Wellness is the solo project from Jordan Gatesmith, who you might know from Howler and Total Babe. Last year’s Mostly Blue EP introduced their slightly weird brand of dream pop, which is captured neatly (or not so neatly) in the video for the title track. Fast forward a year and Gatesmith is back with a brand new release, Mall Goth, this time via Forged Artifacts.
The release sees a continuation of the dreamy atmosphere of the previous EP, the vocals and instrumentation managing to sound at once carefree and heartsick. In this way, the album’s title is the perfect image. This is alienation and detachment teen-style, the sense of being fundamentally not-of-this-world and reacting by going to hang out anyway, slurping soda through black lips and staring down the old folks stupid enough to look in the wrong direction.
This interplay between the strange and the processed is what marks the Wellness sound, the poppy vibes supported by an ominous undercurrent. Opener ‘Fake Flowers’ is a great example, the upbeat rhythm and relatively confident vocals unsettled by background synths and strange, dark lyrics. Again, the result is a sense of estrangement, as though the narrator doesn’t feel happy or comfortable in the world.
“I’m paling in the sun
I shake a hateful fist
At every single orange strip mall fascist
And their spray tanning baptists
And it hurts so good
But not as good as this
As I scold my tongue for these scalding words
Please slap me on the wristA bouquet for your concern”
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‘Moon in Libra’ mixes surf rock with post-punk in an almost haunting manner, before ‘Get Me Out of My Way’ goes full retro with a punky new wave energy that refuses to slow across its 90 second runtime. Without much of a pause, ‘Sippin on Sadness’ carries this momentum through, the vocals again riding a kind of carefree vitality, though as the title might suggest, the song is anything but a happy-go-lucky pop hit. Again the mood feels decidedly adolescent, wrapped up in a kind of affirming, energising sadness, a mood to define an entire youth. Which goes some way in explaining the twin emotions of assurance and melancholy—the disaffection here is not a debilitating lack of anything, but rather the foundation for an aesthetic, the basis of a persona.
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‘Killer Instincts’ is both the most confrontational and unhinged of the tracks on the record, the confident embrace of violence and things on the edge lending a dangerous feel that is only heightened by the dreamy backing and ferocious percussion. And things get even stranger on closer ‘Purge’, where the dream vibe is pushed into a hallucinogenic brand of shoegaze, the vocals losing all of their edges to become smoothed out and shimmering.
Mall Goth is out now via Forged Artifacts and you can get it from the Wellness Bandcamp page, including a lovely cassette edition.