Applesauce Tears: Encounters (Black Cottage, 2024)
February 5, 2024 at 11:44 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Applesauce Tears: Encounters
Almost like clockwork, Atlanta’s Applesauce Tears seem to release a
new album of cinematic psych-pop instrumentals every year. Their usage of vintage synths and swaying rhythms always bring to mind Black Moth Super Rainbow and Boards of Canada, except not as lo-fi, subliminal, or cryptic. While it’s easy to describe their sound, they do a lot with it, and there’s moments that aren’t easily predictable, such as “The Flower Ouch Hour”, which continually switches from chilled-out spacescapes to cosmic power pop. “The Time Darling” has a lot of lonesome submovements with distant singing and whistling, bookended by more airy, optimistic sections. “The Docks at Bootle” navigates through dense seashore fog, eventually switching from psych-rock to something closer to lo-fi hip-hop, with dusky trumpet calling in the distance. “Caramel Coated Go Go” is exactly the type of happy candy-high sunshine pop the title suggests. “Three Sweets” starts out kind of jangly but alt-rock tough, then it transforms into this slow, sweeping downtempo thing unexpectedly. With the final track “Puff the Star Stuff”, there’s rainfall, squiggly voices or trumpets or something, trappy beats, mellow keyboards, crickets, and a switch to a slower, more dazed-out beat. The group’s music is easy to put on in the background and vibe out to, but if you listen closer, you find yourself asking, does this make sense? Do these folks know where they’re going, or is being lost and ambling around the entire point?
The Answer Is In The Beat 
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