NEW TRACK: Light Asylum - Shallow Tears

Finally, a new release!  Shallow Tears is the lead 12" single from Light Asylum's long-awaited, highly anticipated self-titled debut album, due out in May on Mexican Summer.  The two-track single comes on suitably fetishistic limited edition white vinyl.

Dancing over the grave of the not-even-dead-yet Grace Jones, with a vocal comparisons all too apparent to avoid a reference, Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello return with another visceral tear-streaked symphony to emotion-haunted back alleys and dry-ice cloaked dancefloors. It starts with a peal of thunder,as dramatic an entrance as they could make, then the drums start pounding. This music is something else out there on its own. Even without Funchess' remarkable intonations there's enough resonant affect being squeezed out of the synths that each time she really opens up her lungs it reaches right into your chest and crushes your heart.  A less coked-up Cold Cave in introspective sensitive mode, Shallow Tears rolls forward in stately fashion, blowing up into alternating surges of drum crescendos and vocal multitracking that freezes time and blows out way before your ready for the affair to be over.

The B-side, Genesis, is far more restrained, with a creeping paranoid melody line picking its way over a jittery drum track that slowly slides into a silvery vocodered vocal climax. A little bit HTRK, but again, an entity all of itself.  It's the perfect foil to the grander A-side, a flawless 12" dropping a twin assault deep into your sensual perception, and the ultimate teaser to the10 track album, due out soon.

Order now from Mexican Summer.

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VIDEO: Light Asylum - A Certain Person

Official new video for A Certain Person by New York's Light Asylum directed by Eden Batki collages their recent tour round the US with on and offstage footage. Such a powerful emotive song, and it's not even the best on the ep, which has now been made available on a full release. Mexican Summer re-released the duo's awesome debut and only recorded output, In Tension, earlier this month.  Get it get it get it.

VIDEO: Light Asylum - Dark Allies

Neon-neo-gothic, strobescopic video for nu-Grace Jones-like scary-lady fronted two-piece Light Asylum. It's one of the more aggressive tracks off their EP and shows off Shannon Funchess’s range pretty comprehensively, though it's even more intimidating to know that she does have plenty more in her arsenal across the rest of it.  She has that kind of rich, classic sounding voice that instantly connects - she does owe a huge debt to Grace Jones and it's kind of weird having two of the stalking the Earth simultaneously, but then it's a voice that brings a certain kind of sci-fi to mind, of futuristic film-noir, of underground decadance and deviance.  I wouldn't be surprised if some evil uber-fan mastermind has vats of trial clones at different stages of success, and this is the one he's unleashed on to the surface to wreak havoc has the original's evil double.  She's sung on tracks by Telepathe, !!! and TV On The Radio, but I don't remember being confronted by her presence anywhere near as dramatically as she makes herself felt here; in her own band with synth player Bruno Coviello.

VIDEO: Light Asylum- Shallow Tears

This year is definitely on to something special for promo videos.  Here's another excellent clip for Light Asylum's Shallow Tears.  All the hallmarks of an 80's slowdance tearjerker are there in the music then the video twists it up a bit; almost like a sequel to Massive Attack's Teardrop  The video is directed by Fabian Svensson & Jens Klevje @ Conjunction Films, Sweden - who also made the unsettling video for Fever Ray's Keep The Streets Empty For Me