Shop our Big Takeover store for back issues, t-shirts & CDs
Follow The Big Takeover
I’m a big fan of music makers who throw me a curveball. As you can imagine, as someone who listens to and writes about music all day, I hear a lot of music that is more than reminiscent of other music. Often very much like other music. Too much like it. So when a song like “Satan Stop The Wheel” comes my way, I sit up and take notice. Not only because it is radically different from anything I have heard in a while but also because it drives me to want to get a better understanding of what is happening here. That can only be a good thing, right?
As a lazy journalist, my instant reaction is to reach for the handy generic tags that I keep lying around the office, but which one should I go for? Dream-pop? Ambient-indie? Cinematic Folk? Or perhaps one of my own making? How about Washed Out Pop or Filmic Folk Music? I don’t know. None of them really work, and when that is the case, you know that you have stumbled upon something good—no, something great!
Guitars gently roll and chime in the background, like the rhythmic breaking of waves, sonic waters that ebb and flow on the musical beach, as a dream-like and drifting vocal delivers a sound that is part lyrical engagement, part voice as an instrument, as much a form of soundscaping in its own right as it is a deliverer of words.
But it is the space and luminosity that is the real charm here; space that allows everything to breathe and then creates enough distance between the guitar tones and the vocal textures to allow all manner of atmospheres to pool and percolate between and beyond and below the song’s more tangible components.
Even after several repeat plays, I might not know what it’s all about, but I know one thing. I love this song. And that, when it all comes down, is the only thing that really matters.
Taken from their new EP, killing, grief and lies, its a song that makes even more sonic sense when listened to as part of that whole suite of music. Here, songs such as “Body Violence” run on the same slowcore drifts, the same ethereal ecstasy, “Tarmac” feels like the faint and final echoes of a pop ballad, washed out, but wonderfully so, before rising into a dream-pop induced final act, and “Murder, Death, Kill” seems little more than a sketch of a song, feeling almost like the blend of a Kate Bush interlude and some fractured, darkwave energies.
“Satan Stop the Wheel” is an exquisite experience, as much mood as song, more atmosphere than energy. When taken as part of the EP as a whole, it signals the presence of brilliant, avant-garde, and unique new music makers on the sonic landscape.
