From the very onset (and I do mean from the very onset) on the epic "Renegade" by New York's divergent rockers Imaginary People you step into a literal moving, undulating journey that feels grand, sometimes emotionally oppressive and otherworldly. The double time synth bass, cagey snare beat chases you as Dylan Von Wagner's trembling clutched vox creates even more hightened tension. It feels like there is emotional or real danger around the corner. There is a melodic pattern during the chorus that makes my shoulders and neck muscles tighten inward and yet it is stirringly beautiful too. I can mouth it but it would be hard to describe in writing. Within each measure multiple notes dance in a frenetic pace and move in surprising ways. I think it is an electric guitar but it might be a synth. It doesn't matter in the end but it is a brilliant artistic choice as is everything in this sort of art pop anti pop song creating a ramping up cyclical eclipsing feeling of unease.
Apart from the obvious movement and tension you feel affections to late 70's proto punk, surf punk, 80's new wave, I could help but think of Von Wagner's vocal aesthetic as something between Bryan Ferry and Jello Biafra especially when "Renegade" falls away and gets very dreamy and inwardly reflective. It is from the band's third full length release "Alibi" due out later this year (2021). Of the track and Official video that he directed, Von Wagner shares:
"After spending two nights in jail for trespassing in an empty warehouse we found the "right" one and performed an exorcism! Thank you and please just listen."
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“Imaginary People are just in our own little world,” says Von Wagner. “I don’t think we really participate, we live in New York and it was made here, but we just keep to ourselves. I don’t know where this stuff comes from or why I feel this way and write this shit. I feel like it’s a weird addiction that I can’t shake, and I don’t think any psychoanalysis is going to shed light on it.”
The band, Dylan Von Wagner (lead vox), Mark Roth (guitar), Justin Repasky (keys/synth), Kolby Wade (drums), Bryan Percivall (bass/synth), and additional synth work by Grant Zubritsky as Imaginary People creates music that feels less crafted than conjured up, a musical artistic Rorshack test in reverse, the stuff of heartbreak, lust and longing thrown on a canvas with black paint.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES
https://www.facebook.com/imaginarypeoplenyc
https://www.instagram.com/imaginarypeoplenyc/
https://twitter.com/Imagpeoplenyc
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7eHg45a4gNDL77NEpGUa9P
After beginning the campaign of their 3rd LP in February 2020, Imaginary People had to hit the pause button due to the Pandemic. Now the band is starting back up with singles from their new album Alibi and are pleased to share "Renegade" from the forthcoming release.
Any music worth its salt will reflect the times it’s made in. It’ll absorb the atmosphere of everything around it, hold up a mirror to what’s happening in the lives of the people who made it and also the wider world outside. That’s exactly what Alibi out in 2021 the third full-length from New York’s Imaginary People, does. It is, as frontmtan Dylan Von Wagner, explains, a response to the cultural civil war that he sees unfolding all across the USA.
That cultural dystopia bristles through Alibi’s 11 songs. Recorded by Phil Weinrobe (Nick Murphy, Pussy Riot, Stolen Jars) at Rivington 66 in the band’s home of New York City, as well as upstate with Eli Crews at Spillway Sound in the Catskills, and mixed by Eli Crews (Tuneyards, Deerhoof, Xylouris White at Figure 8 in Brooklyn. This is an album that shimmers with a twisted beauty, which feeds off all of that disturbing substance and turns it into something both harrowing and beautiful.
As such, the band – completed by Mark Roth (guitar), Justin Repasky (keys/synth), Kolby Wade (drums), Bryan Percivall (bass/synth), and with additional synth work by Grant Zubritsky – have not just perfectly captured the times in which this record was written, but have managed to turn the nightmare of the modern world into something truly exquisite, pitting emotional vulnerability against an almost resigned stoicism. Just listen to the way that Von Wagner’s voice trembles on opener “It’s Simple” – the tenderly mournful opener written minutes after the singer watched the gun massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School unfold on live television – or the tentative fragility and dark romanticism of “Bronx Girl”, which manages to still be hopeful in a world without hope. Elsewhere, the jittery “Neon Age” rails against a world in which people present a different version of their lives to society in order to impress them.
“It’s a giant shit on Instagram,” Von Wagner says matter-of-factly. “I have no problem with people using it, but everybody’s just making up their life to be their own little movie, and I think it’s making a lot of people mentally ill.”
“It’s about what happens when your town is replaced with something that seems to sway on the benign and it kind of leaves you with this dread,” explains Von Wagner. “It’s all spread out in this cookie cutter mold, and the town doesn’t have its own personality – just another brush stroke on the bland canvas of suburbia.”
While there are glimpses of light throughout the darkness that permeates every aspect of Alibi – one that captures the nature of what humanity has become – and while its songs do reflect the harsh, bleak reality of being alive – and of the coldness and meanness of the big city, especially when the world feels like it’s collapsing – it also manages to exist on its own, and on its own terms.
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