Be My Wife is the Bowie-inspired alias of Paris-rooted, Miami, and Buenos Aires-reared Federico Nessi: a name dipped in noir gloss and lit by cigarette ash. His songs, equal parts dirge and daydream, coil through corridors of post-punk disquiet, minimal wave restraint, and crooner cool. Think fog machines coughing, strobes stammering, bodies swaying while hearts splinter.
The Restless Pursuit spins four songs, each a small, sharp prayer to dance floors and dim-lit reveries. There’s something unmistakably Latin in the sway: part Miami heat, part Buenos Aires ache; all stitched, stitched again, stitched once more in a Paris flat, a meticulous labour soaked in sweat and sentimental scrawl. It’s gothic pop tempered with tenderness, Krautrock rhythms haunted by hip tremours, a soundtrack for nights when the lights blur, and the only thing left is to lose yourself: eyes shut, heart open, between the beat and the breakdown. The Restless Pursuit is a brilliant, brave, and bold effort of poetry and sound experimentation.
Who You Are opens soft as a whispered prayer, echoing acapella syllables floating fragile, fragile as frost. It harks to those halcyon sixties crooners, Bowie at his most brittle, Bunnymen at their most bare. But the sweetness shatters: soon comes the throb, the thump, the tension. The steady pulse builds, then breaks, unspooling into some Lynchian wasteland where woozy wooshes and off-key lamentations stagger like lost souls down a dim corridor. It’s a slow-burn siren song turned cacophony…eerily inviting.
Complicate Me slides slick into synthetic precision: Kraftwerkian clicks, motorik mechanics. Crooning crooks from the throat, stately and smooth, reminiscent of Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley’s baritone ballet. Beneath the gloss, basslines burble like Gary Numan’s machines dreaming feverishly, while distant echoes feel like fragment: two estranged songs fused together, stitched with insomnia into a Frankenlied. It’s dance music for the disoriented, where pop polish tangles with cold circuitry and memory skips like a scratched vinyl.
Melodramatic meanders first – slow, stammering, stumbling; recalling Fad Gadget’s jittery jabs on Incontinent, all bent circuits and broken rhythms. Then, without warning, it veers: vocals steeped in a Cure-like croon spill across the static. Beneath the electric tangle lies a tremour: a wish, wan and wavering; for touch, for tether. Each line loops like a lonesome wire, sparking between need and noise, clarity collapsing into confusion. The singer swings precariously, perched between ache and absurdity, signal and silence, sketching a portrait of passions frayed and fragile.
Radically Sealed smoulders, searing straight through the sterile landscape of division and decay. The voice: soft, serrated, rises like smoke from scorched streets, standing amidst ruin, fists clenched yet fingers trembling. Beneath hushed synths and sorrowed percussion, the plea presses forward: a call for communion in a world-worn thin by cruelty, trapped in its own tragic repetition. It hums with aftermath, heavy with the ache of futures frayed too soon.
Listen to The Restless Pursuit below and order the EP here:
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