Lore City—Alchemical Task

Lore City’s Alchemical Task is a subdued album, woven close in spirit to Leeds duo Hawthonn’s 2018 work Red Goddess. In fact, Lore City share so much of that group’s folkloric DNA, it’s hard to believe they’re from Portland. They sound more like people who wound down from some Cornish side-road, having time-travelled from the English Civil War. Their sensibility feels constructed from pagan apocrypha which predates the existence of their country.

This is most explicitly suggested by floor-tom heartbeats which suffuse the album’s first half with military regularity. Civil War writer William Barriffe described these drums as “the voice of the Commander”, a sentiment which can still be applied outside of a battlefield; they’re drums which drive inexorably forward, and dictate the pace of the album. Likewise, when they’re removed altogether, for final tracks ‘Beyond Done’ and ‘Don’t Be Afraid’, the effect is startling—an album which has marched itself into thick fog to begin a slow disintegration into silence.

Historicity is also pretended at by dreamlike vocals, and a par-for-the course soak of reverb. These hymnal elements are still successful, serving as a pleasant contrast to Alchemical Task’s medieval motorik, but they’re not quite as unique—and at points become dream-pop window-dressing. At their best they imitate the (inimitable) Jarboe, as on ‘Beacon of Light’, which places emphasis on vocalist Laura Mariposa Williams’ wonderful lower register while thinning things out to a stage whisper.

Truth be said, Alchemical Task is difficult to write about—it generates most of its interest from an ineffable place. You can stand and watch the sea for hours at a time, but nobody wants to compare waves against one another. Lore City have created an album which surfs its own hypnotic shivers; into which time and sense evaporate and all you can do is listen, dumbfounded. Quite how everything works so well is a mystery. Perhaps it really is magic.

Alchemical Task is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Choir Boy—Gathering Swans

Choir Boy are one of a number of eclectic Salt Lake City bands now graduating to unprecedented worldwide recognition and acclaim. The city has been a quiet cultural hotspot for ages, but was recently discovered as the site of a post-punk renaissance. Choir Boy are one of the softest of these in sound, but still have enough prickly spirit to rival any of their peers. More mawkish elements slip the net because they feel sardonic—exposing the emotional vacuum at the nexus of modern yuppie indie shite not by violent opposition, but wry homage.

Nowhere is this more cogently deployed than in lead single ‘Complainer’; a ballad that’s effusive with defeatism and self-pity, and riffs on a Morrissey-like “dearie me” persona even more aggressively than Morrissey does (and it helps that vocalist Adam Klopp has some of the nicest pipes in the business). But the comparison doesn’t end there, courtesy of the same buoyant instrumentation and world-class performances which made the Smiths such a listenable band. It’s impeccably constructed, beautifully assembled and mixed, but at no point feels insincere or too performative or “clean”.

A delicate, tragi-comic balance is struck; a Twin Peaks-ian tone of melodrama we cannot avoid becoming swept up in. Gathering Swans is frequently funny, but never a joke. And it can switch things up into paroxysmal sadness and beauty at a moment’s notice. This band do heaps with the smallest movements. Lyrical themes are fully-developed, but are explored with such a delicate touch it feels crass to even bring them up; like whispering art history in someone’s ear in the Rothko chapel.

The mark of a great synth pop act is that they make now decades-old techniques feel refreshed or unprecedented. With Gathering Swans, Choir Boy manage just that—beneath a cosy synth blanket is something ineffable that makes you want to recommend them to everyone you know. There is a unique sense of mystery to this band—a feeling that something profound is being withheld or concealed, and that if you listen hard enough, the curtain will fall away. Until then, it’s a really lovely curtain.

Gathering Swans is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Poliça—When We Stay Alive

The 2010s were defined by retrospectivity. A wave crashed on itself; churned a froth of remixes, re-imaginings, and reinterpretations of already-haggard ideas. But even this perpetual break was nothing new—merely the extension of a facsimile of past artists.

On When We Stay Alive, Poliça continue a pattern of being greater than the sum of their parts. Language may be well-worn, its clauses played-out. But Poliça exact such a successful blending of influences that those influences dissolve completely. This is not some kitschy nostalgia-act or Julee Cruise-a-like. When We Stay Alive constantly presents new ways to inflect old sounds.

The most immediate appeal of Poliça’s music, especially when compared to that of their dream-pop contemporaries, is its muscularity. Tracks are punchy, compact, concise. There is an appealing ugliness to When We Stay Alive. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once criticised his vocals as being ‘too pretty’. This proves not to be a problem for Poliça vocalist Channy Leaneagh. She balances the natural delicacy of her own voice with a potent, almost frightening conviction of delivery—even if half the time it does still sound like she’s singing through a desk fan. Absent is the bubblegummy self-infantalisation and waftiness that made Grimes’ Art Angels such a chore.

Ryan Olson, on production duties, grounds Leaneagh’s work. When We Stay Alive has the feel of a Daniel Lopatin project; full of tenderness despite an artificial, sucked-up-through-a-straw feel and some inhumanly brawny bass. An array of sounds can be heard, but—as with their corralled influences—Poliça combine these into something which feels both singular and complete. It’s the most confident the band have ever sounded.

The title of When We Stay Alive supposedly refers to Leaneagh’s rallying from an accident which had left her gravely injured, and left her on the brink of shelving music altogether. A renewed awareness of her mortality (and a lot of time off work) inspired the construction of half of the tracks on this LP. But the title speaks to a broader kind of survival, too. Poliça were always more than the fashions around them—on When We Stay Alive, they’ve proved it. Let’s see if another wave comes up behind them.

When We Stay Alive is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe