Park Motive release their circuit-board-curdling single ‘Undark’, via Bristol’s Spinny Nights.
“I have seen the beauty in decay”. This is the key refrain which Park Motive’s brain-centre Sam Herschmann, croaks and caterwauls in chamber-chilled vaults of ‘Undark’. It’s a fitting line to lynchpin the Park Motive’s aesthetic: music that combusts as it formulates; burns magnificently as it collapses into choreographed, psychological chaos.
Founded upon hell-gracing skyscrapers of synthesis – upon swirling rhythmic-patterns too – Herschmann channels his own mechanical obsessions in this jewel of dark-souled synth-pop. It’s a track which rocks and buckles as if revolting at its very birth. We listeners shiver as we witness a vivification of wire and metal into twisted organic shape. Constantly able to reach higher and higher levels of demented intensity, even when we might have thought the ceiling had been reached, there’s a certain moment where ‘Undark’ ceases to be merely thrilling, and becomes profoundly discomfiting.
Add melodic quotations of Broadcast’s haunted ‘I Found the F’, and the reptilian aura of Howard Devoto in the vocal, and you’re left with a track that finds eeriness on every plane. You want to get off the ride, but you can’t. Park Motive’s narrative must justly follow its course; and it’s for our own good, that we give in to this seduction.
Photo by Genoveva Arteaga-Rynn
Issue Thirty-Seven is out now Ft. Porridge Radio, Crows, Folly Group, The Dinner Party, Automatic, Gently Tender, headboy and more. Buy in print here. Read the digital edition below.
