For four years that feel more like a century by this point, Portland’s SHADOWLANDS has been a mainstay of a space that occupies the dark, ephemeral, and blacklit world of post-punk and dark pop. Headed by identical twins that few can distinguish, they’ve crafted gem after gem of glistening power, reveling in emotion and layered with a hopeful melancholy. They now stand as masters of their craft, pushing hooky melodies in less predictable ways and making full use of vocal range as opposed to the genre’s sometimes pedestrian monotony. Always forgoing a standard backbeat, the drums take on a repetitive, trance-inducing position employing toms and auxiliary to lull us off into their dream world painted in the sky by the syrupy vintage synth movements and peppered with the finest shade of single-note guitar hooks, receding into the nebula of their origin. Today they’ve hit us with their next video, ‘Perfect Void’:
The song is lyrically centered around the awful outcomes of the pandemic and the realization that humans routinely find new ways to treat each other horridly. Once that misanthropy is processed, we must also take a look in the mirror and admit we all have similar tendencies and none of us are free from the critique of cruelty, only some worse than others. The video itself dreams up an alien landscape, devoid of civilization, wandered alone. Perhaps it is better to drift through strange and barren lands than bear the brunt of the human condition and everyone else’s identical position. A two-song EP of the same title drops today here and stay tuned for more from these ruminating revelers.
