People Skills - Gunshots At Crestridge (2016)

Graciously welcoming the second full-length lp from Philadelphia’s Jesse Dewlow, recording under the moniker People Skills. The follow-up to 2014’s Siltbreeze set Tricephalic Head. Ten sunken songs, derisively adorned with rhythm and rudimentary dub effects. Bedroom elegies for the lost and irretrievable, last-ditch spells for transformation and renewal. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley likened the previous record to “South Island NZ pop played inside of an armored car”, and that description holds here: underneath the hoods of these wracked and weather-beaten recordings are melodies of disarming beauty and optimism, bordering on the (wilfully) mawkish, bubblegum ground underfoot. Each piece as time-stopping and evocative as an old photograph of someone who used to mean something. Whether speaking through stately keyboard pastorals (‘Mint Julep’), rat-arsed rock ‘n roll slur (‘89¢ Public Render’) or sulphurous aggro-electronics (the two-part title track),Gunshots At Crestridge exposes, then seeks to redeem, all our tiny acts of self-sabotage, all our sins against time. When to stay, when to go...you never got it right, not once.