On their new album, Violent Light, Brooklyn-based new school New Wave quartet Milagres aim for the skies. Singing about such airy concepts as rainbows, moonlight and clouds, they even feature a balloon on the album's cover (albeit a black balloon, which should warn listeners that it might not all be sunny under Milagres' heavens). Sonically they also seem to be inspired to lofty heights by using Bowie's eerie Scary Monsters-era space age funk as a model for their own 80s-flavored tunes.
Big gated drums and sharp synth stings lend a decided retro flair to Milagres' spacious landscapes. I hear echoes of Peter Gabriel's distorted vocal screams on tracks like "Another Light," or the pounding rhythm of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" in "The Black Table." Perhaps you'll hear riffs that remind you of Talk Talk or Naked Eyes or even Robert Plant's "In the Mood" elsewhere on the record. But they are embraced and incorporated with such class and augmented with a post-Radiohead sense of dramatics and pathos that it sounds as fresh of an album as you are likely to hear in 2014.
-Eric J. Lawrence
Track List:
1. Perennial Bulb
2. Terrifying Sea
3. Jeweled Cave
4. The Black Tables
5. Column of Streetlight
6. The Letterbomb
7. Urban Eunuchs
8. Idnyl
9. Sunburn
10. Another Light
Photo courtesy of the artist