Track Of The Day Nights Templar
While strongly considering a postponement due to the recent glaring flaming events, Long Beach, California-based outfit Nights Templar have dropped a 2-track single “Shadow Of A Doubt / Life Of Crime” that will be part of their “IV” album coming in March.
Rooted in the ‘Soft Goth Vanity’ DIY label Reapo Records, a showcase as well for other ‘weirdo’ side projects such as Marble Fields, Der Minnion, and Artificial Flower Factory among others, the three piece, also playing live, is made of longtime active members from the Bay Area underground bedroom pop cassette scene, the more attentive may identify close links with The Lice, we featured a couple of times a while ago, Shivering Window, Morgue Toad, and the Juniper Tree Songs imprint.
Fed and drenched in enveloping melancholy, driving sombre-melody-carrying bass lines, tinny drum machines, spectral forlorn synths, glistening emotive guitars and a tormented, reflective vocal delivery, construct a smooth, pensive and nostalgic, deliberately lo-fi, sound palette of Indie-Pop, Minimal-Cold Wave and Post-Punk, laced with subdued, somehow ephemeral, endearing bittersweet melodicism.
Both less synthy than the group’s earlier endeavours, downsized to a gauzy, plaintive murmuring, “Shadow Of A Doubt” sways on the hypnotic tempo of rounded, humming bass pulses, punctuated by repetitive, punchy beats and subtly piercing, deeply weeping guitar strains, to mirror wistful compassionate broods, observing a loved one struggle. More urgent and ghostly, “Life of Crime” gently bounces on tight, insistent drum patterns and crisp, rolling, sullen bass loops, meandering with sad, anxious vocals longing for better times.
Eternally out-of-time, out-of-tune, and out-of-place outsiders, yet indispensable as ever, in these perilous times.
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