The Laughing Chimes – Whispers In The Speech Machine | Album Review
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Slumberland Records
There’s a part of me that still thinks a goth is the coolest thing you can be. It’s not even something that I particularly identify with or feel a strong pull toward, but to me, there’s nothing more fascinating than the person in the corner with the swoopy black hair and an extraneous leather belt.
While it’s easy to see how a crush on Sam from Danny Phantom could segue into the emo investments and highlighter-colored hair of my late-Aughts scene period, I often kick myself for taking so long to arrive at an admiration for this type of music. I look at the discography of a band like The Cure or The Jesus and Mary Chain, and I see nothing but decades of consistency. I also look at the number of bands they’ve influenced, like Mogwai, Beach House, and countless others, then wonder why it took me until my mid-twenties to develop an appreciation for goth and new wave.
Perhaps I was apprehensive because it felt ingenuine to be drawn to this aesthetic as a relatively stress-free, well-off kid from a suburb of Oregon. Goths were something I saw in movies and TV shows; even by the time I was a teenager, the music felt like an ancient text, and for me to adopt that style would have come across as nothing but hollow. The reason The Cure can make an album as phenomenal as Songs of A Lost World more than 40 years into their career is because that’s who those people are at their core. Robert Smith has always been that bitch.
The same thing goes for jangle-pop acts like R.E.M., who, in my estimation, have near-spotless discographies and have always sounded effortlessly cool, even when they were still greasy, pimple-faced college kids. It makes total sense then that I’d hear an album like The Laughing Chimes’ Whispers In The Speech Machine and be drawn in like a fly to honey.
Despite sounding like an album you’d pick off the shelf of an English record store in the mid-80s, The Laughing Chimes hail from southeastern Ohio, lending their blend of post-punky dream-pop a sturdy midwestern foundation. It’s a trip to think about these four making such gothy works from Athens, Ohio, of all places, but anyone who’s visited that part of the country can attest to the imposing industrial abandon that marks your days. I imagine it’s actually quite similar to the drab places where this music often emerges like London or Scotland, but what does my Pacific Northwestern-ass know?
Whispers In The Speech Machine starts by whisking the listener straight up in a pitch-perfect jangle riff that serves as the engine for most of the record’s 28 minutes. It’s easy to get drawn in, nodding along to the delay-drenched guitar lick of “Atrophy” as Evan Seurkamp’s dreamy vocals float by. You’re liable to soon lose your place in time and space as The Laughing Chimes move you from one scene to the next with a studied precision. Just like the washed-out half-exposure on the album cover, things start to feel half-real and overgrown, an amalgamation of physical places and hallucinatory visions constructed from half-remembered locales. Was I really here, or was it just something I saw in a movie? Why does that building look so familiar? Who are all these people that I feel like I should know?
Though it feels scant, these eight songs have the exact right elements: the aforementioned arpeggiated guitar paired with driving, cool basslines that link up perfectly with Quinn Seurkamp’s effervescent drumming. Despite being prominent in the mix, the vocals often feel more like a vibe-guiding suggestion than a critical element–it’s just as easy to get sucked up into the gorgeous swirling guitarwork and driving rhythm section as it is the wraithy lyrics surrounding them.
Some songs like “Country Eidolism” retreat into more retracted acoustic-guitar-led pensivity, which the band knows to quickly chase with a high-energy burst like “Cats Go Car Watching.” Through all these lush instrumental explorations, the Laughing Chimes remain locked in on their gothy inspirations. A playlist of songs that influenced the LP reveals not only expected suspects like The Cure and Bauhaus but more modern touchpoints like Alvvays and early-career R.E.M.
Up until the final moments of “Mudhouse Mansion,” you’re likely to remain under the band’s witchy spell until its final reverb-soaked jangles have come to a rest, at which point, you’ll be hopelessly dumped back into the real world with all of its horrors and pains. The transportive nature of Whispers In The Speech Machine is one of its powers, no doubt, but the band’s harkening back to this older style of music also serves to show us how far we’ve progressed (or flatlined) in the previous decades. If the contrast feels stark, then the music is doing its job.
