Peaking Lights
A trek through Imaginary Falcons' disorienting yet deliberate song cycle
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Whether or not Madison avant-pop duo Peaking Lights meant for their new album, Imaginary Falcons, to be conceptual, the group's drugged-up exploration tunnels forward with impressive cohesion. On the album's opening cut—somewhat predictably titled “Intro To Imaginary Falcons”—husband-and-wife collaborators Indra Dunis (formerly of Numbers) and Aaron Coyes begin with clear yet lo-fi layers of Asian-sounding synth melodies matched with searching vocal lines. “Intro” gets lost, however, in a tunnel of white noise and sonic twitching, which pulls the audience out of one world and sends it hurtling toward another. “Silver Tongues, Soft Whispers,” a dreamy pop tune that rests on a platform of lushly percussive melodies, serves as a sort of entrance gate to the hallucinatory universe that Imaginary Falcons occupies. And it can be an elusive universe to begin with: Peaking Lights have mostly released their music on cassette, and the group will celebrate this album's vinyl release with a show this Saturday at Good Style Shop, a boutique and makeshift venue the group runs downtown.
"Silver Tongues, Soft Whispers" by Peaking Lights
The album continues to gravitate toward zoned-out weirdness with tracks like "Boy And The Rabbit Band." Loaded with heavily reverberated guitar and vocal lines, the song sounds like it was captured with a cheap tape recorder located two rooms away—an interesting effect that keeps Peaking Lights' music from sounding too much like music from any given period, even the high point of shoegaze. In “Wedding Song,” Peaking Lights effectively blend droning blues riffs with a cheesy rhythm that could easily be passed for a preset on an old Casio, making it sound oddly nostalgic.
“All The Good Songs Have Been Written” pulls the album down a drug-induced rabbit hole with Johnny Thunders, as he drunkenly spews out the most cryptic proto-punk he never wrote. Finally, Imaginary Falcons marches through the pysch-industrial pulse of “New News,” only to return to the spaced-out place where it began with closing number "Owls Barning." All together, the album is focused and deliberate, sounding like two experimental-music veterans offering the fruits of their tireless curiosity. Decider can only hope to hear where they take this in another ten years.
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