We have issues with this idea of “New Music Friday.” While it’s great that there is now a deluge of great music arriving in unison as the masses prepare their finest TGIF memes, there is a certain distraction about the day and a shallow attention that comes with it. Which is great for a three-minute pop banger, but maybe less appropriate for an hour-long art-rock LP that requires several listens for proper understanding.
But that’s where Cloud Castle Lake find themselves today, release day, a certain 4/20, as the Dublin band offer up Malingerer. Their new LP is an art-rock painting of ambition, a layered set of experimental sounds and moods that are as lengthy as pop music is short, tracing lines and lineage from Radiohead to Jeff Buckley to Can. If there is a saving grace to this day in particular, it’s that some may find the time later in the hours to spark up something fuzzy and allow Cloud Castle Lake to transport them to another place. A better place, defined by moments as they string together to tell a story unhinged from time. Because this is music without borders.
“Some of the songs on this record purposely lack pace, whereas others required a fair bit of experimenting in the studio — it was about getting them right in the moment,” Brendan William Jenkinson
tells The Seventh Hex. “However, there were other tracks which consisted of a pretty long process involving trial and error in our studio in Dublin. I guess it was key to do a lot of writing by recording ourselves so we could get the tension and release to feel right.”
Jenkinson adds: “Having an open mind whilst forming these tracks was good because each song ended up having its own identity. We kind of had a code for the writing of each song; therefore we kind of just allowed every track to become itself in ways. I guess when you are creating new music there is normally a eureka moment of some kind which really helps us to make sense of the song and this is what we were attempting to capture.”
It deserves proper attention, a type that a crowded day of aural sales pitches might not provide. File this one away, and embrace at length on your own desired timeframe.
Featured image via High Rise PR.