Brian McBride and Kenneth James Gibson – members of Stars Of The Lid and Furry Things/[a]pendics.shuffle respectively – have recently been taking time out from their main projects to write music as Bell Gardens, a band "conceived over many late nights talking and playing for each other the songs that have inspired them over the years".
Now they’ve got a full-length album entitled Full Sundown Assembly set for release through Southern Records in September, and in advance of the album a single, ‘Through The Rain’. We’ve been given the video as an exclusive to run ahead of the single’s release – you can watch it above, and you can listen to both tracks from the single below. ‘Through The Rain’ is backed by a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Don’t Let The Sunshine Fool Ya’.
Both solo and as half of opiate-soaked ambient/drone duo Stars Of The Lid, McBride is generally known for crafting sparse and slow-moving instrumentals. His last release – 2010’s The Effective Disconnect, a soundtrack to the film The Vanishing Of The Bees, was no exception, gathering together a set of exquisite, gradually unfurling tracks that touched both on the hazy ambient of old and on more traditional classical composition. Gibson’s history is rather more convoluted, and has taken him from noisy pop with Furry Things in the 90s through techno, minimal house and dub as Eight Frozen Molecules and [a]pendics.shuffle.
Bell Gardens make a rather different sort of racket, though with an equally narcotic twist. ‘Through The Rain’ finds them working in songwriting mode, with a dreamy, indistinct pop feel not too dissimilar from Panda Bear’s channeling of Brian Wilson. At times it’s even vaguely reminiscent of Christian Fennesz’s album Endless Summer, which reimagined West Coast guitar pop as lucid and shimmery instrumentals.
‘Through The Rain’/’Don’t Let The Sunshine Fool Ya’ is out this month.
