In the late nineties American television began to accept realism. Gone were the mansions, cocktail hours, private helicopters and family-owned sheriffs that had littered the sagas of Dallas and Dynasty. Grit made its seedy way onto the small screen in the same way that it made its imprint in eighties Scorsese movies. Main characters would carry on their backs the brunt of repercussions of a potentially destructive foreign policy (The West Wing), or find themselves responsible for turning human matter into mangled flesh (The Sopranos and The Wire). Alternately they treated mangled flesh to stop it from expiring (ER), or, should the victim suffer no such luck, hover by their dead bodies whilst they munched on their ham sandwiches (the Law and Order franchise). That was if their daily tasks did not include its grooming and embalming (Six Feet Under).

This kind of television overturned the artificial glamour which the public had been weaned on for too many years. Through means of some mysterious paradox, this was the funniest time in television’s history.

In the dozen years between the mid-nineties and late 2000’s, an era now known as the modern ‘golden age’, no law decreed that characters would have to be completely clueless to be humorous. Even the average network sitcom – a genre now riddled with characters so unbelievable in their idiocy that any ‘real’ version of them remains totally alien to most human beings – had people to whose living functions we could actually relate. But what was ‘golden’ when it came to golden drama was the sleek unbroken way in which it could poke fun at its own plots and protagonists. This wasn’t rooted in a lazily staged moment where a character trips up on a dead body before later misplacing it. The funny moments wove patches of guesswork, endeared to us the major players, or relieved a moment heavy with dramatic tension of its burden. They had the buttons for igniting lightness.

Characters in these beloved series were in full recognition of the risks they took, the brevity of their existence and the countless childhood tragedies they or their friend or wives or husbands had endured. Yet they traipsed round their lives with all the casualness, self-mockery and sometimes nonchalance to which we would attribute long-shore fishermen described in Arthur Miller plays. It was the job, and that was life. There would still be a home at the end of the day. Or the night. Or seventy-two hours if it was that kind of shift.

Infallibility was absent; flaws were not. Tony Soprano, for instance, once left two ‘made men’ of his Mafia dynasty, Paulie and Christopher, in charge of killing and disposing of the body of a Russian mobster. The act itself falls short of triggering a laugh. What is funny is the outcome that this gruelling cruelty has when aforementioned Paulie and Christopher are not only uncertain about the Russian’s existential status, but lose him (either as an active human being or as a corpse), in the midst of the snow-laden Pine Barrens, a huge woods in New Jersey. That, however, is not Paulie’s major concern. In the process, he has lost his shoe. Outraged, Tony screams down the phone at him, in some crooked attempt at cryptic language: “Is the ‘package’ still alive?!” His fifteen-year-old son, Anthony Junior, sits on the couch nonchalantly eating ice-cream. He watches. He says nothing. The paradox between the horrifying subject that’s at hand, Tony’s ‘inventive’ way of questioning, and his son’s habitualness to such a situation recalls the Theatre of the Absurd. It is the spark that pierced the dark.

In ER, a hospital drama where patients die daily from an inoperable stage five cancer, a gunshot wound or horrible bad luck, one never gets the feeling there’s a messy clutter of untarnishable blackness. Intern John Carter gleefully listens to The Ride of the Valkyries as he joyously performs an appendectomy on Dr. Benton, a resident and Carter’s dictatorial teacher. The nurses, whose daily tasks include directing screaming patients to the Psych unit and intubating suicidal cases, chat briskly with the simple attitude of shopkeepers or office workers who have never seen a corpse. A typical conversation has one nurse request leave for a honeymoon, insisting that “You don’t get married every day,” only for her colleague to respond with a correction: “No, in your case, only every year.” To this the first nurse then replies: “Yeah – but I worked extra hard for this one.”

It’s not only the killers and the doctors at their victims’ helm who brand a sticky daily situation with a stamp of light trivialisation. Police procedurals such as Law and Order, back in the days when Times Square was not clustered with the flashing images from multimedia presentations, tended to discuss a body slashed, mangled or maimed as easily as they might do a daytime soap opera. When one detective, fresh from the sighting of the body of a murdered councilman, finds out that there’s a rumour that his partner hasn’t told him yet, he retorts in his indignation: “Well, Max. This really freezes my cookies.”

