SubmitHub – Page 95 – Queen City Sounds and Art

Bad Flamingo Tread Close to the Edge of a Good Time on the Fringe of Its Expiration Date on “Fiddle”

Bad Flamingo, photo courtesy the artists

It’s really astonishing how Bad Flamingo delivers such stylistic diversity across its prolific songwriting career. Always inventive, always incisive and creative lyrics. And “Fiddle” is no exception. Employing a simple acoustic guitar riff and narrowly executed vocals like a Laurel Canyon era song but written by Gordon Lightfoot it’s a song about opening oneself up to someone who isn’t so good for your life but who has an appeal that gets past your defenses and for a time you indulge their trespasses because there’s something about their energy you find enjoyable for the moment. The chorus lines with “right now just play me like a fiddle” suggest there is a complicity in and awareness of the manipulation to which one is allowing into your sphere but no guilt because “I wanna pin your clothes on the line, I want to pin your body under mine.” Our narrator of this story song is getting something she wants out of the situation and is willing to put up with nonsense until she’s through with it. We find out in lyric “giving you my hands, finger the middle,” surely a deft and creative turn of phrase, that even in the acceptance is a willingness to drop a fool when the time to move on arrives. Listen to “Fiddle” on Spotify and follow the talented duo of Bad Flamingo at the links provided.

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Orbital Returns With a Spooky Yet Danceable Reworking of a Folkloric Childhood Pandemic Classic With “Ringa Ringa (feat. The Mediæval Bæbes)”

Orbital took an old pandemic classic “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” and set it to ultra modern electronic music with “Ringa Ringa (feat. The Mediæval Bæbes)” but with a music video that hearkens back to the era of the bubonic plague of the Fourteenth Century though the song has long been debunked as dating back that far or even to the Great Plague of England in the Seventeenth Century. It is nevertheless a haunting song with a modern resonance, in no small part due to the ghostly vocals of The Mediæval Bæbes, that Orbital and video director Luke Losey and producer Lindsey Bowden and the various collaborators brought to dramatic fruition. With plague doctors and animal-masked attendants, a ritual master and the figure of death the typically playful and luminously melodic music of Orbital is infused with a spooky energy that truly reinforces the haunted undertones Orbital seems to have intended. Watch the video for “Ringa Ringa (feat. The Mediæval Bæbes)” on YouTube and follow Orbital at the links below. The legendary UK duo’s new album Optical Delusion releases on February 17 via London Records.

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McDead’s “Old Sparky” is Like a Modern Library Music Companion to a Retro Science Fiction Film

One might be excused for having a different set of expectations with the title of McDead’s “Old Sparky.” It’s not a nostalgic punk song or pop ballad tribute to an old pet or car. It’s like an alternative soundtrack to Fantastic Voyage and the sound of fluid churning and flowing around you as the spectral synth stream distorts and stretches in tone counted out by a simple melodic arpeggio that shifts throughout the trip. It all sounds bright and shiny and enigmatic. It has that library music quality and thus the vintage science fiction film soundtrack comparison and thus out of step with normal time as it was obviously crafted using modern methods yet captures the aesthetic essence of a bygone era. Listen to “Old Sparky” on Spotify and follow McDead at the links below.

The Deep Layers of Progressive Drone and Abstract Melody in YULYSEUS’ “In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts” is Like a Shared Journey Through the Chambers of the Subconscious

For a full minute of YULYSEUS’ “In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts” it sounds like you’ve woken up in an immense indoor space with the sounds of motion and life in the distance. But as the track progresses, abstract melodic drones ease in and more concrete if difficult to identify sounds that reveal themselves to perhaps be the squealing of a train on a track at a station, some steam letting out now and then. Like the vehicle just pulled in and waiting on you to stir from barely conscious quiescence to wakefulness. And the roiling arc of drones is on a slow ascent as though tracing the sunrise. Distant sounds and those more up close incandesce with a hazy resolve that recedes as the sound of the track takes on more clarity and a simple synth progression glimmers toward the end, traveling back and forth with a gently panning effect like the sensation of your brain emerging from the ethereal energy of dreams into a wakeful silence. It feels like a journey but one of subtle states of consciousness more so than any actual or symbolic and one that feels born of the mind incorporating physical sonic stimuli into the experience of the subconscious. Listen to “In the Dark Palaces of Both Our Hearts” on Spotify and follow YULYSEUS on Instagram.

