Tom O C Wilson – Queen City Sounds and Art

Tom O C Wilson, photo courtesy the artist

Tom O C Wilson takes a fascinatingly left field turn with his experimental, electronic pop single “Better Off.” Bringing in Australian singer-songwriter The Magic Lantern on vocals, the song’s tones echo rapidly and convey a sense of being out of phrase with normal reality. The melodic shimmer of bell tones with crystal clear vocals and minimalist percussion manages to somehow be surreal and intimate and accessible at the same time. And the song seems to be about a person coming to terms with breaking up with someone whose influence forced them to bury or otherwise subsume parts of themselves to adapt to their particular and likely peculiar demands. It’s ultimately a song about reclaiming one’s psyche and making sense of what happened and how one can and should exist outside of an oppressive social context even if one was willing to enter into that situation to begin with because of a sense of affection that might have worked at one time and the early phases of which one is often willing to overlook how one is diminished and truncated in the attempt to be part of someone’s life. The song sounds like something spooky from the Warp Records catalog and it pushes the notion of what pop music can sound like just a little further afield. Listen to “Better Off” on Spotify and follow Tom O C Wilson at the links below.

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Tom O C Wilson expertly infuses his single “Until I’m Out” with saturated synth tones and low end so that it immediately has a sonic presence that immerses you in a reflective mood. David Brewis’ lead vocals on the track are reminiscent of a more melancholic Iva Davis of Icehouse and altogether the song feels like a series of sketches of taking a stroll in the mind to take stock of one’s relationship with oneself. Wilson pairs well streams of moody melody with couplets on how your thoughts can revert into a pattern of isolation when it has become a habit. That slow creep of anxiety that reinforces those habits when you can be just a little too stuck in your own head until you find yourself having to be outside of that pattern and your mind is forced into a different mode. Maybe the song isn’t about being depressed and the little things that can nudge you out of it and how sometimes you have to trick yourself into almost unknowingly to be away from what feel like immediate comforts and stimulate your mind beyond what might be described as a feedback loop. But the song with its sounds of moody comfort instantly dissolves anxiousness and the splashes of piano and other bright tones, the lyric “As I’m starting to hear the light” in the beginning of the song captures the impulse to a more engaged mode of living well, make the prospect of moving out of a state of suspended inertia seem inevitable and desirable. What makes the song seem especially effective is how it invokes feelings of nostalgia and musical styles of another era but employs them in a way that looks to the future with an apparent knowledge that often one needs to coax oneself into better head spaces. Music it’s like an update of an 80s synth pop song as envisioned by one of the classic art rock composers and because of that it’s a refreshingly original listen. Listen to “Until I’m Out” on Spotify and follow Tom O C Wilson at the links below.