of the song also suggests a self-awareness with indulging feelings of tenderness and affection for someone you had to leave behind. Listen to “Know Too Much” on Spotify and follow the songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, drummer and producer Janna Pelle at the links below.

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King Black Acid’s Video for “Kissed at the Cemetery” is a Darkly Fantastical Yet Sweet Telling of an Unlikely Love Story

King Black Acid, photo courtesy the artist

The stop motion/claymation music video for King Black Acid’s “Kissed at the Cemetery” with the images a cemetery, the vampire guitarist/singer, aliens coming down to harass and then put into coffins is the perfect storybook presentation for the song’s lyrics. Musically it’s a gentle, psychedelic pop number with a luminous guitar melody and paired vocals that are both elevated and whimsical that fans of Broncho and The Flaming Lips will appreciate though it has a more lighthearted pop touch. The surreal lyrics are about true love and the perils of the forces of evil coming to threaten it. In this case the character of The Devil so maybe the story is set in a universe where our protagonist is in uneasy cahoots with the Horned One. But whatever the case, as if a song has to make strict narrative sense anyway, apparently the titular cemetery is a party on the weekend and marijuana gives our narrator special powers and an unlikely true love wins out in the end. Watch the highly creative video for “Kissed at the Cemetery” on YouTube and connect with the long-running space rock/psychedelic band King Black Acid at the links below. The project’s latest album The Rainbow Lodge released on April 7, 2023.

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“Smoke” by Leen is a Dream Pop Love Song Warmed by the Passion of Culturally Forbidden Expressions of Love

“Smoke” is a song based on the forbidden love stories that were common in Leen’s home country of Syria. It smolders with the subsumed passions that one often had to keep to oneself in observance of the laws of a “traditional” culture and the norms that reinforced those laws in the everyday, outward behaviors of people going about their day. But the drifty guitar melodies and Leen’s tenderly warm vocals and the sheer spaciousness of the song gives the impression of wide open possibilities in one’s imagination and in the spirit of love when people want to make it happen and find the ways to consummate it in spite of arbitrary customs that place barriers between people that never need to be there. It’s the kind of romantic dream pop song that teems with the energy and spirit of its chosen subject. Listen to “Smoke” on Spotify and connect with the Sweden-based artist at the links provided.

Night Movies Crafts a Deep Sense of Spiritual Displacement and Yearning on “Enough”

“Enough” by Night Movies is a soundtrack in search of a worthy existential dystopian science fiction film in which it can be placed. The distorted droning and slow-twisting soundscapes and sense of desperate menace mixed with desolation whorls around Anna Papadimitriou’s (of Hawxx) clear and evocative vocals calling out yearning for confirmation of being enough, being worthy of all the dignity and respect all people should have but articulating a deep felt sense of not knowing if that is the case, intoning a haunted sense of displacement at one’s core. Musically it’s reminiscent of something by Swans or Growing with the heightened mood of spiritual exploration and catharsis and ends peacefully without a clear cut mood of resolution which is a more brave creative choice than one hears in a lot of modern music. Listen to “Enough” on Bandcamp and follow Night Movies at the links provided. The single is paired with a industrial drone cover of “The End” by The Doors comparable to the dark expanses of Patti Smith circa Radio Ethiopia.

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Amos Waits Floats Through a Slow Moving Parade of the Shades of Romantic Possibilities on Dream Pop Single “Berlin Blue”

The sound of rain, tinkling of glasses and ghostly synth tones wafting through before lingering splashes of melody bring us into Amos Waits’ “Berlin Blue.” It has an early morning feel, or one of being up way long into the night. When Waits’ vocals begin it’s like a reflective narrative to self on recent events and overthinking what happened when meeting someone new with whom one feels a real connection but mixed signals either real or imagined are contemplated and examined for what’s real and what might be wishful thinking and giving into one’s fantasies that aren’t rooted in something mutual. The details tonal sweep of the song is a little like inhabiting a dream where the ghosts and veils of a life that could be but may not be float by as tantalizing possibilities if only they weren’t delusions and yet holding on to these phantoms of joy isn’t all bad even if it amounts to nothing because having nothing can often feel worse. Listen to “Berlin Blue” on Spotify and follow Amos Waits on Instagram.