VAGUE LANES is the new East Bay machine-driven dual-bass post-punk project featuring veterans musicians Mike Cadoo and Badger McInnes, fresh from releasing their debut 4-track cassette EP.
While the former runs the electronic-born yet, with time, eclectic Oakland‘s independent imprint n5MD, often included in our weekly lists, besides being as well an electronic experimentalist as one half of the disbanded Gridlock, under the Bitcrush alias, and also the drummer with shoegazers and label affiliated Winterlight, the former is more used to exploring dark and gothic rock territories with Here We Burn and After the Apex.
At a first listen, what struck me was the heavy firepower of the combined dense, distorted effect-laden bass sound with the magniloquence of ponderous, crushing and awkward rhythms, echoing the chugging edge from early Killing Joke, enfolding like a slow but unstoppable wave that thickens and heightens along the tracks, lit by penetrating lush, ethereal guitar strings and sparse bright synth flourishes, over anguished and haunting vocalizations steeped in glum and depressed moods.
And it is a sort of obsessive and heartbroken lovelorn ‘requiem’ the opening track “A Dying Star”, that deals with the end of a relationship reaching the sad realization that irreconcilable differences lie within the heart will keep them apart.
Ponderous, stumbling drum beats rattle and rumble with leaden primal intensity along with snakily pulsing, burbling bass swells, enfolded by The Cure-like glistening plaintive guitar melodies reverberating atop an immanent deadening sense of consuming sorrow and angst, as ominous rippling low ends slowly surge with a latest syncopated heartbeat of buzzing desperation to drift inexorably into excruciating, haunted, and tormented vocals relentlessly excreting chasmic echoes of pain and suffering into an intense immersion of breaking dreams.
A hypnotic and suspended mixture of lyricism and physicality, old memories and new inflexions, you can’t help but be utterly overwhelmed by its evocative dark charge and the powerful visceral sensory overload, vibrating with a resonant sense of underlying tension and angst.
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