Orchid Mantis is the recording project of Georgia-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Thomas Howard. Adding texture through found sounds and tape collages, Howard creatures a dream-laden brand of music—lo-fi pop for the VHS generation. The result is evocative and immersive, as we wrote back in 2015: “[Orchid Mantis is a] perfect fit for the summer time, with nostalgia-drenched vocals and the blissed-out pop sound conjuring warm, carefree evenings and hot sticky nights.”
Howard is back with a brand new record, Yellow House, out now on Z Tapes. The album feels like a logical progression from his past releases, developing and expanding his aesthetic into its brightest, most compelling form. “I conceived Yellow House as a response to (and continuation of) my previous work,” Howard confirms, “driven by an unshakable feeling that I was in the position to do everything that album did better and more cohesively, and that the loose narrative thread connecting these last few albums (Flashbulb Memory onward) continued to extend directly into the new songs I was writing.”
Indeed, Howard sees Yellow House as something of a companion piece to his most recent album, Kulla Sunset, which came out last march. The records are sisters in that respect, born of the same creative influences and circumstances, and the shared DNA is apparent from the very first song. Like the tracks on Kulla Sunset, ‘lanterns’ feels indebted to the past, a representation of or longing for times and places now sealed in memories, inaccessible save for the need to remember.
when you work this out
i’ll help you burn it down
inside an empty house
i know only embers now
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Where Yellow House departs from, or at least pushes beyond Kulla Sunset is in its thematic focus. Where the previous record focused on the influences particular memories have on not just the time in question but our entire view of the world, Yellow House delves further into the esoteric folds of the brain. Both the samples and lyrical imagery are suggestive of a supernatural or metaphysical position, where time is not some ever lengthening chain of events but something far more plastic and strange. Tracks such as ‘rift’ and ‘phantom limb’ call into question the authority of the tangible world, probing into the grey areas beyond where all is not as it seems.
As such, the oneiric consistency of these tracks is not some adolescent lesson in performative weirdness, but rather an attempt to engage with reality beyond its strict physics. If the lo-fi guitar and tape hiss backing of ‘porch song’ lends a surreal edge, then it is only a surreality born of Howard’s own experiences, where coincidence and happenstance prove a little too convenient, and strange connections form between moments in his life. “Last year, an emblem of my childhood, my grandparent’s yellow house in Sweden, was sold and repainted, forever altered,” he explains, though, far from being relegated to the deep recesses of his brain, the memory found a way to haunt the present and leave a sense of connect and logic to seemingly random events:
As if predestined, that same year my friends and significant other rented out a new yellow house – in physical terms, this is where I spent the last year writing and recording this album (and parts of the last), but in a larger sense, the yellow house represents the synchronous, cyclical patterns the trajectories of our lives seem to adhere to: nothing is ever truly here, and nothing is ever truly gone – leaving and returning, reoccurring.
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Yellow House is out now via Z Tapes and you can get it from the Orchid Mantis Bandcamp page.
