As calm as the night and as wild as my mind.

The other night my roommate and I drove through the mountains.  We were heading up to our house and drove right by it, and on we went for miles and miles.

We had gone to a concert that night and had heard sounds that moved us.  A small, two person, Grizzly Bear inspired opening act.  We bought their music after the show.  It was midnight or so, and we skipped back to the car laughing loudly at how excited we were to listen to it immediately.

The first song began slowly as we drove.  The singer was a thin young man with a thick mustache.  He is weird.  Quirky.  His head shakes madly as raw emotion pours into the microphone, rising somewhere from within the depths.  His expressions more intense than I had seen in a long time.  A pretty girl accompanies on the drums.

The bloodhounds,

the bloodhounds they are thirsty.

Well, they lick their lips

at a chance like this.

We kept on up the twisting dirt road.  Past our house and through Gold Hill, a lovely mining village nestled in the peaks.  It has one rickety old shack of a store that sells you not much more than soy milk and cranberry-apple pie.

We kept on up and up until snow coated the trees and covered the ground.  And then some more, until the unusual melodies and the raw, echoing, folk-rock riffs had finished.

After this we turned around, back towards the house, starting the disc again from track one.  The music was slow, beautiful, as calm as the night, and as wild as my mind.  And the words, the words can move you, take you places in your head.  They are so real and so true, they tell stories that wrench at your gut and throw goosebumps down your skin.

I know you noticed, I know you noticed my clumsy hands

Run through your head of, run through your head of gossamer hair

Oh God, I’m an animal

The night was like something I had once read in a fantasy book, in that kind of tripped out and awe-inspiring way that nights can be.  The sound had sucked us into a new and interesting world. Burned trees lined the road like the victims of Medusa, frozen in their dying forms.  And the mountains, the mountains were sleeping giants.  Perfect peaks of white snow even brighter by the reflection of the stars against the dark night.  The city lights spread out below us.  Pearly Gate Music all around us.

Barduk Records describes the music as “if it were written and performed by a bedraggled dust bowl poet influenced by whatever popular songs from the poor folk circuit were being sung after dinner in the parlors of his youth — and who somehow managed to supernaturally absorb the sound of Lubbock circa 1955, Laurel Canyon circa 1968 and Berlin circa 1980.”

Pearly Gate Music is inspiring, dreamy, rough, raw, passionate, fierce, and powerful.  If you have been looking for that certain sound that will move your soul than this is it.

Visit Barsuk Records for more info on Pearly Gate Music.

Or, visit their myspace to listen to some of the music.

Marissa Faye is a cultural explorer hailing from the far eastern lands of Sherborn, Massachusetts.

She is like a sponge—absorbing all things around her with a forever unquenched curiosity.  Often times she is hidden away in her mountain fortress, madly writing tales of fact and fiction.

She is a flowerchild at heart and an incurable addict of art, music, food, and the infinite explorations of life.  In her spare time she enjoys deep space exploration.