derives - slowcore, ambient, melancholic, sunny... indie music reviews & discoveries: Villa Venus

Villa Venus is a slowcore band from Brooklyn, with if I'm not wrong,

Jeff Ciprioni (guitar / vocals), Mike Zorrilla (guitar), Beth Ann Coulton (bass) and Ian Vidaurre (drums), playing slow melodic songs, recalling the older stuff of bands like Barzin, Radar Bros or The Clientele but also more obscure formations such as Coastal, Hula, Best Boy Electric, The Relict or Nord Express.

Their songs are definitely melancholic, but more slow and melodic than tense and desperate, even if in the background, you can see the ghosts of Low, Galaxie 500 or Bedhead.

Five songs recorded at home, freely available and irremediably quiet and classic. Four originals and a cover of "My Drug Buddy", a song by The Lemonheads which they made their own only by playing it slower and in a sleepily way, pleasant but not revolutionary.

It's the driving "Slow Collapse" which starts the ep, with a bewitching atmosphere, delicate invitation to a reverie, nicely annoying with a delicate tension, a song you can only love and succumb to, which makes you dream of foggy November mornings.

"Don't come home" is deliciously vaporous, somewhere between The Relict and Coastal, watching the sunrise, still in bed, a blanket around the shoulders, covering warmly the body, while the eyes are attracted by a cold light blue sky and the first rays, conjuring up intoxicating feelings of beauty, while we just try to stay with the head above a sea of melancholy, trying not to drown.

Closer to - the "Long Division" era - Low, "Like Drowning", is about drifting and losing yourself inside, but Villa Venus is offering you parachutes through their song, and cotton clouds where to land softly and comfortably. Haunted and heading towards dreamier, almost shoegaze areas, "Currents" plays with weightlessness and soft emotional waves sweeping you away.

It is a really nice an brilliantly realized debut ep, and even if it doesn't really offer something new to the genre, it is fulfilling, appeasing and comforting.