“It’s getting closer / It’s right around the corner / Something is coming for me” - sings John Cogleton on the first song of The Paper Chase’s new album Someday This Could All Be Yours (Vol. 1). And once you decide to buy the album and listen to it, you’ll realize that this closening (is this an English word?) is not a pleasant event. In fact, it’s rather unsettling and terrifying. The Paper Chase has a fingerprint of really-really weird, creepy and experimental pop(ish) music. This is not only darkness, this manifests the darnkess under your bed that has creatures existing on a different plane of reality. I’ve been following them since 2004’s God Bless Your Black Heart and I have to say that they do much more than not-dissapoint. They bring the theatrical atmosphere, the dissonant keys and screaming guitar-noises and horror-strings and drums of death. Sometimes they shoot the whole music out into ambiguity with the melodic vocals and the sweet melancholic sounds. Actually this contrast is one thing I really like about them and it’s kinda the same contrast I liked in The Blood Brothers. Btw they both share that their themes of music are sick. Or they suggest it. Apocalypse, perversion, occult stuff like ghosts and devils and other symbolic entities, emptiness, inner darkness, dissolution of the body and the decay of the soul among others. Nihilistic accounts of love and anxiety, the catastrophe that mankind is headed for (exemplified in this latest concept album of natural disasters), the industrialization of relationships… Of course, it’s not all this serious stuff, they are well aware the over-masking of their style so sometimes you can grasp something of their black and grotesque humour. The song I’m sharing is titled I’m Going to Heaven. I think it’s kinda more accessible than the rest and it shows something of the attitude that there is a very faint light somewhere hidden under the graves, the organs, the blood and the masquarade that, in this particular song, takes the form of a twisted prayer. And please watch the video for my all-time favourite song by them, Said the Spider to the Fly. Summer smoothness, huh?

The Paper Chase - I’m Going to Heaven (The Forest Fire) [mediafire] // [ysi]

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under the paper chase, creepy, album review, experimental, noise, indie.