What do we have here? A place, dimly lit, with plastic flowers, vacant, spiritual pictures on its walls, odd-coloured carpets and even odder personnel. An old-fashioned American funeral parlour. How did we get here? Well, the intro of the album at hand placed us there. Twin Flames by Gvllow starts off with funeral parlour music, played from a wobbly cassette tape. About midway the tape gets stuck, repeatedly playing the same sequence, making the scene that you had playing in your head weirder still. Then the soundscape morphs into something that calls the film scores of old, black-and-white, scary silent movies to mind, before it finds an abrupt end. After a prolonged silence, the fast, icy beats of track number two It’s So Cold invite you to a twitchy dance, accompanied also by a bit of rolling thunder.
Gvllow is a self-recorded, self-produced solo project from Riverside in southern California. The individual behind the project started playing drums at the age of nine, growing up in the local punk scene and joining it at 14. Over the years, he moved through various bands and genres, from punk to rap and hip hop. The death of his long-time companion, best friend and bandmate Zak threw him off the tracks, leading him to branch off and created Gvllow where he experimented mixing all of his musical backgrounds in order to honour Zak and other dead friends.
Twin Flames is the project’s third full-length album, following Gvllow (2020) and Waste Away (2018). While previous albums featured a mixture of punk rock and rap, the sound of the project’s new release is gloomier, gothier and heavily influenced by The Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and The Cure, with a bit of southern Californian punk rock still ringing through as well. The album’s eleven tracks clock in at a very digestible 29 minutes and 35 seconds, featuring short, electronic, danceable pieces with an 80s vibe the likes of which will go down very well with post-punk, darkwave and goth rock fans.
Combining lyrics about loss, sadness, loneliness, hopelessness and death with danceable music, Gvllow continues a tradition started decades ago that’s becoming ever more popular the lesser the world makes sense.
The album’s final track Until The Light Takes Me returns to the taped organ music from the intro. Another funeral, it seems.
(7/10 Slavica)
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