Devotions: Pusher | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It seems fitting when I listen to The Rational Academy, Glitter Veils and, now, Devotions, that I hear Luke Zahnleiter’s guitar, rising like a mournful cry in the night, an echoing coyote howl that’s haunted each of his projects over the last twenty years or so. These bands embrace their stylishly disaffected natures, emerging like itinerant drifters from the gloom, putting down some bittersweet music like a part-payment on a promise that’s never going to be fulfilled, a brief affair cut short, before they disappear, back into the night again.

Is that laying it on a bit thick? Maybe, but that mood seems to be stronger than ever on Pusher, the debut album by Devotions: Luke’s new duo with vocalist Kate Mockunzie. It’s made the more explicit by their influences, too, which are as cinematic as they are musical. The pair namecheck the work of Wong Kar-Wai, Nicholas Winding-Refn and David Lynch, directors obsessed with tragic, romantic protagonists, trussed up by their emotions and delivered to the often sad, bleak fates that await them. They lift liberally from the associated soundtracks, too, be it the bittersweet synthwave-pop of Drive, the synthetically reconstituted nostalgia of Chungking Express or the psychologically tortured refrains of Lost Highway, Devotions have found fertile ground in which to plant the seeds of their own sound.

In other ways, strangely, the dense fog of Pusher is a little hard to pin down. It sits comfortably amongst the contemporary fad for dreampop, shoegaze and synthwave too, but, perhaps because it so deftly sutures elements from a wide variety of the practitioners of these styles into a new whole, it can be a little confusing picking which musical memory they’re evoking at any given moment. Is it The Cocteau Twins, The Chromatics or The Curve that’s echoing out of the reverb right now? There are some unexpected dividends in all of this musical recontextualisation, like the strange mutation of old-school electro into the trap of today, a process at work across the record. Such a simple thing, really, but there’s a subtle genius for hybridisation in here, that’s really worth digging into.

It is a very dense sound, packed with layers and treated with the soft focus roar of shoegaze, which is, stylistically, what it’s supposed to do. I am curious, however, what it would sound like if more of the individual parts were allowed to stand out in the mix. As it is, there’s a surprising amount of depth to Pusher but I found myself getting lost in the miasma of the sound trying to get to it. Again, maybe that’s the point.

The lyrics, if you can make them out, are exactly as loaded with a shared history of love, regret, obsession, ennui, nostalgic pleasure and pain, as you would expect. It’s all too easy to imagine this is Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan instead of Luke and Kate. I was struggling to find a tract from the lyrics that captured every shred of that complex range of emotions, but try this from Pawns: “Let's leave home / And Laugh at all the cuts we lick / You should know / I'm drunk on all my favourite failures / Let's head back / I can't do another lonely lonely line / Bloodlines spill and every other hour spills / But nothing ever fills”. I guess it’s no wonder things turn out like they do.

Pusher only gets more intense as it goes on, later cuts like Final Girl or Modeling doing both some of the better dreampop you’ll hear right now and then tricking it out with layers of moaning, booming, shrieking synths and guitar that surge around those snapping electro beats. The narratives which form the foundations of Pusher have been around for as long as there have been rootless drifters and melancholy romances. Devotions bring the pain flooding back and all of the longing that went with it too; a burst of feeling before the darkness descends again.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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