This album was released in October, but only landed with me in the last couple of weeks. It loks lie I’ve got some catching up to do – as have you, unless you’re already au fait with Winkie. This Brooklyn-based band certainly look good on paper, with comparisons to Cranes, My Bloody Valentine, Chapterhouse and Bleak, not to mention the fact their debut album has been mastered by Oliver Ackermann of A Place to Bury Strangers, which provides both a reference and recommendation.
Winkie are a duo: Peter plays bass and Gina provides vocals and keys. There are no guitars on ‘One Day We Pretended To Be Ghosts’, although you’d never know. They create a dense whorling wall of noise, a claustrophobic and intense world swathed in cavernous reverb and impenetrable layers of enigma.
A buzzing bass drives a swirl of sound on the urgent opening track, ‘To Die A Thousand Romantic Deaths’, a yawning maelstrom of kaleidoscopic sound through which Gina’s breathy, compressed vocals just cut to the surface. I’m reminded of early Curve. ‘My Eyes are Closed When the Sun Comes Up’ brings the angularity and cavernous reverb of early Cranes to a bassline reminiscent of early 80s Cure (think murky B-sides like ‘Another Journey by Train’ and ‘Descent’) to forge a stark and darkly atmospheric listening experience.
‘The Line Up’ is dominated by thunderous percussion and a squalling curtain of undulating noise that threaten to bury Gina’s desperate vocals; ‘Sometimes’ is perhaps the most overtly accessible track on the album, but it’s pop edge and mechanised disco groove is wrapped in a dark gauze of ethereal synths and a blizzard of white noise that builds, layer upon layer. ‘The Safest Place is Denial’ is monumental in its weight and density, a grinding drone that threatens to collapse under its own immensity, while the insistent thud of closer ‘Arrows’ is a mass of reverb and distortion that’s gloriously tense and oppressive in its relentlessness.
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To complain that the lyrics are all but inaudible would be to miss the point entirely: it’s all about how they create and convey mood, and on this level Winkie excel. A sonic haze shrouds the walls of distortion, the towering cathedrals of FX-drenched fizz, the synth drones that twist and warp while metronomic drums pump away insistently in the background. Over the course of the album’s 10 tracks, the dark intensity is sustained, and any glimmers of light exist only by virtue of their contrast to the shadows that flicker against every wall and in every corner of the aural labyrinth they construct to stunning effect.
A late contender for my album of the year.
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