It could be interpreted as either disturbing or funny. But by all measures – it was realistic. One would hope that real detectives don’t spend all day frowning and issuing speech in flat tones of an empty hopelessness the way their representatives in Law and Order: SVU, Person of Interest, NCIS and other shows do. After all, unlike most citizens they have pursued this lifestyle as a full-time job. There’s a time in the day when they have to go out and get lunch; another when they have to go and buy their kids some socks. If they were genuinely traumatised by every corpse they witnessed being gnawed at by a swarm of flies, they would be spending half their salaries on therapy.

The trend in television was not just offsetting the extreme dark with a small dosage of comedy. The West Wing, a series which featured no glimpse of an expired matter, relied on its characters mess-ups to render them loveable. In the current climate of political dramas such as Scandal and House of Cards, every plot line rests on an epic scale. It’s do or die, or save a life or kill, or some advent of a dramatic leitmotif on strings which signifies an eerie omen. The West Wing was unique in telling viewers that White House policies, which sometimes end up on the front page of The New York Times, could be cemented when two aides sit down for a Jack Daniels. They could be sparked by a whirlwind of meaningless banter spiced with a subtle flirtation. Or they could happen by accident. When Josh Lyman accidentally tells the White House Press Corps there’s a ‘secret plan to fight inflation’ intending it as nothing but a superficial joke, it is perceived as policy. Sometimes even the gravest mishaps are the funniest ones.

Desperate Housewives, which ran eight seasons largely on the fuel of its narration of a young wife who committed suicide, had the facility to splinter gloom. A mother’s insistence that the big bad wolf who ate the grandma of Red Riding Hood had simply ‘suffered a bad childhood and deserved forgiveness’ lightened-up an episode laden with tension. Even one of HBO’s most miserable endeavours, 2008’s In Treatment, consisting wholly of traumatic psychotherapeutic sessions, made viewers laugh when the psychiatrist saw his own shrink. Responding to the doctor’s grievances about the wife who left him, little familiarity with his own daughter, and broken communication with his son, Dianne Wiest’s character remarked: “Well, at least you didn’t have a dog; or else you would have screwed that up.”

The years passed by. Cable and broadcast networks sought a continuation of the golden age and picked on what made most hits differ from a typical Hollywood blockbuster; what had ensured that train passengers and people waiting at the bus-stop talked much more about them than they did about the latest ‘epic’ movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their answer? Darkness.

In the medium of TV, the commonly used adjective ‘dark’ often purports to translate into one message: ‘He is deep’. Tony Soprano killed people for a living, then didn’t feel too good about it. He was complex, he was complicated, and he spent one hour a week at a psychiatrist’s office. Networks picked on up this theme: if a character was part-time evil or ambiguous, if something in them was the crux of something dangerous or irremediable – as with Don Draper and more recently with Walter White – it gathered reams of watchers and the viewing figures mounted. Producers hunted for their own piece of the hype and snapped it up. It’s possible they went too far.

Whilst television quality reached new artistic heights, Hollywood spent those years sticking to showing viewers more about computers and the different moulds that make one virtual figure jump and fly than something recognisable or neighbourly. The room left for the actual human beings, unsimulated dialogue, two people brushing past each other as they walk down through a corridor, has mostly muted its main characters into sharp wooden figurines who wear a frown most gallantly and transport in their oratory only the gravest, allegedly most life-changing, supposedly ‘meaningful’ speech.

Has Hollywood now hijacked television? Looking around the drama series both on cable and network channels, the staples that we know so well from modern cinema – layer upon layer of flash imagery, eyebrows narrowed to signify impending disaster, not to mention the quickest strokes of bowing on the strings – has swallowed up this genre that we’ve come to call ‘elite’.  

If television’s current need for darkness shaped only the moral values of its major characters, then its creative side and structure would remain unhurt. But this compulsion for TV to have a ‘dark side’ has begun to tamper with the stitches of its fabric. It’s mandated that seriousness preside over each drama, that protagonists be so irreparably damaged that they unlearn animation in the eyes, and that all inner darkness be externalised. The flexible and malleable fabric of lightness has been stuffed behind a locked door. Modern hype-spurring hits, such as True Detective, House of Cards, and within broadcast television, NBC’s The Blacklist, are not privy to human beings who have capacity for laughing at themselves. Their storylines are hardly sterile to these humoristic touches; we have learnt in TV’s recent history that very few are. Perhaps for flash effect, perhaps for seediness, perhaps to construct a barometer of ‘grit’ – ‘lightness’ is something they forego.

