Quite how to describe Blank Panthers is definitely a challenge. Taking elements of ambient, drone, shoegaze, psychedelica and indie rock, the release consists of looped, hallucinatory soundscapes which rip up the rulebook and defy any clear label. As if not wanting to encourage too much though on the matter, opener ‘Sixes’ throws you in at the deep end. While the temptation is to grasp for threads of familiarity amidst the novel sound, the listener quickly finds that if they stop thrashing and submit to the flow, they are taken up by the current and carried along.

‘Acosta’ is more laid back, sounding like a combination of The Stone Roses and Aero Flynn, while ‘Seamagnet’ occupies the trippy end of the spectrum and ‘Krilltastica’ inches forward with a pervasive oddness, building towards a climax which only half arrives, confounding the sense of eccentricity. Closer ‘Can’t Take My Mind’ is perhaps the most accessible track on the release, with echoes of Low, Yo La Tengo and Nathan Amundson’s Rivulets.

With little respect for contemporary crazes and conventions, Skyjelly are the antidote to the saturated music scene where every semi-successful band comes with a thousand clones. Plug in your headphones, sit back and get lost in their peculiar world.

You can buy Blank Panthers now from the Skyjelly Bandcamp page.

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“neo-classical… draws on a wide range of styles and genres to create a surreal, cinematic slice of orchestral pop”

Now the album has been released and I’m glad to say it follows this same blueprint. Opener ‘Big Fish And The Sirens’ is a perfect example of this. The first thirty seconds unfold as a luscious, intricate instrumental before Weber’s vocals arrive and transform the track into a pop song. But just as his vocals take centre-stage and you think you have it pegged, the music responds accordingly, swelling once more so that Weber’s voice is reduced to just another element of a brilliant whole. The song barely reaches the 2:20 mark, yet by the time the music recedes to leave sirens traversing the silence, you feel in the aftermath of something important and on the verge of a larger burst of activity.

As we mentioned in other REW<< and Eric & Magill posts, Weber draws inspiration from across the globe, utilising an array of distinctive sounds side by side to create something akin to the multicultural world in which we live. ‘To Come Unglued’ opens with air-raid siren synths which morph quickly into an Eastern jaunt before the drums and vocals of Western pop kick in. The title track is similarly diverse, a collision of Bollywood and Hollywood scores with the slow, atmospheric percussion of a post-rock anthem. ‘The Lights in the Sands of Katumpkale’ is the soundtrack to a different cinematic world entirely, one where unknown Europeans committed weird to tape, while ‘Cupid’s Empty House’ is a grand dream-pop song, and ‘Swan’s Melody’ is piano-led and melancholic, full of lingering moments and gravid empty spaces.

If this variety sounds jarring then that’s because it is. Weber does not knit all the elements into a seamless whole but rather plays with order and explores the joins, in doing so creating music which addresses our fragmented, postmodern existence. His biggest achievement is managing to assemble the pieces into something listenable for all of it’s idiosyncrasies, with the pop elements acting as a string to follow into the unfamiliar territories beyond.

Olive Skinned, Silver Tongued Sirens Sing Swan Songs is out now on Hidden Shoal. You can buy it from Bandcamp.

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Début album Islet is certainly a world of its own, with the band drawing upon their upbringings in America, Puerto Rico and Japan and to create a land informed by global cultures yet exotic and alien. The album artwork goes some way to visualising this place: a photograph of a world the band created in an old fruit crate they found on the street. The intricate scene represents the titular islet, a lush, nameless landscape full of arresting details and half-familiar echoes. So important is this fruit crate world that it features in the band’s live performances:

“The diorama itself is hooked up to a computer that controls numerous LED lights which have been carefully installed below the worlds surface. To accompany their live performances, this vibrant scene is projected behind the band, creating an otherworldly effect that envelops their audiences”

Only the musical world they have created is far more complex than a fruit crate and some LEDs. While many ambient acts could claim to conjure landscapes, Peptalk paint ecosystems, thriving arrangements of geology and biology where plants and animals and wind and rain follow their own instinctive patterns. However, things are not quite what they seem. While the components of the landscape are recognisable, their order is not. It’s like seeing jungles and waterfalls and deserts and tundras all in one space, pines and palms and flat baked earth, mammals and marsupials and other taxa as yet unidentified. Unsurprisingly, there is a supernatural edge here, something akin to Twin Peaks where elemental forces take on familiar shapes and every so often reality ripples like a curtain in the breeze. By the end the scene seems less natural and more technological, an experiment in some cyberpunk laboratory or else a complex projection engineered by an advanced mechanical race looking for answers. Whatever Islet is, it certainly takes you on a journey.

The album is out now on Home Assembly Music and you can buy it here.

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‘Bling’ is the latest single from Hyperlust, a jagged pop hit which manages to not only bathe the listener in a glowing summer chill but also challenge the concept of capital-T Truth in reality and the mind, answering its own mystical questions with the only fair motto of our times. I don’t know.

“What do you mean?

I don’t know

Just a sign of science

Just a sign of science

What did you see?

Eyes to the floor

And if I do not understand it, was it real?

What do you mean?

I don’t know”

Hyperlust will be released on the 31st May and you can pre-order it now from Bandcamp. If, like me, you are new to the band, be sure to go back and explore their previous releases.

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‘The Lights in the Sands of Katumpkale’ is a short neo-classical track that draws on a wide range of styles and genres to create a surreal, cinematic slice of orchestral pop. Lable Hidden Shoal describe the song as “a window into Ryan E. Weber’s kaleidoscopic musical universe,” which seems more than apt. You can grab it for free right now over at Bandcamp.

