The alien, emotionally whirling dervishistic "Five Days" by New York’s Imaginary People, from their third full length "Alibi", is as beautifully drawn as it is musically strange and like a compulsion to be with a stranger you just met, it burrows inside your head like a hypnotic mirage. I mean, through and through is is like no other song I have heard / experienced not only sonically but technically. I am adoring the kind of boominess to the sound overall and I am gobsmacked at the percussive elements, the drumming by Kolby Wade that makes my mind go to Ghanaian highlife music and other foreign rhythms, and like with Stewart Copeland, what is happening at Wades hands feels like a wonderful puzzle to be figured out.
There are other delicious things happening. Mark Roth's shiny guitar swipes with both kind of surf guitar wahs and vibrations, Bryan Percivall's wonderfully invasive bass lines, the droning organ keys courtesy of Justin Repasky and additional synth work by Grant Zubritsky and, of course, setting the story tones, the truly magical vocals of Dylan Von Wagner whom in past reviews I have described as:
"utterly unique, instantly recognizable and there is a raw immediacy and emotional connection to the tremble in his voice and the feeling that he is reflecting on the words that he sings as they tumble from his lips. Again, hard to describe but I think of singers like Paul Banks (Interpol), Roland Gift (Fine Young Cannibals), Bryan Ferry (Roxy Music) during their halcyon days (or maybe an amalgam of all of them)."
I will stick with that description as I think it makes absolute sense.
Speaking of Von Wagner, he shares this about the new third album "Alibi":
“I just think we’re in an ultimate fight right now. Our culture is just falling apart and the ins and outs of our cultural differences are splitting – it feels like what one person says is right and what the other person says is wrong and that’s it. The whole time we were doing the record, it just felt like normalcy was falling apart. The things you’d think would normally be right and wrong – the normal yesses and nos – aren’t happening anymore, and that was very disturbing to me.”
LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed) on "Alibi"
[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 at Spillway Sound in the Catskills, and mixed by Eli Crews at Figure 8 in Brooklyn, this is an album that shimmers with a twisted beauty, which feeds off all of that disturbing stuff and turns it into something both harrowing and beautiful.
As such, the band... 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 feel the need to present a different vision of their lives to people 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.”]
I have not heard the album in it's entirety, although I plan on it, but I have to say that "Five Days", I suspect, will be one of my favorites. It really feels like foreign territory not only in terms of exact genres and the lightning seeds that spawned it but in terms of which era it belongs in, if any. Something beautifully alien.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXUt01DOtMPjpnN5NG8jlNA
https://www.instagram.com/imaginarypeoplenyc/#
https://www.facebook.com/imaginarypeoplenyc
https://www.imaginarypeoplenyc.com/
https://imaginarypeople.bandcamp.com/album/alibi
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, the third full-length from New York’s Imaginary People, does. It is, as frontman Dylan Von Wagner, explains, a response to the cultural civil war that he sees unfolding all across the USA.
“I just think we’re in an ultimate fight right now,” explains the singer. “Our culture is just falling apart and the ins and outs of our cultural differences are splitting – it feels like what one person says is right and what the other person says is wrong and that’s it. The whole time we were doing the record, it just felt like normalcy was falling apart. The things you’d think would normally be right and wrong – the normal yesses and nos – aren’t happening anymore, and that was very disturbing to me.”
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, the third full-length from New York’s Imaginary People, does. It is, as frontman Dylan Von Wagner, explains, a response to the cultural civil war that he sees unfolding all across the USA.
“I just think we’re in an ultimate fight right now,” explains the singer. “Our culture is just falling apart and the ins and outs of our cultural differences are splitting – it feels like what one person says is right and what the other person says is wrong and that’s it. The whole time we were doing the record, it just felt like normalcy was falling apart. The things you’d think would normally be right and wrong – the normal yesses and nos – aren’t happening anymore, and that was very disturbing to me.”
Imaginary People, indie rock, alt rock, soulful rock, synthpop, new wave-esque, frontman Dylan Von Wagner, third album "Alibi", single "Five Days", 90's post punk, East Coast art punk,
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