Parallax
A fertile path
Magnify theory
Recast what’s worthy
Dan Powers, doing business in the rainy voltage district as Mutual Shock, has coughed up Charlatans, a sleek little poison pellet from the forthcoming EP Tools of Western Aggression, and it arrives with the kind of cold grin usually seen on a lobbyist leaving lunch with three senators and somebody else’s pension fund. Seattle has always been good at making weather feel like a moral condition; here, the drizzle has gone electronic, each synth line lacquered in suspicion, each drum hit landing with the civic courtesy of a boot heel on a briefcase.
Charlatans take square aim at kleptocrats, those business-and-politics goblins who erode public trust the way termites devour a staircase. Powers does not shout at them from the barricades…he gets close enough to smell their expensive cologne. The song slips between the judging whisper of an angel and the low, oily encouragement of a devil, both perched near the ear of some sanctified fraud counting spoils while the crowd stands around looking freshly unplugged. The opening question, “What’s in your hands?” feels like an audit from beyond the grave, and by the time the song turns toward blank-eyed spectators and collective decline, the target has widened from the con man to the entire room that let him keep talking.
The value of restraint shines through, as the track rides a bassline with real bodily intelligence, something sly and serpentine enough to make the hips cooperate before the brain has finished reading the indictment. Analogue synths snip and glower around it, cool wave surfaces bruised by industrial pressure, while Max Zara Bernstein’s drums give the song a lean, physical snap. You can hear the family resemblance to Black Marble and Molchat Doma in the gray romantic machinery, and the NIN and Cabaret Voltaire influence in the way pleasure gets filed down into menace. Matt Bayles’ mix keeps everything dry, close, and dangerous, while Rachel Field’s mastering gives it the final polished edge of a blade passed across a silk tie.
The Tess Martin-directed video makes a smart, strange companion piece. Rather than dressing Powers up as a doomed prophet or staging another warehouse sermon for the smoke-machine faithful, it plunges into macro footage of oil, water, and reactive substances shifting into tiny unstable planets. The liquids bloom, break, swallow, and divide, turning chemistry into corruption with a laboratory wink. The psychedelic visuals suit the bassline’s sensual creep and Powers’ croon, suggesting a world where every beautiful surface has a toxic transaction underneath.
Watch the video for Charlatans below:
Charlatans is protest music for a population too sedated to notice the robbery until the furniture is gone. It slinks, accuses, and smirks, carrying its disgust like a silver flask. Listen to the song below and order the single here.
Follow Mutual Shock:
Or via: