The solo recording project of Cincinnati’s Bell Cenower, Nice Knees uses an experimental brand of synth pop to conjure vast, shimmering spaces. However, while possessing an inherent beauty, these gleaming expanses serve a purpose beyond aesthetics. Nice Knees songs feel like rooms carved outside of our known dimension, populated with Cenower’s introspective thoughts and feelings, each track a museum hall filled with objects and trinkets, shards of memories and symbols of an older time that become their own abstract whole.
After releasing releasing a number of EPs and singles, Nice Knees is back with Blue Mirror, a brand new EP to be released at the end of June on Broken Circles. We’re delighted to share the album a few days early. The release serves as a complete realisation of the Nice Knees style, the bass and synths combining to craft a realm of crystal and quartz, a world alien yet strangely familiar too, as though, should we care to look hard enough, we might end up catching snatches of our own reflection across the glinting walls.
The title track is the archetypal example of this, a space sparse and warm both, while ‘Backout’ has an almost Trouble Books-esque sound, possessing the intricacies of organic life yet retaining a mechanical feel too, like some post-natural landscape of cell-shaded simulation. ‘U Would Do’ follows a similar vein, its sky shot by forks of mesmeric synths, before the vocal swirl of ‘Athena Whine (Exit Song)’ and the more moody ‘Weekend Fun’, where the brilliant sparkle is threaded by a brooding heaviness.
Through the curious interplay between nostalgic familiarity and radiant futurism, the question of time is at the forefront of every song. Indeed, the Nice Knees sound could be said to toe the strangely thin line between primordial and post-human, Cenower’s vocals becoming part of the fabric of something much larger—something newer, more ancient, or altogether timeless.
Cover photo by Greazi