On his first 3-track EP titled “Howl”, Basavruik, the solo project of musician and composer Kevin Shames based in San Juan de Puerto Rico, although active, even with the same alias, for several years, I recall a single as Kevin about 8 years ago, as well as the bassist of long-standing Vermont‘s Post-punk duo The Dead Souls together with Etienne Tel’uial (Falgar, Triumphant Race).
Basavruik crafts an atmospheric, ethereal, and jangly layered guitar sound that combines ’90s-tinged hazy Shoegaze textures, nostalgic Dream Pop languors and bleak ’80s Post-punk dynamics with gliding and distant reverb-soaked bittersweet vocal harmonies.
“Caverns” is laced with poetic lyrics that dive into the lightless caverns of the mind to shatter the hidden voices and shadows that lie and deceive.
Lush and shimmering strums stir up stridently tempered guitar riffs, underlined by thick pulsing warm basslines and crashing cymbal-fueled shifting drum beats, to build billowing gauzy spectral clouds of cathartic wintry spleen over soft, imperceptible, emotional cries, falling hopelessly through the mesmerizing and tumultuous hum of a dark grey sky, to vanish completely into silence.
Along the slightly more urgent, humming title track and the swaying contemplative “Song of the Sea”, with a searing soaring Post-Rock-tinged climax, the Puerto Rican artist reveals a heartfelt, immersive and sober songwriting, dynamic yet rarefied and nostalgic, cloaked in a misty web of aching melancholy, amid ephemeral shades and spectral glares, from an emotionally wrought soul.
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