If you are looking for something different, if you are tired of all the style-over-substance pop wannabes and cooler-than-thou (they wish) indie kids…and I know I am…Blank Verse Records is always a good place to find something new. Go there, and songs like ‘There Are Spiders In My Dreams’ will restore your faith in music’s interesting, adventurous future.
Describing this latest collaboration between Poems For Dead People and Intertitle as a spoken-word piece over a post-punk groove is both accurate and wildly understates what is going on here.
The lyrics feel like a Lynchian monologue, as interpreted by William Burroughs, sat in that famous Blade Runner noodle bar struggling with a cold comedown. The words are obscure, deep, and meaning-ful/less, open to interpretation, or perhaps they are merely poetic and designed to make you overthink things. You decide, but at least you are thinking about the lyrics…something that hasn’t happened in the modern music world since about 1986…XTC’s ‘Dear God’ since you ask!
Musically, the soundscape moves from shimmering ambiance to a twin attack of churning guitar grit and relentless bass, then through more delicate digital lulls and electric pulses before returning to the analog fray, and a sonic battlefield now slowly infused and invaded by synth washes as it fades out on toxic winds.
The instrumentation isn’t about melody, hook, or riff; it is a delivery system, a backdrop, a soundscape…a raw and beguiling one, but one designed for the lyrics to glide over without ever detracting from their impact. The lyrics are the point here.
And the greatest thing about this strange sonic brew is that, as I listen, I am already picturing the film it should be part of. Imagine if the film industry worked back to front: instead of adding soundtracks as a final component, what if the music score came first, and the writers and directors then used it as the anchor point around which they build the story, the visuals, the film. Wouldn’t that be something?
On the strength of ‘There Are Spiders in My Dreams,’ it would probably be my new favorite film.
