While modern bands present their music to the listener in the form of a song, there is, or at least there should be, much more going on than just a tune and some words. The word song is at best a placeholder, a shorthand for… well, anything from a vibe, a feeling, and an understanding to complete immersion in a sonic otherworld. And all such elements are certainly in play with Lost Velvet’s long-awaited debut album, Dark Cells. Music, tunes, songs, of course, but so much more, and so much more that is so much less tangible
Lost Velvet’s music has always been both easy to describe and impossible to capture, a beautiful conundrum indeed. It would be very easy to tag them as alt-rock or shoegaze… and in places they are, but such simplistic journalistic shorthand misses so much.
It misses the lush, velvety (pun intended) textures, those blends of the delicate and the devastating with which the latest single ‘2003’ opens proceedings, the dark sonic shards that riff and roar through the almost-gothic soundscape of the title track, and the drifting, lysergic flow of ‘Burnt.’
Such a lack of attention would also miss the collision of sonic worlds, the cinematic and hazy being shot through with dense and explosive guitars of ‘Brother,’ the mix of clipped riffs and almost trip-hop groove of ‘Right Back’, and the swirling, claustrophobic, lysergic dream-scape tumble of ‘Summer’s Gone.’
All bands like to think that they are undefinable, too complex to pin down, that they are too nonconformist to fit into any category (they rarely are). Lost Velvet’s problem is that they fit into too many genres but do so without ever risking a loss of consistency or focus. They spread themselves musically wide but never sonically too thin. Such a rare mix of unique creativity and mass appeal is a pretty great problem to have. Don’t you think?
Website
Facebook
YouTube
TikTok
Instagram