SOMOH Helps to Untangle the Emotional Mess We All Often Find Ourselves Within on the Poignantly Heartfelt “I Know You Care”

With spare guitar work and introspective, up close vocals and minimal drums SOMOH starts off “I Know You Care” on a particularly vulnerable footing. But as the song progresses the musical elements swell up, joined by a wash of synth as the emotional arc of the song intensifies before dropping back to a quieter moment and building again. It’s an elegant song about heartbreak and compassionate frustration with great nuance in its simplicity. It expresses how when you’re hurt initially it’s hard to know what to say sometimes so it’s best to just feel and sort out the words as you go. The line “I know you care/But you don’t show it well” in the last half of the song encapsulates so poignantly and succinctly an emotional complexity and nuance that goes beyond the typical love song and heartbreak tropes and gets to the reality of what it can often be like to be in a real relationship with an actual human being who may not be equipped with all the emotional intelligence to react or behave in the ways one would hope with the typically limited set of personal skills we are encouraged to learn in many cultures. SOMOH singer and songwriter Sophia Mohan’s breathy vocals and way of diving deep into that tangle of feelings with a clarity of feeling truly helps to clarify what could otherwise be purely messy. Listen to “I Know You Care” on Spotify and follow SOMOH at the links provided.

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Abby T. Imbues “I Want It All” With a Sense of Mystery and Swagger

Abby T. accomplishes the rare union of mystique and swagger on her track “I Want It All.” The almost classical music structure of the songs and the plucked string sounds that mark the bars and sync well with the finely syncopated percussion help to give the vocal delivery a sense of the personal confessional, the aspirational and the dismissal of the ill intent of others with great finesse. She warns all comers to talk to her nice and not to talk with their eyes, advising them to look into some kind of therapy to get over hating what they like. Sounds like a more kind and clever addressing of misogyny than you typically hear in any song. But the core idea of the song is not being ashamed to want the good things in life:“I don’t want the fame, I wanna get paid, I’m not ashamed, I want everyhing.” In that line Abby T. speaks for many of us in articulating the fact that sometimes everything in that essential and meaningful sense is pretty realistic and not the mere survival we’ve all come to accept unless we were born to wealth. Fan’s of the imaginative beats and poetic imaginations of Doja Cat and Kari Faux will appreciate what Abby T. is putting out with this track. Listen to “I Want It All” on Spotify and follow Abby T. at the links below.

Abby T. on TikTok

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Heradel’s Intimate and Otherworldly “Mother” is the Pop Equivalent of a Space Rock Song

Heradel taps into multiple sonic and emotional resonances with her single “Mother.” The treatment on her vocals brings together a feeling of intimacy and the otherworldly. The rhythmic line, the bass, is like something out of a Fad Gadget song but the organic, percussive background sounds give the song a gently tactile feel that grounds its more ethereal drift and bursts of sounds that rise up to accompany the singing as it floats into luminous fades. In moments it’s reminiscent of Sinead O’Connor circa “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” but with the earthy alien vibe of late 90s Björk. It’s an enveloping piece of work like the experimental pop equivalent of a space rock song and not the kind of music one would expect from an artist with cultural roots in Cuba. Listen to “Mother” on Spotify and follow the Los Angeles and Havana-based Heradel at the links below.

