VENTURE_LIFT_Junkie_Love.mp3
Street of Mirrors, the fourth album by Venture Lift, the neopsych recording project of Woodstock's Stanton Warren, is a highly dynamic and diverse set of material. It starts strong, with the track "Turn On," leaning heavily on the vibe of punk-goes-electronica pioneered by Suicide and New Order. From there, the tunes open up and slow down, getting more ethereal and spacey as the record progresses. On the instrumental track "Girl with Green Eyes," there are even some Eastern musical nods here, with sparsely played box percussion and open-tuned electric guitar drones that a Shankar-influenced George Harrison may have found fancy for. The spoken-word/instrumental track "Bessie Echo Blues" (voice by Karen Schoemer) reads like paranoid inner thoughts ripped straight from the headlines of anxiety-induced contemporary news media. A musical dirge trudges on behind the poetic lines, mirroring the delicate, labored movements required to simply get through the day with your mental capacities intact in these troubled times. Layered, phasered-out acoustics and sweet-voiced synths accentuate the languid, Syd Barret-esque vocals of the closing track, "War Won't Fix It," a sort of anti-call to arms, simple in its messaging but major in its meaning.
