Chamber Music

goldenstar is a band from Montreal. Chamber Music is their EP. It’s out on OST. It takes them to the altar of a relatively new but already widely resonant North American musical canon: it’s a self-avowed slowcore record, a term that conjures

intimacy, slow-glowing guitars, and ride cymbals that bathe and shimmer. It’s a term fraught with the legacy of universally beloved forebears like Duster, Bedhead, Codeine, et al. A pantheon of sorts. Slowcore carries weight. But this is no retread. Chamber Music’s palette is recognisable, but reconstituted through the idiosyncrasies of its songwriting: the creeping unease on opener ‘Forget’ and the sleepwalking lamentation of ‘Spinning Out’, songs whose warmth are framed by an ever-present anxiety that ebbs and bobs like lantern light on ocean water.

‘Thread’ unspools a kind of shaky optimism, undercutting every swell of hope with a chord change that eases the realisation of its falseness. The downcast note it ends on is carried through to the EP’s second half, which brings the pace down to a hypnotic sway. ‘Belemen’ and ‘April 3’ are scenic views through tired, dark-circled eyes, twinges of memories felt but elusive, meaning that recedes further every time it’s recalled. Instrumental closer ‘I Blink and See Nothing’ concludes numbly, spiralling downwards like a stomach butterfly turned to a moth.

These are songs that speak to stillness and solitude and slow-burning pangs of regret: words unheard and half-thoughts left unspoken, a creeping sense that taking your own advice will only ever reveal the meaning it lacks. It’s about hollowness, it’s music that constructs a chamber in the familiar surroundings of a well-worn void. Welcome down.

Credits
Engineered by Patrick Holland
Mixed and mastered by Patrick Holland and Francis Latreille
Words by Madjestic Kasual