Queen City Sounds
By Tom Murphy
Published Issue 129, September 2024
A Shoreline Dream – Whitelined
The songs on this seventh A Shoreline Dream album sound like Ryan Policky and Erik Jeffries mined through the ambient despair and melancholy of recent years to infuse the songwriting and production with a hopeful vitality. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Mark Gardener of RIDE contributed his talents to three of the tracks, but the core songs turn the group’s beautiful ethereal melodies into something that pairs well with the physicality of its always robust rhythms and electronic and electric low end. The lyrics seem to trace a journey through low places of emotional desolation and a feeling of being out of place and lost expressed through gorgeously luminous flows of ambient sounds. But in the end, the record leaves you feeling like you can make it through a gauntlet of disappointments and setbacks with your heart and sense of self reinvigorated.
Felix Fast4ward – Between Sun & Moon
The deep sense of tranquility that permeates every track of the new Felix Fast4ward album is immediately striking even when the songs course into psychedelic dub passages. In aggregate the tracks link like a mystical radio broadcast. It’s probably best listened to, if possible, on a cassette or a continuous playlist because the flow of ideas and sounds hits like a continuum. One might compare this to Gonjasufi’s 2010 release A Sufi and a Killer of another record from that year in Flying Lotus’ epochal Cosmogramma. Except there is more of a neo-soul flavor here in the artist’s command of similarly fused aesthetics from the aforementioned to hip-hop and IDM production resulting in an entrancing listen beginning to end.
Midwife – No Depression in Heaven
Once again proving that the heaviest music is that which has the deepest moods and goes to the emotional spaces that most people would rather forget, Madeline Johnston offers seven songs that are uncompromising in their emotional weightiness. Each guides you through lingering grief and the dreams, fantasies and ghosts that sit with you as you try to sort through what anything means — and the things you’re told have meaning — and how to navigate the nuances of what you’ve come to believe. Through a lens of abstract, pastoral, ambient folk and gauzy tones, Johnston eases the listener into an acceptance of uncertainty and vulnerability to existential truth. Also, nice nod to Santo & Johnny.
Pink Lady Monster – Psychic Antennae and a Tinsel Heart
40 plus years ago this album could have come out on the 99 Records imprint during the height of No Wave. Its alchemical fusion of free jazz, noise rock, pop and the avant-garde is frankly unlike much of anything going on at the moment. Although “No Romance” might be compared to a PJ Harvey song, its rhythms slink, slash and flow in unpredictable yet intuitive fashion. The group’s earlier dream pop leanings are folded into beautifully and thrillingly nightmarish compositions that sometimes wax into the realm of Tropicália, with a similarly pointed social commentary delivered with a creatively wicked sense of humor.
Steven Lee Lawson & The Archers – Help is On the Way
Steven Lee Lawson & The Archers fully integrate its more raw, existential rough edged and earnest Americana with its introspective pop sensibilities on this EP. Maybe it’s the Rhodes or the splintered power pop guitar hooks that bleed into psychedelic Americana akin to mid-70s Neil Young. Maybe it’s tender and confessional folk elements. But here, Lawson and company find a way to elegantly articulate the tension between despair and hope as two faces of the same emotional state, and on measure, land on the latter, rendered in the sounds of a kinder and gentler honky tonk band.
Tuff Bluff – s/t
A lot of poppy garage punk has fairly straightforward and unironic lyrics. Tuff Bluff off nuanced and complex emotional portraits in its supercharged power pop throughout this self-titled debut album. The stories in every song have specific and immediately relatable situations, illuminating the essence of an American experience or archetype, and not always the type our culture romanticizes. Because of that, the irresistible and energetic melodies baked into every song hits as vital and authentic and never as saccharine and trite.
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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 August 2024 install of Queen City Sounds in case you missed it, or head to our Explore section to see more of his past reviews.