We first wrote about the music of Miguel Gallego back in 2015 with a short piece on his band Dicktations, and then again the following year when Dicktations put of the ambitious and rewarding Super Paradise. The album was the first real hint at the scope of Gallego’s talents, running the gamut of garage rock influences to produce something varied yet cohesive, a patchwork of styles knitted into a meaningful whole. Then, in 2017, we introduced you to Miserable Chillers, a new project from Gallego that saw him deviate away from the indie rock genre in favour of a synth pop aesthetic, trumping the apparent range of Dicktations with a completely new direction.
Under the Miserable Chillers moniker, Gallego has just released Adoration Room, a split album with Kabir Kumar’s Sun Kin. The pair began as digital-age pen pals, connecting over a love of music and a shared appreciation of the American experience for immigrants and first generation kids. The latter is more than a bio-ready factoid, because conversations about such topics shaped the music the pair made once they started collaborating, the synth-pop sound a sparkly vehicle in which they can explore the pressing concerns of the contemporary age. “Anxieties induced by social media,” play a role, explains Gallego, as do “misgivings and fears about making art in a time where a tidal wave of history seems poised to crash down on us,” with the final purpose of the music geared around “the need to hold on to faith that another future is possible.”
Conversation has a thematic resonance on Adoration Room too. The split sees an alternation between Miserable Chillers and Sun Kin, with neither taking the baton for more than two songs before passing on to the other, and as such the the album forms something of a dialogue. Sun Kin opens proceedings with ‘Veena’, an archetypal example of his polished pop sound, before Miserable Chillers responds with ‘Un canto a Galicia’, a track pitched halfway between surf rock and synth pop that conjures long Mediterranean days as seen in dreams.
“what’s the sun feel like in Spain?
we’re in a cafe, it’s afternoon
i smell fish and lemon.
we can sit in the shade!Suppose our hearts are unblossomed flowers
and when they bloom what color do
you think we’ll see?”
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After the deep tropical shimmer of Sun Kin’s ‘Teri Ankhen’, Miserable Chillers follow with two tracks. ‘Natural History’ maintains the dreamy aesthetic through natural imagery, though frames it firmly in the modern age, as seen in museum collections, while ‘Adoration’ slows the tempo into a late-night crawl, like floating on your back in the pool of a cheap motel at 2AM. This is something of a theme on the record, the intangible or transcendental instrumentation always balanced by something more real and banal—be it mention of Bitcoin exchanges or, as in Sun Kin’s ‘Neglect’, the trappings of social media.
The track feels an important one for the album, suggesting the paradisaical pop might be nothing but artifice, a simulated landscape beneath which a search for meaning and connection continues. There’s something of an unease here, one not assuaged by the bright music but accentuated, the sonic veneer that merely masks what lies beneath, and one which might evaporate at any moment to reveal the true nature of things.
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‘Ringing’ follows in a similar vein, mapping the ghost of a relationship as seen on Facebook, accidental invites and conspicuously absent likes serving to make clear what is no longer present. The track is less a technophobic comment on social media and more an agitated view of the world as it now exists, what has been preventing what might be, the past displayed alongside the present to prevent any view of the future. A similarly anxious state exists on Miserable Chillers’ ‘Horse Opera’, though this time the scope widens, the political crashing into the personal whether invited or not.
“This big city
isn’t so big at all!
if you trace the train,
our paths stay small.
this city ain’t so big at all!little by little
we’ll all disappear
they’ll pull you by the toes
they’ll pull you by the ears
Born in the USA
But we won’t die in it.”
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There might appear to be a difference in scale or focus between heartsick hating on Facebook and the chronic unease of immigrant life in the US, though in presenting them side by side, Sun Kin and Miserable Chillers tease out links. Something about a lack of privacy, a lack of grace, an inability to unplug from the system and live your own life. The low-level awareness that the system could turn on you at any moment, information barrelling through its synapses with your number, operating according to rules set by people far richer and more powerful than is imaginable.
Miserable Chillers and Sun Kin put a human face to these ideas, blending the big issues of our time with small personal vignettes and touches of emotion to reframe the narrative. To discuss such conceptual themes directly is to risk sounding like the synopsis of an overly familiar sci-fi film, but Gallego and Kumar circumvent this and instead paint a world very much in the realist style. And, if it sounds too fantastic or futuristic to be realism, then perhaps that is the whole point. Welcome to the contemporary world.
Adoration Room is out now and you can get it from the Miserable Chillers Bandcamp page.