Shifting the dial on what modern music can be is rarely an act of revolution; such movements don’t really have any lasting effect. For every Punk year zero there is a Rap-Rock monstrosity, for every Kool Herc there is a Vanilla Ice. And when such musical forces do stick around, look closer, and there is probably an orchestrated logic to such movements. No, the music world moves on through evolution not revolution, because enlightened artists aren’t trying to smash the barricades but are pushing them further away from the rules and traditions, the comfort zones and expectations that are weighing them down.
And that is the best way to describe what is going on here with The Wires Out, the latest EP from experimental Queens duo, Throes NYC.
This scintillating brace of songs has it all! By that, I mean there is hardly a genre or sound they don’t draw into their sonic web, and, as always, while those sonic building blocks may appear familiar, the charm lies in what they build out of these raw musical materials.
‘Always, Baby’ has a gentle trip-hop groove at its heart, a pulse which is then soaked in shimmering percussion, soaring electronic washes, and raw guitars, an ever-growing, ever-growling, ever-grooving, taut and tense track which moves from the intelligent to the intense, the artistic to the wonderfully abrasive, the atmospheric to the anticipatory, and does all of that in under four minutes.
It’s sonic travelling companion is ‘Something Chemical’ another brooding and brilliant slice, this time fired up by warped alt-rock energies and almost funk-infused bass lines.
Brilliantly claustrophobic, wonderfully ornate and fantastically experimental, their music might be a complex beast, but so deft are Throes NYC at working with these dark and slightly oppressive textures that what results is….well, who knows what to call it (and when I run out of obvious words I know I am onto something great).
The Wires Out is a brilliant experience, one that doesn’t swerve genres but instead seems to embrace all of them, at least all the ones that matter.
Dark, delicious, and dense… this is new music for a new age and a new mindset.
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