Stream: Some Ember “Asleep in the Ice Palace” (exclusive)

13 Mar 2013 — Henning Lahmann

Iowa City's ever-reliable Night-People imprint has once again been on fire recently, without a lot of fuss dropping superb and modestly high-profile releases by underground pop luminaries such as Featureless Ghost, Dylan Ettinger, or Boy Friend. Next in line is the latest tape by Some Ember, the Bay Area-based outfit gathered around mastermind Dylan Travis, whose 2012 full-length Hotel of Lost Light on Crash Symbols managed to enthral with its blend of post-punk faithfulness and latter-day electronics, unobtrusively experimental on the edges and by all means gloomy without slipping into shallow cliché, which happens all too easily within this genre. Follow-up EP Asleep in the Ice Palace now is another tight and compellingly mature effort, delivered with a surprising amount of confidence. The group persists on exploring the darker side of 80s wave tropes, at times rather obviously reminiscing authorities such as Joy Division or The Cure, at other plunging deep into more remote currents of the era, demonstrating a considerable expertise in minimal wave and other left-field subgenres, evoking images of bleak and empty basements crowded with sweaty, belligerent youngsters dressed in black. Overall, Asleep in the Ice Palace might not exactly reinvent the wheel when it comes to heavy, dead serious synth music, but it is a highly enjoyable and very convincing EP without any doubt. Stream it in full below.

Asleep in the Ice Palace is out on cassette via Night-People.