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.
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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