Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Chords of Eve release EP



Bursting at the seams with grooves as lush as they are intoxicatingly cerebral in “Brightside,” evenly distributed in a stony deluge of moderate distortion and crisp string harmonies in “The Future’s Not What It Used To Be,” the musicality that Chords of Eve are throwing down in their new extended play Dear Engineer is nothing to scoff at, and for critics like myself who have been lucky enough to score a sneak preview of the record’s five fabulously surreal tracks, it’s enough to get quite a buzz storm going.

From the electropop title track in Dear Engineer to the rambling rhythm of a beefy “Rebuild Ourselves Tonight” and haunting rhymes of “Evelyn,” Chords of Eve deliver a relentlessly dreamy debut in this EP that draws reference to some of the more ambient offerings in modern electronica/rock fusion, but make no mistake about it – theirs is a sound that stands on its own without question. There have been a lot of exciting new hybrids making headlines in the American underground in the last few years, but I can’t say that I’ve come across very many that have held my attention quite as well as this disc recently has.

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The vocals in “Evelyn,” “Brightside” and “The Future’s Not What It Used To Be” are ironically utilized as a frame for the lustrous instrumentation that each of these tracks contain rather than the other way around, and although this might seem like a complicated way to induce textured chills, I think it’s partly what makes Dear Engineer so hard to peg using conventional artistic terminology.

There’s a great use of contrast in “Rebuild Ourselves Tonight” that dispels any tethering of the song’s conceptualism to trends in progressive electronica, and while “Brightside” and the title track share a certain duality that would seemingly make them prime fodder for rock radio over a commercial pop format, the tension in their individual grooves make them plenty danceable just the same. On paper, a lot of what Chords of Eve are doing here could qualify as black and white experimentalism, but upon closer inspection, the indulgent cosmetics they liberally employ in this record make it a much more elaborate offering to decipher.


It’s a highly eclectic effort that requires a discriminating ear to fully appreciate, but if you ask me, Chords of Eve’s Dear Engineer is more than promising enough to bring those who give it a spin this April back to their music when they decide to cut a full-length album (which, judging from the caliber of this content, won’t be too far down the line). They’re coming up against a lot of competition both in their home scene of Austin, Texas as well as throughout the underground in the United States at the moment, but as long as they continue to pursue compositional techniques and stylizations that their peers would just as soon shy away from, I think they’re going to see more and more success as this new decade begins to take shape for all of us.

Mark Druery

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