Quilt – Arctic Shark
Boston psych-pop trio have fun with Chondrichthyes. Watch, listen and enjoy.
This Boston trio for whom Odessey And Oracle is a keystone album and pop music comes in various shades of wistful, autumnal brown, are putting out this playful harmony pop 7” ahead of their second album, Held In Splendor, out on Mexican Summer in January. Although it evokes a kooky atmosphere of tea and symphony baroque, it does so with remarkably restrained instrumentation, just trip-trap drumming and a distant piano replacing the chiming Byrdsy guitar for the song’s hallucinatory coda.
“The group roll about, balance radishes on their heads and grapes pop back onto the vine.”
Arctic Shark hinges instead on Quilt vocalist Anna Fox Rochinski, a singer possessed of wide-eyed innocence and a languorous, honeyed vocal style that belies some perceptive cosmic-level observation. “Everything will regenerate as it was,” she assures us, “all your heavy hearts are simply illusory.” Which is good to know.
Fox-Rochinski also understands that psychedelic tweeness must be used sparingly. “All my heavy dreams are simply luxury,” she acknowledges, “the horses in the pepper tree and lighthouse flowing in the sea.”
In place of cor anglais or harpsichord solos, to up the psychedelic silliness quotient is the accompanying video of the trio at play on a patchwork of coloured blankets (conceptual gag ahoy!) as they roll about, balance radishes on their heads and grapes pop back onto the vine, implying both brain-curdling significance and affable wit in one go.
Watch the video for Arctic Shark here:
