People Skills - Gunshots At Crestridge LP

Label: Blackest Ever Black

Gunshots At Crestridge is the second full-length album 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 New Zealand 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 (willfully) mawkish, bubblegum ground underfoot. 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 of our tiny acts of self-sabotage, all of our sins against time.