To paraphrase old Reginald Kenneth Dwight, it’s a little bit funny. You take a job writing about music from all over the world via a few international platforms and post the results mainly in US-based publications so as to cast a net as widely as possible in a quest to find new and exciting music that stimulates your sonic taste buds and hopefully adds something exciting to the modern musical landscape, and when it turns up you find out that it is based less than an hour down the road from your front door.
Reading, UK based Lost Velvet ticks all the right boxes; to my 18-year, post-punk obsessed brain, which their gloriously dark and seductive sound has reawoken, it ticks more than a few that I hadn’t even thought of.
“Wasted” is a strange musical blend, formed in the liminal spaces of music creation, more specifically, at the fringes where the sonic currents of grunge drag the resonant ring of shoegaze guitars under the surface, where post-punk pioneering evolves into post-rock’s experimental potential, where cinematic swirls and ambient atmospheres are lured towards the shaded realms of goth. Music truly of the fringes.
As it drifts and evolves ever forward, the vocals remain so embedded within the song that they become an instrument in their own right rather than a direct point of communication. If the music does speak to the listener, and it does, it is through feelings and emotions, musical moods, and a sort of sonic osmosis, absorbed rather than observed.
“Wasted” is not only a timeless sound, but it is also a sound out of time, somehow both nostalgic and forward-thinking, a nod to the past and ahead of the curve, the sounds of many scene styles, eras, and decades strip-mined for their often overlooked wealth and turned into something unique. And uniqueness is not something you encounter often in today’s music world.
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