A NEW YORK auteur with an eye for the beauty of a song steeped in the good stuff of muted bass-string riffs clicking away, a sturdy brass section and the slow chelsea-booted beauty of Roy Orbison, Elvis Perkins has shared a new taste of his upcoming album Creation Myths in the shape of “See Through.”.
“We’re see-through, homesick and heartbroken … would you turn me away if the walls were all I could see?” he sings; a man disconnected, crossed over to the otherworld. “I’ll leave you alone, with your headphones,” he concludes, that voice sliding into a cracking falsetto that reaches into your chest and squeezes.
It’s at once rooted in a world of Brunswick Records 7”s with triangular pushouts and yellowed, dogeared sleeves, and utterly modern in its lyrical concerns: the self-satisfying bubbles of media interaction we have come to live in, gone see-through to each other. Bodies sharing sofas but elsewhere in our eyes and minds.
Elvis says: ‘“See Through’ is something of a ghost song, or a ghosting-right-before-the-eyes song; and perhaps also something of a muted paean to the ameliorative quality of music, as herein we have two conflicted people in a shared space happily enough disappearing down the forking paths of their respective headphones.
“To me one of the best moments of the whole Sam Cohen-produced LP is the sonic vanishing act he pulls off in the final seconds of this track.”
His new album, which follows his previous long-player, the soundtrack to The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which got a release on Manchester’s achingly cool Death Waltz, is entitled Creation Myths and is slated for an October 2nd release via MIR/Petaluma Records.
It forms a tantalising one-two with “Half Life” , a single full of longing and rootsy timbre.
Elvis says of the album: “Sometimes you do the best things when you don’t know what you’re doing yet. I called this record Creation Myths because, in a way, I really don’t know how these songs came into being. So they are the explanation of themselves.”
You can pre-order Creation Myths, which will be available on digital, CD and vinyl formats, here.