So popular is this component ‘darkness’ that it spreads not only to the script, but even more so to aesthetics. True Detective is its crowning example. A series about two detectives searching for a serial killer over the course of seventeen years is not inviting humour along for the ride. Neither its themes nor plot is to be held responsible. A great deal of screen time is devoted to shots which in no way supplant the viewers with a story thread or leave behind red herrings. Long shots of wide expanses of the Louisiana desert consume the series’ minutes in a manner that’s unduly. As though extensive close-ups of a corpse are insufficient, in the corpse’s background can be seen a dark grey, clouded sky. The camera shifts its focus from the bound and litigated corpse to the grey sky, then to the corpse and back again; it’s tiring on the viewer’s eyes. But more importantly, it misses out on any chance to spell outsomething, acting only as a keener emphasis on knowledge that we have. Even the phrase “You gotta come to dinner” is delivered like a dark presage. As though a tortured, murdered prostitute and the fact that one of the detectives had his daughter killed isn’t enough, it has to be conveyed to us: “Look, viewers – the material is dark.”

Sometimes a show can go beyond all reasonable lengths to toot the sound of its own horn. The breakout broadcast drama of last season, NBC’s The Blacklist, is a beaming example. It follows James Spader as ‘Red’ Reddington, an FBI assistant who himself is guilty of, shall we say, more than a hundred crimes.

Typical plots include death threats, the odd bomb, hijacking, kidnapping, hostage, murder-suicide, and the main character Elizabeth Keen’s arduous attempt to find out how she and ‘Red’ have a connection. These events can rival the series’ own gaudiness, but nonetheless don’t quite win out. The camera lens flicks from one face, one location or one object to another; desiring first and foremost to inform us of impending danger. We see half-faces, then a quarter of a face, then three-quarter faces – all of them freeze shots like photos. Although having the luxury of being entirely filmed in New York City, the colour palette is, as though by some formal decree, restricted to a dismal murky grey and brown. The interiors, mostly situated in Keen’s home or FBI headquarters, resemble army barracks or the inside of a prison cell. This isn’t helped by the delivery of lines from secondary characters; thrown off in the frozen declamatory nature of a student group preparing for the read-through of their summer play.

Although Breaking Bad made ample use of humour, not even grazing this cliché, other more recent cable dramas stick to the ‘look at us: we’re serious’ trope. This is one of the reasons why last year’s debut The Americans fell short of millions among viewers. Not only is it ill-informed about its subject – a pair of Soviet spies posing as US travel agents in the midst of Cold War Washington – it boasts too much of the high stakes involved. We understand that its protagonists risk being martyrs for their country. We understand their children, ignorant of who they really are, may also die. It seems that this alone is not enough. Relying on some slow strokes of the strings in film music to tell us of impending action, The Americans is built on a somnolent tone which, paradoxically to all intents and purposes, transports its viewers into a calm lull. So frequently are we expected to anticipate something horrific – such as being led falsely to believe that its main character, clad in black leather gloves, would kill a priest for taking a donation from his teenage daughter – that the show no longer toots its horn; the horn has ceased to function.

One could argue that this immersion of serialised drama into a bleak solidity, either aesthetically or plot-wise, is limited to series which lack critical acclaim or Emmy nominations. But even when it comes to Homeland, meticulously acted, polished with the finest sense of art direction, the drama seems to be so irrevocably plunged into gloom that there is nothing left which can be funny. Understandably one can’t expect self-mockery from anti-hero Nicholas Brody; a US marine who has spent six years in torture in the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists. Nor can we anticipate much easiness from Carrie Mathison; the female lead and an unstable, bipolar CIA Case Officer. But Homeland went all out to tell us that not even something banal or routine, nothing with semblance to the average life could ever happen on this show. Brody’s wife Jessica is endlessly depressed – and not because her husband has been brainwashed by Iraqi terrorists and missed out on his children’s lives. She hates lacking the time for trysts with her ex-lover. Her daughter Dana is a disturbed rebel whose idea of frivolity involves making her boyfriend drive them recklessly through traffic and red lights. The ‘act of daring’ ends when they collide with an old lady, ending her life. For a series with a prisoner of war, Islamic fundamentalists and a mostly ruthless band of undercover CIA agents at its centre, the surrounding melodrama is unnecessaary.

