Music Review: Alice Sweet Alice - Moloko and Ultraviolence
Eighties Touchstones, Modern Sensibility
Alice Sweet Alice, a five-piece band from Kansas City, released their sophomore album Moloko and Ultraviolence in early summer 2009 on the indie label Cauldron Soundwerx. “Electropostpunkadelic” is not a helpful point of reference, as offered on the band’s MySpace site, given that the phrase can encompass just about any band that loosely fits in one of those genres. “Darkwave” is another tired description that never established an enduring place in the lexicon of music trends. How to describe their music?
Bassist Scott Martinez offers this explanation of the band's use of the term electropostpunkadelic: That's just a silly word for the different influences our music takes from. Some of our music is interlaced with arpeggiated synths, some has the punch and energy of double-kick drums, screaming guitars, and some has pretty strings, lush orchestral movements and pretty piano. Some of us grew up in the 80's and early 90's and so some of that post-punk influence is there, both American and European. Of course, '60s and '70s rock has always been something we've all listened to, so it can't help but appear in our music, with some of the Hammond organ and Vox piano sounds we use."
Alice Sweet Alice and Chloe Day perform on Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at recordBar.
Listen to Alice Sweet Alice: These Old Shoes, Synethesia, and Flight of Night
Take the turbulent undercurrent of Joy Division, add edgy guitar-synth crunch and hooks ala Garbage, drop in the haunting post-punk of Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, a dash of Love and Rockets psychedelics, and polish the whole mix with angst-meets-curious inclinations inspired by The Cure's rhythmic urges. Something like that with a twist.
Alice Sweet Alice uses synth guitar, electric guitar effects, and piano to embellish the fundamentals of guitar, bass, and drums. Structurally, the songs have enough variety and interesting elements to hold up individually and as a body of work.
ASA’s strongest assets include bassist Scott Martinez and pianist Ali Kat, infusing vocals with a brooding, no-nonsense attitude and alluring nonchalance respectively. “These Old Shoes” demonstrated the band’s skill at layering droning psychedelic guitar over a slow grind drumbeat and bass. Her voice coolly takes control on the gentle comedown of “Jaded Addiction.”
“Synethesia” wriggles on a snake’s slithering belly of a bass line and atmospheric guitar effects. Compressed drumming and brief bouts of psychedelic guitar flesh out the sound. “Flight of Tonight” shimmers with a melodic piano line in distress and a quick beat. Ali Kat’s vocals sound crystalline and bright against the music’s dark romanticism.
Having lived through the Eighties as the soundtrack to college years, there’s a definite sense of familiarity to this music. Are the ghosts of Echo & The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, and other acts slipping across the decades to leave traces in the music of now? Perhaps, yet Alice Sweet Alice conjures a contemporary sound as well. There’s melodic muscular rock balladry (read: Evanescence) on “It’s My Time.” The track “Legends of the Po” bears an apocalyptic weight (read: Nick Cave) as if the Western world has gone straight to hell.
Moloko and Ultraviolence is alternately sweeping and wound tight, unabashedly dramatic and consciously remote, sexy as a Twilight vampire and coolly reserved as a diamond smuggler. Alice Sweet Alice references musical antecedents, nodding to touchstones if you will; however, they refuse to dress up in the worn black leather, velvet lace, or loud plaid of yesteryear’s goths, punks, and New Wave outsiders. They’re looking through the electropostpunkadelic kaleidoscope backwards and forwards, twisting and tweaking enough to craft a familiar sound with some idiosyncratic flourishes.
http://www.myspace.com/asarockshard
"Music" is proudly sponsored by American Jazz Museum.
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alicesweetalice 02:57:46 PM - Friday, December 18, 2009
Thanks for the Review & FREE DOWNLOAD