Sitting in a place where the music dimensions have buckled and bent enough to create a space bordered by dreampop and indie, slacker rock and shoegaze, Velodrone embraces some elegant sounds. While the individual building blocks are instantly recognisable, the way they bind them together creates such a delicious sound.
It is telling that the band came together when Marisa Dewa stumbled across some old demo tapes from a band she had been in during the 90s, because it is to that decade’s shoegaze/dreampop scene that the band takes more than a glance. But it is also a sound that has been brought up to date with some heavier rock energies and 21st-century indie attitudes.
“Coming Home” embraces the same creative distortion that lay at the heart of My Bloody Valentine, a song somehow light and accessible yet sonically coiled and complex. “Without You” is lighter, layered, more ethereal, sitting somewhere between the grace of pre-pop Lush and the darker, alt-americana dreamscapes of Mazzy Star and the title track, which plays the EP out, blends sonic weight with a sound that shimmers, and does so sounding like no one other than themselves.
Because of all the name-dropping, I may have made it sound that Velodrone is spending too much time looking over their shoulder to the halcyon days of such gossamer music. Music being demonstrably cyclical, rather than backward glancing, I would suggest that they are actually paving the way for a new sonic golden age. You wait and see.
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