Antics & Collectables’ Debut Single “Breaking Point” is an IDM Infused Downtempo Catharsis of Ambient Anxiety

“Breaking Point” is the debut single by the Antics & Collectables collective based out of London. With the collage of imagery in the music video the downtempo IDM flavor of the track hits like something that emerged out of late 90s alternative hip-hop, Warp Records releases, Air’s abstract downtempo jazz funk pop and Dilla’s most haunted left field experiments in pure mood sculpting. There is a great use of tension building and release and informal rhythm and structure that really works for a song that seems to be about someone who feels like they’ve been on this ascent of building anxiety and anticipation for some relief from that swell of energy, like being on a constant simmer and not quite a boil in the psyche. The dark melodies, the rising arpeggios of tone, the sweeps of white noise and low end pulse, the soft yet jittery percussion have a textural as well as musical quality that the abstract and dreamlike imagery of the video somehow captures perfectly. Like you’re stuck in a quietly menacing dream waiting to wake up but not quite being able to reach into the light of consciousness. There’s something beautiful about this sustained feeling as that prolonged wait finds some release as the song ascends and descends in the roller coaster of its tonal and emotional progression to the end. Watch the video for “Breaking Point” on YouTube and follow Antics & Collectables on Instagram.

Dre Ishmail’s “Lost In My Thoughts” is a Harrowing Depiction of Being Trapped In One’s Own Emotional Labyrinth

Dre Ishmail’s “Lost In My Thoughts” begins with the sound of reaching a voice mail prompt and haunting tones that border on atonal but are really disorienting and out of step with any melody. Dark, shimmering, icy anti-melodies cast in slow spirals almost anchored by a loping bass line is not at all the typical sound you’re expecting on a hip-hop track. But Ishmail’s lyrics about being trapped in the recursive patterns of mind and getting stuck re-litigating your thoughts and feelings and overthinking even overthinking itself captures perfectly that feeling of emotional paralysis in the form of one’s mind going over the same thoughts ad infinitum that can happen when you’re undergoing a variety of mental health episodes without any clear path out of that pattern that maybe at one point served to keep one from dipping further down the levels of psychological trauma response. But the behavior has become a rut so deep that it can seem almost comfortable simply due to the fact that it has become your new normal. The unsettling and nightmarish nature of the music sets a tone that while not aberrant, getting lost in one’s own personal labyrinth is unhealthy but that the expression of that discomfort can be a signal of an awareness that leads to acting to making the changes necessary to move on from the psychological stagnation. The song is pure hip-hop but it eschews all the musical tropes that have become rote production styles in the past decade and Ishmail’s gift for creating such an original soundscape is a real achievement for the art form. Watch the video for “Lost In My Thoughts” on YouTube and follow Dre Ishmail at the links provided.

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Clouds in a Headlock Deliver Downtempo, Cosmic, Psychedelic Hip-Hop With “Phantasia”

Clouds in a Headlock, photo courtesy the artists

The psychedelic and downtempo chillout beats for “Phantasia” by Clouds in a Headlock with its imaginative stream of consciousness lyrics with the project’s various MCs delivering bars as the song sits back into a transporting passages between blocks of words like getting otherworldly, free verse meditations on organic spiritual observations born of navigating a confusing world as a thoughtful person. The music video coupled with the song with a cast of characters like street mystics wandering a large urban park relocated to the edge of town is reminiscent of a fan video for a Boards of Canada song. The first rapper presented projects his face beyond his immediate body in one of the most beautifully visually disorienting parts of a particularly colorful video treatment like a long lost cable access video from a time when you could find some of the strangest and most original examples of home grown cinema around before it became accessible to anyone with a smart phone. This lends the whole experience of seeing and listening to the song an air of mystery that is often missing in modern media. But that mystery comes with an inviting energy that emanates from the figures we see and the music that’s lush and easy on the brain and gently transporting. It’s a remarkable piece of work that recalls the IDM-esque, ambient flavored works of other practitioners of psychedelic hip-hop like A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets. Witness the wondrous strangeness of “Phantasia” on YouTube and follow Clouds in a Headlock, flagship artists of the ŌFFKILTR circle at the links below.

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