Release Date: 3/27/20
While “international synthwave supergroup” is enough of a descriptor to turn some heads, Loveblind are all the more impressive for making music since 2017 without ever having been in the same room.
Spearheaded by Saint Marie Records owner Wyatt Parkins, the Texas-based label head initially joined forces with Joshua Garman of Florida’s Crash City Saints and soon tapped Germany-based vocalist and songwriter Dorian Electrique of Seasurfer fame for her strikingly icy vocals. Fellow Seasurfer member Mikel Wegener was brought on for bass and guitarist/drummer Neil Burkdoll of Florida’s Whimsical rounded out the lineup.
After years of incremental recording, file transfers, phone calls, video chats and constant Facebook chats, their upcoming debut album, Sleeping Visions, will be unveiled in March 2020 via Saint Marie.
Opening on the abrasively industrial “War Planets,” Loveblind aim and succeed in creating an album completely alien up against their previous bands. Where single “Daydream” fully lives up to its title in soaring dream pop, “White Piano Black Dress” (featuring Ringo Deathstarr’s Elliott Frazier) isn’t afraid to switch gears and careen towards earth with massive, shoegazing guitar work and chirpy synth percussion.
With Electrique’s vocals kept front and center guiding Sleeping Visions, its ten songs aim to interpret dreams with as much lucidity as our waking states, but Visions is far from a half-awake listen. If anything, Loveblind’s debut introduces a band that not only takes its members’ past pedigrees and distance as a challenge, but a superpower.
RIYL: Siouxsie and The Banshees, Cocteau Twins, Curve, My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins, Lovespiralsdownwards, Placebo, Slowdive
1. War Planets
2. Sleeping Visions
3. Daydream
4. Goodbyes Without Goodbye
5. Mistress
6. Ice Song
7. White Piano Black Dress
8. Saturnine
9. A Strange Place
10. We Land
