It was walking through cold downtown Atlanta streets, bundled up but not nearly enough, hands shoved in pockets, that I first listened to the entirety of NYC-based Dead Leaf Echo’s newest release, the 6-song Pale Fire. I almost wrote “E.P.” there, but as an adjective it doesn’t really do Pale Fire justice. These six songs swirl, swell and cohere together in a foggy mist that seriously had me trapped inside my own headspace for the half-hour in which they played out in my headphones, and with each tender jolt of heartfelt darkness I fell more and more for these out-of-time-and-place songs. My 4AD affection is pretty much well documented any and everywhere, and I feel no remorse in tacking Dead Leaf Echo as a band owing a debt of gratitude both to those hazy, heady shoe-gazings as well as to modern electronic music production.
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To hammer the last point above home, wrap your ears around the title track from Pale Fire. Produced by electronic trance-gaze mastermind Ulrich Schnauss, this song, more than any of the other 5, perfectly captures the prevalent love-lost winter-haze of the Dead Leaf Echo sound. I shared it with one of ResonatorMag’s most notoriously picky associates, Dr Shlomo Zelig:
Dr Z: ROCKING… this song
Shaun: :-)
can you guess
who produced it?
Dr Z: brian eno
wait no
william orbit
Dr Z: but srsly i assume mr shields?
Shaun: ulrich schnauss
Dr Z: yah reading the wiki
very cool
and german
Shaun: i am very into that song
the rest of their stuff is good
that song
explodes
just totally EXPLODES
with passion
Dr Z: yeah i freaked out
Shaun: ?
Dr Z: that song
freaked me out
This is a fall-winter tune. Consume now.
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