Perhaps it’s grounded in the need of television to ingratiate itself with Hollywood movie producers, becoming a copycat in its usage of flash imagery, collectives of flashbacks, or the brand of ‘dark acting’ that customarily imposes incessant frowning, ‘concerned’ looks and a stoicism unseen since its origins in Hellenistic Greece. Or maybe network television wants to originate its own brand of ‘dark characters’, disciplining and carrying their series so much into a murky colour palette that its leads appear infallible and if perchance they err, it is an unimaginable tragedy.

Wherever the reasons begin, ‘lightness’ is not a word one could associate with television drama nowadays. Both its textual and visual fabrics lack the humour, habits and the regular routine most Westerners experience in their daily lives. It lacks moments relatable. In its own thirst for seriousness, it has become a brand of anti-theatre; skipping the opportunity for spontaneity, easy mistakes that plague all human beings, the odd mispronunciation or a miscommunication that either makes our day or makes us blameworthy. Reality has gradually been suctioned out. And there’s no longer anyone to laugh about it.

Ah, Steps. You gave us endless hours of bubbleg- um pop meets massacred house, withobviously painstakingly synchronised and cringeworthy dancemoves that resembled possessed Power Rangers. Your anthems ‘It’s The Way You Make Me Feel’ and ‘Tragedy’ were the soundtrack to which New Labour brought us into the new millennium. My fondest memory of you was at a 7th birthday party, where I ate too much cake, danced to ‘5,6,7,8’ and proceeded to be violently sick.
You were rivalled perhaps only by S-Club during your initial four years of existence, but why in the name of all that is holy did you have to come back after your heyday and record a Christmas album full of uplifting numbers such as ‘A House Is Not A Home’ and ‘When She Loved Me’?
The time has come for you to disappear so that we may still remember you fondly. Claire, cherish that coveted spot on Loose Women. Lee, keep milking your celebrity clientele dry with that personal training business. H, that isn’t even a proper stage name. We look forward to the next inevitable reunion and tour five years down the line.

All slide guitar, mariachi horns and lyrics about desert highways, Bright Eyes frontman and folk-rock darling Conor Oberst’s second solo release is an accomplished effort, which seems almost equal parts Mexico and his native Nebraska.

Gone is 2005’s Conor Oberst, who became famous for the iconic track ‘The First Day of My Life’ under his alter Ego Bright Eyes. Older and wiser – now married, and having had his fair share in political activism, including writing a song dedicated to whistle-blower Chelsea Manning – Oberst is more mature whilst still manag- ing to recruit the listener’s empathy in his now characteristic style. Whilst sometimes Bright Eyes could be overly sincere, he has now been at this long enough to know when to emote and when to hold back. His trademark quavering voice is eerily triumphant in all its melancholy emo-kid glory, but here the vocals manage to elicit sympathy rather than coming across as whiny. He seems to be enjoying himself, and why not? His indie credentials (Park Ave., Mon- sters of Folk, Bright Eyes) speak for themselves.

The sound of the album draws comparisons to the likes of Radical Face, Tallest Man on Earth and Villagers, opening with the triumphant ballad ‘Time Forgot’, before the reflective lyrics of ‘Zigzagging Towards The Light’. “Oh how circumstances change, feels unmistakable from where I came” he croons, drawing on the state of flux in both his music and his life in general. The angst is sometimes obvious in tracks such as ‘It’s Lonely At The Top’, where he laments that “freedom is the opposite of love”.

Things do take a turn for the more upbeat with the high-life flavoured ‘Hundreds of Ways’ and ‘Kick’, which, with its heavier guitar and plectrum interludes, could be one to drive to. But the album goes full circle and closes with the tearjerkers ‘You Are Your Mother’s Child’ and the slide guitar driven slow number ‘Double life’.

Perhaps the only complaint one could have is that it is too Conor. There is a certain sense of déjà vu with regards to 2008’s self-titled Conor Oberst. This is no bad thing though, considering the potent mixture of sun-drenched guitar licks and sultry acoustic that makes a return. After all, why fix something that isn’t broken?

