Dream Bodies – Limerence
We’re all responsible for it. Too afraid that our ordinary lives are impacting negatively on the poetry of the world, we’ve romanticised romance in dreadful ways. Most of us, if asked directly, believe that artists and songwriters walk through their cities with arms full of roses that they hand out to the people that they randomly meet while reciting wonderful poetry to each and every one of them.
The only part of this myth that is likely to be true is that artists do, routinely, fall in love madly for other people and that, using this energy, they create some of their best work. We don’t know how often these feelings are reciprocated, whether the artists are better off doing something better with their time, or when they’ll stop. In truth, we egotistically desire their works too much for ourselves to truly consider these things.
Dream Bodies takes great inspiration from the great post-punk and goth-rock bands of the early 1980s on “Limerice.” But Steven Fleet’s musical project takes the dark romanticism of it all and pushes it to its unnatural extreme. This is a song about obsessive, compulsive, all-consuming love. It’s the kind of love that not many people will know, either as the sender or the recipient of it. But isn’t it a wonderful sound? And don’t we need more of this? Any additional questions seem useless.
Summer Bruises – Death Disco
Then there’s the pressure of having fun. Oh, what a chore that can be! It’s especially difficult if you’re living in the kind of place notorious for its parties, famous for its fun-loving people, and talked about for its wonderful atmosphere.
You might find yourself in one of these grand urban sprawls surrounded by all these people that you’re never going to meet, and you’ll be forced to enjoy yourself. If nobody else will pressure you, it will be yourself doing the pushing. “Time to enjoy yourself!”
Much of the most interesting music of the last decades is city-born, tense dance music. Bands like Summer Bruises and the post-punk and goth-rock groups that they idolise write songs for dance clubs that sit on the same backstreets as places where murders routinely occur.
This is why “Death Disco” by Summer Bruises is a song full of spirit and unease. This feels like the soundtrack for a show in which the dancers have lost all control over their limbs and over their feelings. They can’t stop dancing and don’t know whether they’d like to cry or laugh once the music finally dies down. It’s the sound of modern urban living, and Summer Bruises have managed to capture it very well.
