Remora
Scars Bring Hope
A blessing of a Remora album, ‘Scars Bring Hope’ sees Brian John Mitchell bring the solo guitar drone project out of lo-fi bedroom recordings and into the studio with Brian Lea McKenzie (Of Electric Bird Noise) at the producer helm, focusing three hours worth of demo tape into a sci-fi themed concept album.
‘Awake, Arise’, thematically based around the resurrection of a soldier, has all the eeriness and creep of previous remora tracks but with a fuller richer sound thanks to some studio magic, the melancholic atmosphere ploughing steadily into ‘Don’t let me Die with a Coin in my Pocket’.
‘Does the Music’ meanwhile provides us with a somewhat off kilter approach to a love song, with the repeated lyric “does the music make you feel close enough to God to want to fuck me” overlaying a haunting organ chime, helping the track stand out from other tracks on the album while staying true to the whole’s underlining experimental outlook.
Similarly ‘Let’s Fall in Love’ channels a whiskey soaked Americana approach to romance, with Mitchell channelling the musical drunken swagger and drawl of Johnny Dowd.
Taking influence from more esoteric elements, ‘We Come From the Sea’ muses acoustically over the Cthulhu mythos, remarkably creating a powerful and poignant track despite its pulp content while ‘Static is Motion’ expresses the end times via a straight forward ambient sound space of low tones and minimal percussion with the fantastically named ‘Angel Falling Through Water’ ending the album with a thirteen minute post apocalyptic soundtrack.
Silber has been releasing content and albums that have always proven them to be a good source of contemporary abstract music, with a sound and style similar to those halcyon days of Industrial Records, here’s hoping that ‘Scars Bring Hope’ helps shine a beacon on an underrated artist as well as an underrated label.