GIFT – Lost For You (A Place To Bury Strangers Remix)
Similar artists: Spiritualized, Tame Impala, Wand, The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Genre: Alternative Rock
It’s amazing what an instrument can do when musicians stop playing it in a musical manner. An electric guitar, for example, while using the right rig, can sound like a jet plane, like a witches’ convention, or like an avalanche.
It’s amazing what can happen when musicians start thinking about the experience they want their audience to have. Most people aren’t sitting around counting the notes in a guitar solo. They want to dream away, drift out, or at least be helped out of bed.
All of these things are achievable. Some musicians treat these possibilities like scientists. They look for the places where experiments go wrong. And they repeat it, just in case.
GIFT’ Lost for you, under the wrapping of A Place to Bury Strangers’ sonic vision, sounds like retro-pop terrorism. There’s sweetness here. There’s malice as well. It’s hard to determine which provides more. Still, the artists are willing to try it out on you. They’ll be writing down their findings and using them for future singles.
TVOD – Mantis
Similar artists: THICK, Post Animal, White Reaper, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets
Genre: Post-Punk, Psychedelic Rock, Alternative Rock
What must John Lydon have been thinking wacky early days of British punk? Standing still, starting an audience. All the while, the audience cussed, hissed, and threw projectiles at his head.
It takes mad cool to look at a storm like that. It’s the knowledge that you have the best sit in the house. Why change it? It is also, maybe, sage-like wisdom. Why take anything so seriously anyway?
Since then, many have tried to adopt a similar tactic when dealing with potential fame. Looking nonchalant doesn’t come easy for most. It’s hard to act like you don’t care when you demand rewards from the world.
TVOD’s party-punk of Mantis sounds like a construction site being set up in a sleepy village. It’s loud, violent, and occasionally annoying. But, the people working on it have no reason to care. That makes them cool, I suppose. Or, at the very least bulletproof to anyone’s opinion of them.
