Ice Choir: Artist You Should Know
From KCRW DJ Marion Hodges: One of my most trusted sources for new music is Seattle based blog, The Finest Kiss. Hey, even us selectors have to have a few go…
By Marion Hodges • • 1 min readFrom KCRW DJ Marion Hodges:
One of my most trusted sources for new music is Seattle based blog, The Finest Kiss. Hey, even us selectors have to have a few go to sources up our sleeves, and this is certainly one of my most reliable. Describing Pains of Being Pure at Heart drummer Kurt Feldman’s new project Ice Choir as reminiscent of “Perfect Way” era Scritti Politti was enough to have me clicking on the download link for the single “Two Rings” lightning quick.
I remembered Feldman having played a different Scritti Politti song from the same time period when the Pains guest DJ-ed my night Hungry Beat! a couple of years ago. I also remembered how good his other band the Depreciation Guild was at mixing elements of classic shoegaze with softer, more romantic pop melodies and imagery. And let’s not forget how good the Pains of Being Pure at Heart themselves are at taking classic 80s and 90s fuzz pop, and turning it into something fresh and exciting for the kids.
Happily, the Brooklyn-based Ice Choir continues this grand tradition of taking a sort of familiar sound and making it all sparkly and new. All three songs available for your listening pleasure on the band’s Soundcloud page are synth pop perfection. However, it’s not difficult to see why “Two Rings” was chosen as the lead single. It’s equal parts sinister and romantic, creating a fantastical nether world both with the descriptive lyrics and the icy yet epic instrumentation.
The 7″ single will be out Tuesday, November 15 via the good folks at Shelflife Records, but seeing as how they’re good folks – they’ve gone ahead and made “Two Rings” available as a free download. And just when you thought the news couldn’t get any better, it turns out that “Two Rings” is actually a single from their forthcoming full length, which is due in 2012.
Thus officially giving me at least one answer for that most inevitable of questions this time of year; “Which releases are you most looking forward to in the new year?”