Alternative rock might have begun as a fight back against the conformity of the more established classic sound, but as that sound, in turn, came to replace it, tit too became the thing that today’s real alternative music defines itself as standing against. Ironic, huh?
That might explain the desire of bands such as These Dead Machines to work at the outer limits of not just alternative rock but all manner of other underground and fringe genres, too. This is music made in the liminal spaces, those sonic borders where the tides of one sound wash and ebb and flow along the shores of another.
Whether intentional or not, this seems an apt description of the process at work on Any Minute Now the band’s debut album, Songs like “Subatomic Heart” are woven from blends of shoegaze fluidity and ambient understatement, nu-metal-infused atmospheres and a sort of industrial background crunch. All of that in just this first, opening salvo.
“So Skywards” chimes and charms through a wave of staccato sonics and indie vibes. “Heartstrings” is hushed and hazy, balladic and beautiful. “Lucky” is full of mercurial sounds pooling and percolating between the vocals and the tumbling beats.
If mainstream tastes form and flit away every day, fads and focus coming and going on the transient sonic winds seemingly at random, then the alternative to those musical scenes and sounds has to be equally fluid, fleeting, and changeable. These Dead Machines is the sound of a band responding to those fickle fashions in real-time.
As a wiser man than I once said, “The moving hand once having writ moves on.” Well, Any Minute Now is music doing precisely that.
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