Ice Queen Records (label)
10 August 2018 (released)
10 August 2018
‘If you remember the 80s you were there. If you don’t remember the 80s, fear not, the ‘archi-TECH-ture’ can and will give you memories wholesale.‘ No, not a Philip K. Dick aphorism, but, certainly a critique on the once decried decade that just won’t die.
The commodified and codified 80s © are here to stay, from the fake consciousness pop culture nostalgia that dominates the virtual shopping aisles to recreated and reimagined movie memories that manipulate and skew the present. Saddled with the past, culture’s inertia offers up facsimile pap and zerox rock. However, hope exists, listen as true light continues to glisten, appearing through the cracks and haunting the NOW are Nashville’s Palm Ghosts.
It’s the time of the seasonal affected disorder on ‘Love In Winter’, there’s no solution to a relationship’s dissolution, the end is nigh and it’s all ‘bye-bye’ as the admittance of ‘I fought hard for us, but, I gave up on love’ the ultimate throw of the dice, his best shot his final one.
Main man Joseph Lekkas has spoken of issues of panicked depression and the relentless spectre of anxiety: these terrors stalk both ‘The Hound’ and ‘Cortisol. The former is a tale of blackened bedevilment, the shadows that inhibit the forward thrust, backed by a Tears for Fears-like soundscape. The latter is a duet with Ericka Whitney Wilkes, together producing a tear-dropping explosion of emotions, nature’s alarm bells ring out, worldly weariness and singular strength-seeking ultimately rewarding the resolute.
Nightmarish keys run amok on ‘The Crown and The Confidant’ as doom-laden ebony and ivory collide in a Hammer House of Horror finale. Spook!
Meteoric rhetoric abounds on ‘Who Knew Me Better Than You?’ a ‘War’-era U2 gauntlet throwing that demands affirmation or bust, one last kiss-off to an affection echo: ‘I’ll never forget you’ woo-coos Lekkas.
A spat, a tiff, a squabble, it’s ‘A Lover’s Quarrel’, the handbags are out, the verbals get a scream and a shout as hushed dialogue ends up with the plaintive cries of ‘ I can’t give you everything’, a two-handed resignation to circumstance.
Like a less ‘don’t change a fiscally fertile financially formulaic’ War on Drugs’ wails from the heartlands, Palm Ghosts knowingly tap the temple of the decade’s superlative sounds, media massaged moods and ambience: a politically personal/personally political manifesto.
