Rhythm is important here – it’s tight, controlled and yet ever so slightly slippery- with, dare I say it, a hint of the funk-inflected. A bright dream-pop quality shapes ‘dead malls’ – where haze-riddled vocals stretch out repeated melodic motifs that toy with familiarity. I’m reminded of Lunar Isles’s most recent album in its controlled shimmer of sound- a set of songs where pulse and rhythm hold the listener similarly close.
There’s certainly a clear nod to more shoegaze atmospheres and the reverb feels deliciously cavernous, particularly in the song’s echoing final after image. Lyrically conflicting – contrast seems key in more ways than one – where a fondness for a half-forgotten past collides with the sadness of its passing, albeit one that hints at the chance of hope ahead. Images feel ambiguous and fractured – like an aptly half-remembered dream.
“…everything i’ve grown to know
disappeared without a trace
running out of things to do
hopeful for another day…”
Written and recorded by Orchid Mantis’s mercurial mastermind Thomas Howard in collaboration with Matt Messore of bedroom pop experimenters Cathedral Bells, it is the latter who provides its spaced-out vocals. The bright-eyed bedroom pop meets shoegaze sonic atmospheres fit the lyrical conceit too- the titular ‘dead malls’ a cipher for memory itself. Those nostalgia-rich tape warbling tropes of other Orchid Mantis projects are replaced with something more widescreen in scope and what it may lose in intimacy and subtle sonic secrecies, it replaces with something approaching the cinematic.
Like anything that falls from the Orchid Mantis table, it’s well worth checking out. So… what are you waiting for?
Written by M.A Welsh (Misophone)
Music | Misophone (bandcamp.com)
