[Tonight, indie label Neon Sigh hosts Golden Gardens, Toykoidaho and Kelli Francis Corrado at Columbia City Theater, 4916 Rainier Ave S. Doors at 8 p.m. Tickets, $8 at the door, are still available.]
Golden Gardens capture the flush of first love with their shoe gazing pop, complete with fluttering tummy butterflies and tingling in your toes. Tonight, they’ll be unveiling four new songs from Narcissus, their EP due out on June 11th, and fans should be tickled dream-pop pink.
With their first two records, vocalist Aubrey Violet Rachel Bramble and instrumentalist Greg Alexander Joseph Neville established their sound as a slow-cadenced alchemy of seraphic layered vocals on soothing volume, wrapped in gossamer guitar and percussion (think lovechild of Cocteau Twins, Massive Attack, Blonde Redhead, and Washed Out). The duo’s new tracks showcase their maturity and progression, but the creative combination is just as glimmery as before.
“My Viridescent Heart” births the EP with a resplendent ambient breeze, and the next two tracks are metered by a mesh of percussive textures. The closing track, “Blue Eyes Of a Broken Doll,” launches with a cascade of plucky strings — something new to the band’s sound — and it ends with Bramble’s celestial professions of breathtaking love swallowed in a wash of woolly distortion.
Like GG’s earlier work, Narcissus traverses the cycle of infatuation both lyrically and sonically: Bramble and Neville create an infinite soundspace that’s almost impossible not to fall into. But Bramble’s vocals are louder and self-assured on the new material, not the distant echoey layered vocals from previous records. Her words are crisp but just as lollipop-sweet as before, the clarity adding a layer of intimacy and sopranic charm. Neville expands the instrument-osphere with transportive musicianship, using strings as percussion and dropping in new fuzzy sounds as well.
SPIN dubbed Columbia City Theater “The city’s finest sounding room,” and it should be a perfect setting for all the atmospherics.