The cover of the Roots’ latest offering sums up its content, a collage of songs with just a pinch of aggression. Following on from their collaboration with Elvis Costello – 2013’s Wise Up Ghost – the band, who carried on as Jimmy Fallon’s house band when he moved over to The Tonight Show, seem to have carried over Costello’s edgy pallet of sombre-laced hookery.

They somehow simultaneously reference 16th century polyphony with 50s doowop in the first interlude ‘The Devil’. This is a childhood influence of Questlove’s from his father, Lee Andrews of Lee Andrews and the Hearts fame, from where he commenced his musical career as a teenager, joining him on the touring circuit.

Following in a similar vein to the seminal Things Fall Apart and their most recent, non-collaborative, effort Undun, …and then you shoot your cousin is another concept record but a much more effective one. ‘When the People Cheer’ is undoubtedly the album’s highlight, while the previous two tracks exhibit the full out groove that Questlove and co have become synonymous with, especially on their 2010 John Legend collaboration. Cousin is a refined and mature record from a maturing band, a grower not a show-er.

Seahawks are John Tye and Pete Fowler (of album cover designing fame) who have been mixing their magic since 2009. According to their blog, Ocean Trippin’, Seahawks embody the sound of “psychedelic yacht rock, deck shoegaze, hazy beach pop vibrations and marina drone”. As if the album cover wasn’t enough of a clue.

Their debut album is just as confusing as this description would suggest, with a combination of reverberations, echoes, muted synth samples and hazy filters. But just before you go ahead and find this album guilty of being merely suited to the tastes of the boat party frequenting, Moet chugging, red trouser wearing yachting-type, consider the collaborations with Al Doyle and Rob Smoughton of Hot Chip fame, and Tom Furse from the Horrors.

This dazzling collaboration sets the scene for a sonorous landscape like none other, be it the dreamy vocal atmospheres of ‘Drifting’ or ‘Rainbow Sun’, ‘Paradise Freaks’ or ‘Electric Waterfall’s combination of natural sounds with fleeting synth interplay, or the deceptive simplicity of ‘Islands’ and the close of the album. Relative monotony might force this record to be treated as a background one, but individual tracks ensure that Paradise Freaks is definitely one for the summer sun.

★★★★★
Five Stars

Promoted as being ‘From the producers of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the author of The Talented Mr Ripley and the writer of Drive’, The Two Faces Of January promised much: a brooding, almost ominous atmosphere surrounding a stylish, seductive plot. It entirely delivers. Director Hossein Amini, the screenwriter behind Drive, has created a captivatingly magnetic thriller based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel, boasting three expertly nuanced performances from Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac.

Mortensen and Dunst play Chester and Collette MacFarland, a rich American couple living an apparent life of modest indulgence in Athens, who make the acquaintance of the charmingly enigmatic Rydal (Isaac), a Greek-speaking American tour-guide/con-artist, who takes an immediate liking to Collette. The year is 1962 and all is achingly elegant: Mediterranean rays illuminating the folds of creased white linen jackets, chic continental cafés serving alcohol in the morning, and the marble of ancient ruins sparkling in the sun.

When a hired private investigator ‘representing some very unhappy clients’ is accidentally killed by Chester in a struggle, the MacFarland’s turn to Rydal for help, and the three flee together. Jealousy, suspicion and sexual intrigue abound as the trio’s relationship evolves. The relative simplicity of the plot allows Amini to explore the three characters in commendable depth.

The plot subtly embraces themes from classical mythology. There is something Oedipal about Rydal’s desire for Collette and, more obviously, there is some contorted father-son dynamic between Rydal and Chester. The story of Theseus’ return from slaying the Cretan Minotaur, his failure to announce his success and his father Aegeus’ consequent suicide, is related by Rydal to a group of tourist’s early on; this provides a subtle grounding for the relationship between the male leads, articulating the emotive concepts of filial duty, parental failure and shared disappointment.

Mortensen is thoroughly convincing as the quick-tempered Chester. He manages, with subtle contortions of the brow, to be simultaneously menacing and desperate, and one is sure if he is the villain of the piece or not. His mounting concern over Collette’s faithfulness is masterfully portrayed and one slowly recognises a man whose intelligence is just sufficient to conceal his envious rage.

