Fredericksburg, Virginia is well known to me for giving birth to the legendary mid-90s shoegaze pop noise-makers Skywave, a fiercely independent unit that somehow turned me back again the pleasure of listening to beautiful blistering cascades of guitar feedback, and its subsequent, still actively brilliant, splinters as Ceremony (actually Ceremony East Coast), Static Daydream and A Place To Bury Strangers.
Just around the college town, sharing members from a bunch of noisy local young bands as So Badly, Infant Island, and smallhands, take shape the 5-piece SYLPH driven by the purpose to slow things down.
3-track debut, ltd. cassette, self/titled EP is a nuanced and immersive collection of slow doom songs, blurringly beyond dream-pop, shoegaze, and slowcore, while containing all their distinctive elements.
The intoxicating, sultry, and heart-wrenching “Still Tired” uncoils slithery sparse slow-pace drums pervaded by droning, somber hazily hypnotic 6-string melodies injecting a restrained yet vexed and tortured ecstatic feeling that unfolds and wanders, fiercely engulfed by unrelenting achingly melancholic sadness uncloaked by helplessly detached vocals weary with isolation and depression gently flooded by subdued sweeping breezy layers of slithering guitar distortions.
Stuck in a rut of depression and denial, a woman’s world spins out of control as she, “sleeps all day” and “sleeps all night.”
