Tag Archives: dream pop

Au4: …And Down Goes the Sky

Released: 2013

Personnel

  • Ben Wylie: Vocals; keyboards; guitars; sequencing
  • Aaron Wylie: Vocals; keyboards; programming
  • Jason Nickel: Bass; vocals
  • Nathan Wylie: Drums; percussion

Contributors:

  • Melanie Krueger: Vocals
  • Anna Vandas: Vocals
  • Daniel Moir: Electric guitar
  • Niki Piper: Violin
  • Clara Shandler: Cello
  • Malcolm Aiken: Trumpet

Tracklist:

  1. Everyone is Everyone (and Everything is Everything)
  2. Lost Her Way Home
  3. The Propagation of Light (Through the Ether of Emotion)
  4. So Just Hang On, Beautiful One
  5. In Three Seconds I’ll Be Gone
  6. Forever Dancing Under a Fallen Sky
  7. Wherever We Begin to Fall (Broken Glass Will Surely Follow)
  8. The Empty Gorgeousness of All
  9. Planck Length
  10. Over the Edge It Goes

The great thing about social media is the sheer amount of music that can be found, via recommendations and links from friends, from various genre-based Facebook groups…Youtube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp…there is more great music out there than I will ever get to hear if I live to be a hundred. The disadvantage of social media is, well, the sheer amount of music… yeah.  I could spend my entire day online just clicking links.  It is both exciting and daunting at the same time. I simply have to bypass most of the stuff that people share: no time, no ability to focus on it, whatever.  I know I have missed a lot.

But eventually there comes some time to poke around, to sample the links that folks seem to be most excited about.  On one day I decided to try out a video shared by a few of my friends who were so enthusiastic they were almost incoherent. The band had a strange name seemingly taken from the Periodic Table, and the album cover was a rather beautiful bit of art.

This, the very first track I heard — which I believe is the last track on this album — stopped me dead in my tracks.  I could not quite fathom what I was hearing.  All I knew was that I had to hear more of the album, and when I did I had to hear it again.  And the more I played it, the more I had to play it.  It dug in deeply and insistently and relentlessly, like some musical version of Cordyceps, and zombie-like I was compelled to play the thing. Over and over.  This does not happen very often, and usually if it does, the album does not last for very long.  It gets overplayed and then set aside.  But so far there seems no evidence that I can overplay …And Down Goes the Sky.  This album seems to have found a special niche in my soul.

Continue reading Au4: …And Down Goes the Sky