LISTINGS A lbum OF THE WEEK

JUST ANNOUNCED

GLOVE AND GHOST

DEAD DROP

As is becoming the norm when it comes time to write one of these weekly local-album reviews, I have no idea who the act in question is. Glove and Ghost has exactly zero online presence outside of its Bandcamp page, which features precisely one release: a six-track EP called

Dead Drop. From said Bandcamp page we can glean that Glove and Ghost is the work of someone named richardm, but beyond that, there are few details about the artist.

What we do get, however, is extensive information about what inspired the EP: the Cold War. From that we can infer that richardm was a kid in the 1980s, and there’s certainly something redolent of that decade in his palette of Iron Curtain–grey synths and drum-machine beats.

You could say that Vangelis was trying to evoke a bleak future with his Blade Runner score, and Glove and Ghost does its best to conjure up a paranoid past. It’s almost like the antithesis of vaporwave’s blurry Vcr–era nostalgia. With the exception of “Mantra for Barflies”, there are no lyrics on the EP, just distorted snippets of intercepted transmissions. Some of them sound like police-radio messages, but a few are darker and less easy to place. Who, for example, is the man on “Blackpool Discotheque” who casually observes, “It’d be a good place to corral ’em and gas ’em”? Sometimes it’s better when you don’t know exactly what you’re listening to.