SINGLE REVIEW
Ayfer Simms adds her lyrical magic to the leading tracks from the new Camp Dark and Co-Pilgrim front man Mike Gale albums – Gale’s Finger Bone From Swan Wing is out now, whilst Camp Dark release their Nightmare In A Day LP in May.
Mike Gale ‘Sweet Marie’ (Battle Worldwide Recordings)
A distant dream bursts into the sky and disperses like fragments of clouds, amidst pastel tones of a melancholic sunset evening. Mike Gale’s voice is a distant serenade, an impression rather, shifting in the sky, like dots of paints on a clear canvas, the unbearable lightness of poppy’s on a lonely field.
The track’s lyrics are like the echoes of known words diffused in the air, remote and impalpable. Yet, Sweet Marie, the chorus, comes out like the flutter of a bird that we grasp with ease and the rest matters less so; we embrace the mood through the guitar chords following and guiding the melodious whisper of a man wandering in a folk pop languor…Sweet Marie is, indeed, the ethereal traveler’s prayer.
Camp Dark ‘Are You Hiding’
There’s a worrisome journey into the mind’s abyss’s, an inner excavation, a downward whirl to a place where one does not wish to go willingly, one must dig and one must face, yet, is compelled to it, from forces emerging from the very depth of the mind. The tune scrapes the intellect’s barricades, the cells; are bleeding and dripping and there’s no comfort despite the singer’s appeal: “Are you hiding I’d like to… help you”; bewitching really, the bass pounds, a haunting voice, and then a drum tickles, charges, inhabits and invades, finally forming a bizarre and eerie magma of sounds, alternative, melodious and alluring. This “Indie-ogenous” track smoothly towers a deserted land, a cavernous world, consciousness itself? Portrays the blackout of one, the emergence of another, an uneasy mirroring. The album Nightmare In A Day is released in May, a long time to be waiting after tasting the drizzling Artemisia absinthium-like world of Camp dark…
Words: Ayfer Simms
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