Ex-Isles - Domestic Sacraments (2023) [Hi-Res]

Domestic Sacraments is Ex-Isles’ long awaited follow up to their acclaimed debut album, Luxury Mass released in 2018. With a dramatic and explosive expansion of their sound and a strident agenda, they interrogate the hollowed-out promises of contemporary life under late-capitalism and turn them into an urgent poetics of despair and resistance. Domestic Sacraments is a masterclass of pop writing and arranging, that upends pop music's musical and lyrical conventions to create a beautiful, damaged, slyly witty record that has deep roots in the work of David Sylvian (Secrets of the Beehive), Scott Walker, Talk Talk, and David Bowie's Blackstar.

Across nine tracks, Ex-Isles's arrangements convey the full psychic drama of their idiosyncratic lyrics - abrupt changes of direction, colour, shape - a sense of mid-20th century cinematic sound and vision. From an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia in (After) Deaf Republic - written in response to Ilya Kaminski's poem Deaf Republic, to the ever-tightening knots of punitive officious language of life under Universal Credit in The Gnashing Ends, to the deep yearning for an affective, sensuous kind of solidarity in A Mechanism Of Release, Ex-Isles's music is infused with anger, desire, defiance, agony, self-doubt, hope: a collision of emotions that colour all struggles for a better, fairer, egalitarian world.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Ex-Isles - Do We Call This Home? (2:16)
1.02 - Ex-Isles - The Smallest Plot Of Land (5:14)
1.03 - Ex-Isles - A Mechanism Of Release (10:34)
1.04 - Ex-Isles - (After) Deaf Republic (4:08)
1.05 - Ex-Isles - The Gnashing Ends (8:46)
1.06 - Ex-Isles - This Notice (0:58)
1.07 - Ex-Isles - Theatre (5:21)
1.08 - Ex-Isles - Your Violence (6:04)
1.09 - Ex-Isles - Tender Rites (5:45)