Secret Cities - Pink Graffiti

Not so much a concept album as a meditation on a theme, Graffiti Tapes is (mostly) about Brian Wilson and young people. It's about Brian Wilson and his work as a prism through which we view youthful things. It's about the feelings that start with him getting all mixed up in our feelings for other people and other music (and vice versa). Inspired by a college thesis, changing relationships, and a fateful meeting with the aging once-spokesperson for vibrant youth, Pink Graffiti is a record that uses one artist to anchor and explore a peculiar set of experiences, thoughts and emotions. By drawing on fractured psych, girl groups and minimalist composers, Secret Cities have conjured a kaleidoscopic, strangely moving whole out of disparate pieces. Distorted loops, drones, and thundering toms underpin distant voices. Pianos are pounded. Grainy acoustic guitars come through like AM transmissions received deep underground. But even as strange sounds and frequencies get pushed out front, the melodies, always and forever, get top billing. From the galloping heartbreak of opener Pink City to the final, cathartic release of The End, Pink Graffiti is pop music turned in on itself, lyrically and musically. Secret Cities began with tapes flying through the mail back and forth between the Easternmost to the Westernmost borders of North Dakota. MJ Parker and Charlie Gokey were barely 15 when they met at band camp, but a shared love of psychedelia and scads of secret, unheard songs between them drew the pair together. They passed cassettes back and forth across the tundra of their home state, each manipulating and adding to the other's work via 4-track. Slowly they built up a catalog of sound collage and darkly romantic pop. Those songs might not have made it beyond the UPS had a friend not put them in contact with Baltimore based Fall Records three years and about a dozen cassettes in. In 2005 they released Zurich, an album that embraced both the weirdness that grows in rural isolation and the psychedelic music that had initially brought the pair together. Following the addition of Alex Abnos (aka Kansas City's Tut Tut) on drums and a whirlwind tour of Midwest, the three went back to the drawing board. Over the next four years, they tore down and rebuilt their sound, sometimes woodshedding in an actual wooden shed on the prairie. Eventually, Secret Cities emerged with a cocktail of Spector-esque doe-eyed romanticism, electronic flourishes indebted to minimalist composers like Terry Riley, the noisy, art damaged sensibilities of late psych groups like The United States of America. All that, plus their own persistent weirdness.  // "...a fractured piece of music made from just about every possible sound under the sun, probably not too far off from what [Brian] Wilson’s been attempting for his entire career."" FADER  //  "...layered electronics, live instruments, dreamy vocals and tunes you keep whistling the whole day." Subbacultcha //  "...intimate and immediately likable...It gets better and better the more you listen to it." Stereogum  // 

Tracklisting:

1.  Pink City 2.  Boyfriends1 3.  Slacker 4.  Pink Graffiti pt. 2 5.  Wander 6.  Color 7.  Aw Rats 8.  Pink Graffiti pt. 1 9.  Vamos A La Playa 10. The End

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