Queen City Sounds
By Tom Murphy
Published Issue 134, February 2025
ABANDONS – Liminal Heart
The ghosts of American paranoia and anxiety haunt the melancholic strains and rumblings of opening track, “Habitats,” like future archaeologists sampling those concerns from abandoned structures in the former hinterlands of civilization. ABANDONS thus explores, in composition and sonic emotional resonance, a certain attraction to the forgotten, neglected and transitional spaces in the places we occupy physically and in our own psychology. “Saudade” is in moments reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s desolate nostalgia before tumbling into flights of fiery melodrama. “New Mysteries” sounds like a journey through cavernous darkness guided toward a distant blossom of lingering guitar awash in luminous white noise. Closing the album with “Smiling in the Midst of Two Armies,” and its clashing cathartic clangor and the disintegrating loop of Robert J. Oppenheimer’s famous quote from The Bhagavad Gita, the trio leaves us wishing we could see the ominous and beautiful movie we just heard.
Extra Kool x Time – The Grimies
With a seemingly endless supply of poignant, heartfelt observations and clever wordplay with masterful cultural references, Extra Kool and Time trade bars that establish vivid narratives of personal anxieties and societal disarray and decay. “Orwell Told Me” depicts the surveillance state with a poetic accuracy increasingly relevant. But that poetic truth manifests especially effectively in the anchoring of the lyrics to Denver-specific references. “The Denver Book of the Dead” in particular is like the origin story of the duo’s hip-hop crew, Dirty Laboratory, and one that any underground Denver musician that has had to navigate the Mile High’s fickle musical landscape will recognize immediately. This record is a hall of haunted mirrors that both comfort and challenge in the way instantly identified truths will.
Gregory T.S. Walker – Minstrels and Minimoogs
This album was originally independently released by Gregory T.S. Walker in 1988 written to accompany a multimedia performance at CU Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium. It’s a timeless fusion of analog synth composition and archaic music concepts. It sounds like it could have come out any decade since the 1960s with synth guitars and electronic drums, expressing the vibes of an overlay of Egyptian mythology and Medieval Christian mysticism. Think Wendy Carlos and Suzanne Ciani scoring a John Boorman film, and you’re on the right track in its seamless combining of texture, rhythm, tone and melody.
Oryx – Primordial Sky
The lyrics of this album are like a prophecy of the future and of a summation of our current era of civilizational disintegration out of an overabundance of hubris. The crushing dynamics and caustic clouds of melodic yet noisy distortion lend the songs the appropriate heft of the subject matter. But Oryx has a way of crafting its soundscapes so that the heaviest portions seem to float and drift after they are unleashed. Like the smoke of the fire of the burning wreck of a civilization, too caught up in its own nonsense to realize it can’t pay it’s way out of the consequences of its abuse of the world, within which it exists but treats all as assets to consume. Rather than seethe completely with the anger at this order of things, this album almost seems to have a spirit of looking forward to a time when humanity’s tools and systems of world destruction implode on themselves and leave ruins from which something better can emerge.
The Velveteers – A Million Knives
On 2021’s Nightmare Daydream, The Velveteers established themselves as having a high command of heavy, anthemic blues rock with a creative, dramatic flair and emotional self-awareness. This record builds on the band’s ability to put edge to vulnerability and bombast while exploring beyond expectations. “Bound In Leather” has some modern disco sensibility in its rhythms and Demi Demitro’s soaring choruses. Elements of electronic pop are seemingly more fully integrated into the songwriting, giving the album a cinematic feel as the band’s songs take on themes of emotional abuse, personal integrity, and preserving and nurturing the best aspects of oneself and others. The tenderly rendered title track especially embodies the latter in the heart of the storm of some of the band’s most vitally creative and ferocious material to date.
For more see queencitysoundsandart.wordpress.com
Tom Murphy is a Denver-based music writer and science fiction/fantasy/horror creator. He is also a musician, historian and itinerant filmmaker.
Check out Tom’s January 2025 install on The Fluid, in case you missed it, or head to our Explore section to see more of his past reviews.