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Vines – I’ll be here (2025)
Review:
The Vines, a band consisting of outsized Australian rockers, are releasing an album this summer. So is Vines, sans ‘the,’ a project by Cassie Wieland, a Brooklyn-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and electronic musician.
I’ll Be Here is by the latter artist, who writes songs interwoven with new classical sensibilities and chops. One can’t help but wonder what the algorithms will make of it. There are a lot of doleful song titles on I’ll Be Here, such as “I’m getting sick,” “Evicted,” “Happy is hard,” and “Tired.” The music is less overt, consisting of atmospheric instrumentals and songs, with the vocals are shrouded in vocoder. This technique was used last year, to good effect, by Alan Sparhawk on White Roses, My God, his first solo LP without Mimi Sparhawk, his deceased wife, creative partner, and bandmate. Similarly, the absence of unfiltered vocals in music by Vines would appear to employ the vocoder as symbolic of one’s agency being threatened or removed. Direct confrontation isn’t the way taken to resolve the states described in the aforementioned titles. Instead, there is a sense of poignancy, at times even grief. “We’ve made it this far” is less than two minutes long, feeling more like a cinematic cut than a true minimalist piece, which would develop over a longer duration. But Vines uses ostinato in a powerful fashion, almost akin to the distortion of her voice, to provide a sense of unease. The track segues into “Undercurrent,” where repeated music still holds sway, with a tension between vibrating chords and sustained voices and bass notes never fully resolving. “King of Swords” is a favorite, its minor key ostinato looping over and over again, suggesting a lament. Rather than serving as accompaniment, the arpeggiated guitars and thick chordal keyboard textures seem embellished by the vocals, with their repetition foregrounded and the singing a distressing, rather than central, element. The texture connotes an inversion of what one expects in a song, revealing a harrowing emotional landscape. You have to wait until the last cut for the title track, but it is well worth it. Recessed vocals are buoyed, indeed empowered, by orchestral-sounding synths, completing the album with a sense of determined resiliency. Vicissitudes abound in the musical world-building that Vines undertakes. There is no way they will stop her. Nothing is outsized about I’ll Be Here. It instead is a winning example of how music made with passionate intimacy can draw you in. — dusted
Track List:
01 - I'm getting sick
02 - Evicted
03 - We've made it this far
04 - Undercurrent
05 - King of swords
06 - Omw
07 - Happy is hard
08 - Tired
09 - Keep driving
10 - I'll be here
Media Report:
Genre: ambient, dream-pop
Origin: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
Note: If you like the music, support the artist.
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