Biography
Garden Gate is a new project from Timmi Meskers, a name discerning indie rock fans may recognize as one of the forces behind Brown Recluse. That band flew pretty low under the radar, but over the course of a couple EPs and an album, 2011's Evening Tapestry, they created a lush, psychedelic style of indie pop that ran out of steam far too quickly. With their new project, Meskers holds on tight to the psych-pop aspects of Brown Recluse and melds them with the electronic textures of White Candles, another post-Recluse band they formed.
Next, they gently whip it into a frothy blend of sticky-sweet melodies, soft textures, and verdantly swirling sounds. The result, 2016's Dark Harvest, is the kind of album that's easy to get lost in, with tendrils of sound slowly closing around you as layer after layer of instrumentation is added to the mix. Vintage keys, tambourines, tightly sung vocal harmonies, harpsichords, Mellotrons, and guitars of every kind fit together in intricately interlocked patterns over plinky drum machines and echoing percussion that sound lifted off a Plone song. It's a wonderful mix of '60s psychedelia, British library music, '90s retro-techno, and chamber pop sounds through the ages (from the classical trappings of the Left Banke to the jaunty warble of Witch Hazel).
Meskers is in total control of the sound, splicing and dicing like a mad scientist to come up with a result that's both instantly familiar while also sounding very up-to-date and immediate. It's easy to turn off your mind and float downstream as the album flows from one song to the next in waves of richly reverberating vibrations, but if any one of the songs is extracted and held to the light, it's clear that Meskers is pretty good at writing sneakily hooky pop songs, easily comparable to the best work of the band's contemporaries like Jacco Gardner or Temples.
Dark Harvest is an impressive, sometimes close to brilliant debut album, equally fun when listened to with full attention or when allowed to fill the background with dreamily psychedelic wonder.
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