Gothtober- CLOSED TEAR : "Slow Death"

This one-man project out of Los Angeles sprung from the mind of a man with a fetish for the late 80s and early 90s. That is the era of sounds he is cobbling together to create this shoe-gaze take on post-punk. There is a haze of dream pop covering this. It's dark enough to belong here but also could pass for a lo-fi version of what Crosses did on their first album, as the vocals carry the hushed urgency of Chino, but without the balls to scream out from that place.

The second song feels more like 'Pornography' era Cure in the way the bass drives every. The vocals do something similar to where they were heading on the previous song, it seems like the bass line is what the songs were written around, and the guitars kind of fall around that. The vocals are a one-trick pony, only capturing the most montone element of how Chino croons. Not sure if he was going for a Robert Smith thing and that is where he ended up since he is not that great of a singer. 

I guess this is post-gaze or shoe-punk. It's dreamier than it is dark. His breathy murmur is not emotive enough to get to a place of romancing his melancholy. It is even more muffled in the last song.  I think that while the lo-fi production gives this EP it's charm with the vocals getting better treatment it would have helped the songs, but atl east he was not so obsessed with capturing this sound that he forgot about writing songs, as things have their own groove, so I will give this an 8.5, as it works well for what it is. 

3.6

pst505