Eye New Dark
Adore
self-released
Eye New Dark is the solo project of Null Device’s Jill Sheridan, and while it shares that modern synthpop act’s lushness and melodic bent, departs from it in some interesting ways. Sheridan has always been a powerful vocalist with excellent control and feeling, and the major contrast in the material on Adore is in hearing her over some more bright and even brash sounding material. Single “Backwards Through That Door” features spritely synth arpegios and peppy drum programming, with Sheridan riding the beat, choosing her spots to move into her upper range for emphasis, the phrasing as important to the song’s feeling as any given sound design element. Similarly, when she sings on the rhumba-beat driven “Real Life”, its her clarity and measured performance that allows her to cut through the brushy percussion sounds, big pads and swelling bells, recalling some of OMD’s more baroque moments. Perhaps the most revelatory moment is closer “Eyes in the Dark”, a track that is musically designed around a sort of stop-start rhythmic movement, the spaces between each small burst of instrumentation smoothed by the lush and layered vocal recordings, filling the space without crowding it. It’s a lovely collection of tracks that shows off versatile takes modern and classic synthpop styles, driven by a genuinely skilled performance.
Circa Tapes
Climbers
LVLZ
You’ll always be getting a slightly rejiggered formulation of the styles and influences which shape Adam Sieczka’s work as Circa Tapes every time you check in with it, and new EP Climbers is no exception in that regard. Traces of left-field pop and post-punk, along with some of the project’s longstanding interest in minimal wave can still be found in the corners of these four tracks, but it’s a dark and metallic approach to body music rhythms which holds sway (Ortrotasce might be the only other current American act pulling from the same corners, though the trajectories of the projects have been quite different). The metallic reverb which swirls above the snares of “Pulse Fate” might connote either vintage Underworld or possibly Sieczka’s previous work in Kill Memory Crash, while the smoky and dense waves of feedback chopped into “Stukka”‘s acidic EBM brings the underrated work of European experimentalists NTRSN to mind. Colour, funk, and a distinctly American sardonicism blur the jagged edges of Climbers‘ beats.
