EveningShade, aka James Pinkstone, recently dropped a four track EP, called Impulses. Each instrumental track emanates a singular mood, calling to mind the sci-fi and horror ambiences of the ‘80s.
After a successful career of composing indie rock songs and modern instrumental music for commercials, Pinkstone’s captivation with opaque, eerie synth-pop attained fruition when he founded EveningShade, a musical project designed to encapsulate and give expression to the soundscapes populating his imagination.
In 2015, EveningShade dropped The Hungry Night, an assemblage of pop songs caparisoned in synthwave savors, followed by his latest offering, Impulses, mixed by Kris Sampson.
The first track on the EP, entitled “The Woods,” rides a tight, synth-pop tune conjuring up visions of the movie Constantine, with its demon-possessed victims seeking deliverance from their demonic puppet masters. Sinister colors radiate from the synths with unnerving stridency, as trembling brighter colors flicker with spine-chilling intensity.
“THERE SHE WAS” flows on elegant synths that infuse the tune with mysterious sonic symbolism, as if something abstruse is being figured out. “Making Love To Sarah Connor,” an obvious reference to the female protagonist in the Terminator series of movies, opens on quivering, industrial flavors as austere colors surge horizontally overhead. There’s a mechanical sensuality to the rhythmic throb of the melody that’s both erotic and wickedly alarming.
“Passing In The Dark” discharges disconcerting swirls of oscillating textures shivering with hyperbolic tension, imminent, frenetically fragile, and tumescent with malicious tangs of energy full of actinic effects.
Impulses delivers palpable pressure, uncannily ominous resonance, and textures of nerve-wracking concentration on par with grand mal seizures. It’s the sonic equivalent of hell’s mythic structure as proposed by Dante, wherein skintight themes, disparate rhythms, and eccentric effects are fused into an incubator for whole new congeries of psychological neuroses.
With Impulses, EveningShade provides music of merciless superiority.
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