by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
For all its compositional elegance and artistic grace, Memorial Waterslides isn’t an overtly precious album. MEMORIALS’ debut album came to life in spare moments between projects, giving the duo of Verity Susman (Electrelane) and Matthew Simms (Wire, It Hugs Back) a chance to entertain impulses, to exercise sonic freedom while working together on soundtracks and film scores. They approach experimental pop with a gleeful radiance, warping between gluey sugar spun hooks and rich layered temporal drifts, their clamoring noise pop excursions and textural static played with an honest “exploring the studio” sense of bliss. This is thoughtful music, beautiful music, and challenging music, but it’s also a record that took shape around the duo’s collective chuckles at the idea of waterslides used as memorials. MEMORIALS’ patchwork nuances and focus on detail is most certainly high art, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have some fun with it.
To call Memorial Waterslides the band’s debut album feels like a bit of a misnomer, but it is the duo’s first record without the direct influence of a specific film or art exhibition. Their earliest releases arrived prior to the band realizing they’d started a new band, as Susman and Simms created soundtracks for a pair of documentaries, Tramps! and Women Against The Bomb. Those releases highlighted the eclectic scope of their sound design, an uncanny ability to seamlessly dip between gently psychedelic folk music and outré soundscapes, each engaging in their analogue glory. Live shows followed, and thus MEMORIALS took an amorphous shape, creating with a maximalist framework that magically sounds as though it were minimal. The Centre Pompidou EP, commissioned by the titular Paris based museum, found the duo eschewing structure in favor of the abstract, digging deeper into free jazz, tape loops that seem to run in both directions, and celestial drones. The magic of their early releases is ever apparent throughout Memorial Waterslides, stretching between a reckless but brilliant strain of pop and visionary yet fractured sound collage. There’s a lot going on at the core of MEMORIALS’ music, their songs deconstructing and swirling, layered with mesmerizing rhythms aiding and abetting melodic synth permeation.
Memorial Waterslides arrives in immaculate shape, a complex art pop record that slinks, grooves, sputters and squawks, and yet still glows with a humble charm. The brightest pop moments of the record leave sunspots in our mind, as MEMORIALS craft essential and inescapable songs that warp folk music harmonies and prog pop inclinations into impossibly colossal hooks. The record opens with the band locked in and swarming in psych pop splendor on the buzzing organ led “Acceptable Experience,” a song that grooves with bouncing bass and manipulated harmonies. The atmosphere is thick and chaotic yet focused, like falling through your favorite black hole. “Lamplighter” doubles down on the harmonies, a moment of vivid and direct pop that sparks and combusts with layers of Verity Susman’s incredible vocals. Much like the most accessible Electrelane songs, there’s a joyous wonder and a sense of adventure that feels of equal importance as the melodic grip wraps forever tighter. It’s not easy to make pop sit comfortably with dissonance, but Simms and Susman do it over and over again, “Cut Like A Diamond” a perfect example that’s abrasive in structure and design but feels like an alien smash hit from its spring-loaded start to it’s spiraling conclusion.
Then there’s the detached element. MEMORIALS become willfully unglued at times, obscuring reality as their entire framework seems to ricochet and splinter beneath them on songs like “Memorial Waterslide II” and “False Landing”. The former embraces a plume of chopped and disjointed free jazz while the latter squiggles into serenity like dancing spider limbs amid dense rolling drums, arriving at an eventual state of kinetic hypnotism. Susman and Simms are creating gorgeous music, dreamy and dissociative yet it can hardly be described as delicate. There’s strength pulsing through each successive rhythmic direction, the warble of the tape, and their directly indirect paths. Memorial Waterslides splashes and skitters with supreme confidence, dropping from cosmic heights into kaleidoscopic pop depths like stars exploding in a midnight blue sky.