Organ Thing of The Day: “All Souls Day”, the new single by The Forms out today (All Souls Day) on Threespheres, something rather special from the New York band as I’m sure you will agree.
The press release
Hi everyone – I’m really excited to share this beautiful new video and song from NYC’s The Forms, shot in the Catskills. The stormy atmosphere matches the mystical air of the song perfectly, and I’ve never heard a song built around bass steel pan before.
I love the way the band crafted the arrangement around that instrument here – it feels like the essential core of the song rather than anything done for the sake of novelty. The way the tack piano and rhodes parts mirror the steel pan with repeating single note lines is really striking as well. The sounds of the familiar instruments are transformed into something much more alien and wonder-inducing in this context. I’m also a sucker for anything in 5/4 that feels effortless and flowing, as this does. It’s such a strange and gorgeous song, I hope you’ll find the time to listen and share in whatever form you can.
Here’s what Alex Tween of the band had to say about it:
The ‘soul’ of our song “All Souls Day” is the bass steel pan, a deep sonorous mysterious magical musical instrument we had never heard before that sounds ancient and futuristic all at once. Layered upon that is a tack piano, rhodes, and hammond organ while the vocals were recorded at a church in Rockaway, and the result is a strange dark meditative soundscape of a quiet apocalypse. We decided to release the song on the actual All Souls Day…in fact our entire release calendar was based upon that happening. The song is a wild mood swing after [the previous two singles] Head Underwater and Southern Ocean which were upbeat colorful freak pop songs. We don’t know what kind of song All Souls Day is – but it’s definitely in the vein of a doomy zeitgeist, which is leaned into by the song’s video, in which we play the song in an isolated field in the middle of the Catskill Mountains, and over the course of the day seem to conjure forces that come alive by night as the surrounding goldenrod and spiders look on.
This is another taste of the band’s 2022 LP. More details via the label
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