6/10

EP on Spotify

Nice timing that Paras sent this over on memorial day: this is very much an EP for summer's dog days, and today was the first step toward that heaven-as-purgatory. This all sort of blends together to get you to sway at max 22 back and forths per minute, slathering you up with golden summer honey, and not bothering with much else to interrupt (or stand out from) that pleasant sweetness. Which is a positive way of saying that it's "boring" -- but that seems like it's the point and the pleasure. From interview (regarding a different album - https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/kzw4ym/meet-the-psychedelic-london-band-ulrika-spacek-ahead-of-their-visions-set ):
"A lot of the songs have been made out of loops. That's not to say there isn't 'songwriting' in there but there are certainly large sections where the mind gets to wonder."
From that article, it sounds like their show relies on a lot on visuals:
"We just feel at our most comfortable when the lights are off and the visuals can play tricks on the eye. Think we actually play better when you can barely see what you are doing. For us it removes that notion of 'we are on a stage, performing for you' that feels a bit weird to us."
Both give the idea that this is music as a supplement/layer rather than object. Or, I guess, let's take form the EP's title: the music is suggestive (for me, of driving back from barton springs all sun-dazed on a summer sunday, or idly inspecting vegetable garden in barefeet holding a pepino gatorade and knowing you gotta water them because it's so hot so you set down the gatorade and spray the hose and you get some mulch stuck on your feet as you get to the back of the bed so your rinse of the mulch and go back inside, and this EP is what plays inside the gatorade bottle as it's forgotten and left to bake in the grass). It's "chill" music 2 chill to and focus on something else, which means most of it is ultimately forgettable; there are many, many, many other options out there that are interchangeable in what they are 'suggestive' of -- but who remembers or differentiates between august days? Who cares?

(aside; I watched a music video of a woman chopping vegetables called 'full of men' and that was a bad music video. I was hoping that the visual / art emphasis that they talk about in the article would mean that there is some interesting aesthetic. Nope. Very lazy -- trying to imply some depth or profundity that is just not there. tacky)

(double aside: I looked up some of their lyrics on Genius, and they are surprisingly concrete and personal for the style, which I feel like normally goes the way of being generic and abstracted nothings that try to present some image of insight-- but, that said, lyrics are mostly a riff on some manifestation of ennui. surprise!)

ALSO Attaching this image 4 paras, who said that he had tried Pavement, but it sounds like everything else that sounds like pavement, so nothing really has stuck- screenshot from 'Lord Luck' video.