Not content with the intricate track, Weber teamed up with Megan Olinger Sweeting to shoot an accompanying video which certainly ups the intrigue. Focusing on the strange movements of various body parts, the video is what my uneducated self would label Lynchian, although I’m sure those who enjoy avant-garde cinema would know of a few better examples. Whatever the influences, the whole thing is shot on Super 8 and transferred to VHS, giving that mysterious/creepy/slightly seedy feel of 70s/80s arthouse flicks. Watch it below:

The album will be released on Hidden Shoal the 16th July.

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If you’re even vaguely familiar with Old Earth, then you’ll know that Todd Umhoefer is very much his own man. His influences range from modern-day hip hop to golden oldie pop songs, a blend which he builds on a foundation of experimental folk. Using looped guitars and sparse vocals, Umhoefer creates some of the most interesting and forward-facing art that’s out there today. The album sleeve contains a quote from film soundtrack extraordinaire Bernard Herrmann, beginning with the line, “Musically I count myself as an individualist”. I’m not sure I could think of a better way than these seven simple words to sum up Umhoefer and his artistic goals.

The album consists of just five tracks (named simply ‘Track 1’, ‘Track 2’, etc.), but spans over 30 minutes, with each track shifting and morphing into a variety of guises. In fact, the liner notes show each track split into several component parts, each with a title of its own. These sections meld into one another like events in a dream, the transitions often surreally sudden and spontaneous but retaining an eerie kind of absurd logic. This novel song structure never feels redunant either. It is to Umhoefer’s credit that each element always seems necessary and appropriate.

This non-conformity is illustrated perfectly on the opening track, an eleven minute behemoth which does everything but break the listener in gently. It kicks off with a section called ‘Well Abandonment’, an insistent, driven start of barely restrained guitar and minimal drum work, before the opening line of,

“I wanted walls, for something to push against.
I wanted waves, for something to row.”

One of Umhoefer’s strengths is his ability to make such vague, cryptic lyrics sound important and relevant, with his words often seeming abstract and dislocated. To return to the dream analogy, the lyrics don’t necessarily make narrative sense but they just feel right. The track shifts around the 3:30 mark as a taut guitar line drifts in from the ether, heralding the oncoming of the second section, ‘some Gates’ll swing wide, for us’. This builds to include shuffling drums and Umhoefer’s cry of, “the whole village had their hands in!” The repetitive melody and ethereal ambience are hypnotic, and the best way to listen is to put these tracks on repeat and just let things wander. The third and final segue of ‘Track 1’ occurs around 8:40. ‘Accept that the mark will outlast you’ again features lean and focused guitar work which cuts across the song razor-like, providing a bright and uplifting end to the first track. Soon drums are added and the whole thing becomes a rollicking indie rock tune, perhaps the most conventional “rock music” moment we have seen yet from Old Earth.

Another stand-out, ‘Track 3’, starts as a sign on the horizon, a wisp of dark smoke against the blue-white sky. An ominous force gathers pace and momentum as it approaches, eventually hurtling forward in the furious motion of frantic guitar. Then the vocals are upon you:

“What the hell are these bells doing out?”

Closely followed by one of my favourite lyrical passages on the album:

“One night, I woke up from a nightmare
One night, I woke up from the rain
One night, I woke up from the house shook
And one night I woke up from being alone”

This ominous demand is either a simple set of ambiguous statements or the documentation of some kind of personal epiphany. The track then morphs at around 4:00, a weird reverb-y disintegration paving the way for the slow-building urgency of ‘No Cerra, No’.

If you’ve read this far, then you have probably realised that A Wake in the Wells is not an album that’s going to hurry everyone to the dance floor. If you want toe-tapping sunniness or sing-along choruses then please move along. Good-time rock and roll this is not. Instead we get dynamic, instinctive music-making from a musician whose regard for “the rules” begins and ends with his own innate understanding of them.

This is an album to spend lots of time with. You need to let it wash over you, to become familiar with its dusty corners and idiosyncrasies. I find it difficult to like lots of experimental music, the super-cerebral stuff that you need an advanced maths qualification to understand. A Wake in the Wells is nothing like that. Yes Umhoefer experiments, but all the while he is focused on making something honest and true. I guess the experimentation is simply a means to an end, a way for him to attempt to convey his own personal messages.

I think what I’m trying to get at is that Old Earth’s music is sincere. And I don’t know about you, but sincerity is pretty important to me in art. In fact, I think it may be the most important thing of all. If I’m reading a book or watching a film or listening to an album, the one thing I want is for the artist to mean it. And I realised when listening to A Wake in the Wells over these last few weeks, goddamn does Umhoefer mean it. This is the man who last year (in an interview for WTD) said the killer line, “Fuck irony. I’m trying to make something to uplift myself, and it’s reassuring to me that other people can relate to it.”

So I hope that it’s pretty clear that I like this album a lot. It has drive and ambition and best of all it has heart. I think I’ll let Bernard Herrmann have the last word, his closing remarks capturing perfectly why I love this album (and Old Earth’s music in general) so very much:

“I am not interested in music, or any work of art, that fails to stimulate appreciation of life and, more importantly, pride in life…I believe that only music which springs out of genuine personal emotion is alive and important.”

You can order A Wake in the Wells right now via mini50 records. Please do, you won’t regret it.

P.S. Our American friends will be pleased to hear that Old Earth is currently on tour. You have four chances to see him this week:

Thurs. August 28th, 2014– Turntable (Jamestown, NC), w/ Twin Brother

Fri. August 29th, 2014– Daisy Dukes (Nashville, TN), w/ Twin Brother

Sat. August 30th, 2014– 27 Live (Evanston, IL), w/ Twin Brother

Sun. August 31st, 2014– Club Garibaldi’s (Milwaukee, WI) ALBUM RELEASE w/ Twin Brother
& Joe Crockett

P.P.S. The super-cool cover art is by Jennifer Mehigan.

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