The recording project of Buffalo’s Leah Loefke, Pendulum Girl makes a brand of dream pop that straddles the lo-fi and cinematic divide. The paradoxical nature of this sound is key to the success of heart demos, Loefke’s debut EP, allowing her to weave soundscapes at once beautiful and intimate, sparkling and imperfect, warm but with a lingering chill.
Opener ‘magnet’ begins with a hesitant wistfulness, unfurling gently and slowly to a warm ambient hum. The mood is crepuscular, late evening or early morning, the air shot pink and dusky and moved by sedate breeze. ‘crying in the carwash’ is altogether darker, though no less colourful, a dream walk through a neon-city, where a persistent sense of sadness follows at arm length. With it’s empathetic take on melancholy, the track conjures Broken Social Scene’s ‘Anthem for a Seventeen Year-Old’, the sense of loss almost it’s own comfort, a blanket within which to warm before the future rewards you with something better.
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‘anthem for healing’ takes a more expansive approach, a song of self-empowerment that rises into great, soaring spikes of sound. “You will not silence me,” Loefke repeats, the synths increasing in pitch as her vocals disintegrate into wordless yelps and guitars cut across the noise. ‘we have a dream’ picks up with a more restrained tone, a hushed strangeness cloaking the track before the final third reaches something warmer, before the lush swathes of synths that herald closer ‘beginning’. Loefke’s vocals emerge within pockets of space that mark the almost sci-fi futurism off this noise, before both aspects unite for the transcendental finale.
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heart demos is out now and you can get it from the Pendulum Girl Bandcamp page.