Everything is Chemical is an online label that has recently started sending me links to an ongoing series of virtual 7"s that they give away. This is the 86th one, and then have them all listed on Bandcamp, where you can download each one for free. This is a lot of music that they are giving away. Let's just start here, 86 releases in...
The Harrow are a four-piece keyboardy new wave band from Brooklyn, NY. They have a few releases under their belt, and have apparently been around since 2008.
For the A-side of this virtual 7" they chose to do a cover. Mouth To Mouth is a cover of a song by The Glove, which is an early Cure side project where Robert Smith collaborated with Steve Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Not only that, but this was a B-side to one of that project's singles. Talk about obscure! I am not the biggest Cure fan, and quite frankly i find Blue Sunshine, the Glove's lone LP, to be kind of tedious -- just not my thing. I have never heard the original version of this tune. However, what i hear in this cover is pretty much what i expect. It's darkly moody, guitars chiming in distorted layers as keyboards drone and a female voice whines gothily. It's not bad, but not really my thing.
The B-side is an original, Ringing the Changes. I like this one because the guitarwork is really good. One guitar chimes lightly while another does faint chugging chords, kind of like what Antarctica and Ova Looven did, more like new wave than straight up "goth". After about three minutes, vocalist Vanessa Irena stops the wordless moaning she did at the start of the song and adds some heavily echoed vocals, her voice distant and droning like in an early For Against song. It's a pretty good tune.
So i find this free virtual 7" to be a bit of a mixed bag. Obsessive Cure fans, and there are quite a few of them out there, will probably want to nab this free download to hear the cover.
Expect more reviews of this series coming up in the future.
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