We wrote a short post on Oakland’s Bells Atlas back in May, when they unveiled their first single ‘Bling’. The song packed far more into its four minutes than the majority of albums, leading us to categorize the Bells Atlas sound as:
“prismatic music which draws upon a diverse range of styles and artists, blending the visceral emotions of R&B and soul with an off-the-wall, avant-garde vibe akin to Dirty Projectors and tUnE-yArDs”
The band have now released their Hyperlust EP, and it’s safe to say that the above description holds fast. The most impressive achievement is how the band manage to weave the different elements into something so natural, the guitars, bells, chimes, drums and vocals knitting together like the sonic equivalent of a patchwork quilt.
The atmosphere on the release is decidedly sunny, the vibe generally laid-back and soulful and the cacophony of instrumentation vibrant and bright. However, behind the summery veneer lies a collection of esoteric lyrics which hold an abstract mysticism, frontwoman Sandra Lawson-Ndu posing vague, existential questions as if channelling some higher power or divine force. “If future takes me to find our bones,” she sings on opener ‘Future Bones’, “I’ll mold them together / and desert this form / Break (break) original rules that would guide the way we’d move until we required cover and strange spirits remained.” The song continues in this manner, using precise imagery to trace imprecise, unknowable things, the words coalescing with the music to create something unclear but imbued with meaning, as if reaching somewhere deeper within your brain or soul than you can consciously go. As Lawson-Ndu sings on ‘Sugar Queen’:
“Intertwined by things we’ll never see, never feel, never know, never we try”
[…]
“Lost in these thoughts that you’ll never know, never hear, never ask, never you’ll care.”
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This idea of the lyrics and music entwining to work together is an important part of the Bells Atlas sound. Of course, the majority of songs are based on this marriage but there usually seems a certain degree of disconnect, the words an afterthought to the riffs, the instrumentation an accompaniment to the poetry. Here, both are treated with equal importance, so much so that it becomes difficult to determine which came first. It’s hard to imagine such an experimental sound being created before the profoundly obscure lyrics, yet it’s almost as if Lawson-Ndu is writing about the music itself, as if the lyrics already existed in the kaleidoscopic cocktail and she merely had to delve in and present them for our ears.
You can buy Hyperlust now from Bandcamp, as well as their previous releases and some pretty cool t-shirts.