This mixtape is about that warm glowing feeling you get when you dream about the right path in life. You see it materializing before you, and although it isn’t real yet, you’re filled with the light of understanding.
After this kind of dream, you wake with a newfound sense of purpose and optimism.
Cocainejesus just released the best new album on Dream Catalogue since 2814’s epoch-defining 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day) and I cannot get enough of it. We’re Worried About You introduces a new chapter for the prolific label.
This week felt heavy, swallowed by darkness, but I worked through it and kept pushing. I climbed up until I felt the final warmth of the sun on my skin. I got on my bike and kept going, further every day. I had some hard talks with those closest to me, and I now feel a peaceful sense of clarity about this moment in life.
I also listened to some amazing new music that both eased and enhanced my journey.
The second half of this song was my ringtone for over two years.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about how insanely listenable Empire Ants is.
Bows were born after the demise of brilliant post-rock pioneers Long Fin Killie, by lead guitarist and singer Luke Sutherland. A more atmosphere- and beat-driven, nominally trip-hop associated group than its predecessor, Bows bloomed into something equally adventurous and fulfilling as the acclaimed first band. On this album, they flew even higher.
With a foundation in the bleeding edge of UK PostRock, Sutherland and company’s oceanic swells bleed into entirely new territories, amplifying the latent dub tendencies of the former scene while skipping right over the forefront of then-popular Bristol trip-hop sounds into a starbursting heaven of cascading orchestral waterfalls and breathy dreampop vocals courtesy of chanteuse Signe Hoirup Wille-Jorgensen and Sutherland himself. The enigmatic low end throb provides a bedrock for the torrent of acid-bent melodic workouts embedded with a stream of sub-consciousness lyrics and oracular percussion.
Imagine your favorite deep 90’s Bristol album draped in the gauzy atmosphere of A.R. Kane or Cocteau Twins and shot through with terrifying elation and existential anomie. This is light years beyond that image. Leaning away from the club floor and into the fevered minds of blissed out dreamers, it’s the pinnacle of its kind. Perhaps the only one.
[get ahold of Cassidy at norman records, lala, or reliably, amazon]
Optimistic Underground 