Lomma – Take My Life Apart
Being thought of as something existing on the fringes of society and not a topic worth debating in polite companies, rock music has had the chance to thrive. As an artistic style designed to surprise and shock audiences, the style’s teenage years were spent collecting and putting together incompatible elements.
Horror delivered with a smile and tease was, expressly, one of the main attractions that rock musicians could depend on. Alice Cooper did his best Boris Karloff, KISS spat out blood, the Misfits created horror-punk, and the Norwegian metalheads pretended to be devil-worshipping fiends.
The groundwork has been laid out well for Lomma’s excellent, lo-fi horror pop of Take My Life Apart. The vocals and melodies sway and turn like something blasting out of a 1950s diner jukebox, while the lyrics and performance suggest something all the more sinister. The talented songwriter isn’t wearing any face paint either which just goes to show what might be lying inside the brains of those silent types.
The Living Room – Give Me Your Love
Guitar music used to be the weapon of choice that teenagers made use of when trying to frighten their parents. Back in rock music’s teenage years, guitar music seemed to possess the same potential to disturb and destabilize society as a bunch of South American guerillas.
Things changed as rock got polite and hired a chef and an accountant for itself. Fortunately, with few other options available, the lure of this dark art has been enough to persuade the likes of Mark Lanegan or Nick Cave to become lifelong adepts of it. It’s debatable how well this life has served them, although one would imagine joining the ranks of rock poets was never much of a choice.
The Living Room’s Give Me Your Love, especially, draws from the former Screaming Trees’ haunting body of work. A hypnotic bluesy instrumental charts the territory as if drawing a map to a haunted house. The vocals, not quite Lanegan’s chilling baritone, but efficient just the same, give it its final push over the stairs. It’s sexy music for horror movie fans.