Two years after releasing its debut album “Rose Wine & Gallows” via German tape label Black Verb Records, Ukrainian gothrock/darkgaze project Gentle Ropes based in Kyiv, is back with a new self-released 4-track EP “Consolation”.
Born out as the music moniker of multi-instrumentalist Serj Kost, actually, a duo with the addition of Stefan on bass to provide more density, atmosphere and nuances to the band’s distinctive goth-tinged mix of synth-instilled post-punk and shoegaze, made of drifting swathes of synth, searing reverb-drenched guitars, hypnotic rhythms and forlorn vocals merged together to forge haunting songs steeped in murky shades of light and darkness.
Intensely gloomy and atmospheric, “Milestones” unfolds, glassy, spacey and melodramatic synth that drift over hypnotic, tight, pounding drumbeats and dense quick pulsing bassline to set a deep unnerving sense of claustrophobic distress and misunderstood isolation imbued by scared, angry, quivering vocals loaded with empty sorrow and pain.
Self-Inflicted solitary confinement leads a lost soul to hide in the shadows, chasing the forgotten, and trying to sail away