The other two leads are equally laudable. Rydal is torn between respect for Chester and affection for his wife and Isaac walks this fine line superbly. Dunst is adept as the compassionate Collette, whose distaste for her husband develops throughout and whose stifled longing for Rydal is entirely believable. There is wonderful chemistry between all three characters. Rydal’s affection for Collette is barely mentioned, merely hinted at through sly glances and betrayed by uncomfortable silences, yet still undeniably prominent throughout. Chester and Rydal’s heightening animosity is delightfully drawn out, as is Collette’s steadily increasing exasperation.

There is undeniably something of the BBC’s original le Carré adaptations in Amini’s direction, let alone the 2011 film version. Tension is proficiently mounted without resorting to crassness, emotions are rarely explicit and the audience is refreshingly left to their own interpretations for the most part. The tension, the intrigue and the Englishman/American abroad vibe cannot help but put one in mind of Agatha Christie adaptations also, and there is a comparable elegance here.

Cinematographically, Amini’s film is arrestingly beautiful. Everything seems tinged with a refined, sepia-like tone that is alternately sinister and contemplative, perfectly correlating with the plot’s psychological intricacies. Throughout, the accompaniment of Spanish composer Alberto Iglesias score is fantastically appropriate. It writhes, twists and turns, reflecting the various emotional contortions the three leads undergo.

The Two Faces Of January is an impeccably crafted film, subtle, tense and utterly absorbing. Mortensen, Dunst and Isaac supply arguably their best performances to date and Amini’s direction is persuasive and assured. 

Wolf Alice seem like reluctant stars. When I first meet them, we’re sitting in a sweaty dressing room, and the band members are all tucking into plastic dishes of Ramen noodles. They mess about and crack inside jokes during the interview, and seem eager to shift the focus away from themselves. I’m told around half way through that they should be interviewing me, as, quote, I’m “far more interesting.” When I tell them the interview is for a student newspaper, guitarist Joff Oddie says “if bands were universities, then we’d be Scunthorpe Polytechnic”.

But they’re doing themselves a big injustice. The Hype Machine and BBC Music labelled them the most blogged about artist of 2013, having won the hearts and ears of music buffs with their loud and proud grungy rock, melodic enough to sing along to and tough enough to bash your head to. After releasing their second EP, Blush, last year, the band have been looking more and more like ‘the next big thing’. Since Blush, Wolf Alice have got tighter, more confident, and louder, and are about to drop their second EP, Creature Songs, on Chess Club Records, the label responsible for the likes of Swim Deep and MØ.

I ask what Creature Songs is about, but Theo Ellis, bassist, seems a bit bemused by the question. “It’s just a collection of songs, there’s no narrative”. Joel, the orange nail polish wearing drummer adds, “it’s not a concept EP, if they even exist.” The band then erupt into giggles, scoffing at the idea. This seems pretty characteristic. They are incredibly chilled, both in an interpersonal way, and when it comes to their music. Joel suggests the record almost came together by accident, saying “we had these four songs that weren’t quite an album, but we took them into the studio and they took on a life of their own. We started with ‘Moaning Lisa Smile’ which is the new single, and then we came up with ‘Heavenly Creatures’, and then ‘We’re Not The Same’. Joff had this idea on his iPhone for a song called ‘Storms’ that has this huge riff, which we just started messing around with. Then Catherine Marks, who pro- duced it, came onboard and it had a whole new lease of life. Those songs would have originally all stood alone, but they all sit together quite well.” “It’s thematic but without a theme,” adds Theo, ambiguously.

According to vocalist and front woman Ellie Rowsell, the music of Creature Songs is “similar but hopefully better” than that of Blush, but Joel tells me that they’re “willing to say things to each other in the studio that [they] weren’t before”. Theo, however, looking to turn the tone more towards the crass, adds,“we’re more musically liberated to tell each other we’re shit”. The band laugh as he shakes off the comment. “No, I’m joking. We like each other much more”.

Audiences seem to like them much more too. This year has seen a big step up for the band. It’s revved up tenfold, and they’ve gone from Fieldview to Glastonbury. But Theo is embracing the fast lane. “The pace has changed dramatically, but we didn’t want to get signed and not have something to do everyday”.

Creature Songs EP was released on the 26th of May, on Chess Club Records.