I sit alone
Biting my nails and biding my time
I’ve walked these stairs so many nights before
I search for answers in my empty glass
Harley Moore and Logan Devlin’s Olympia/Portland project Odor Eater takes the old horror-movie phone gag, the one where the menace has been upstairs all along, and turns it into a jittery synth-pop panic attack with a cheap plastic grin. Their new single, Nightcaller, is built from tight drum programming, rubbery synth stabs, and a vocal performance by Moore that sounds cool enough to pour over ice until the dread starts chewing through the glass. You can hear Devo in the playful, clipped angles, Lene Lovich in the nervy theatricality, Berlin in the glossy noir danger, and Human League in the way the machine beat suddenly seems to have a social life.
The song is funny until it starts looking at you too closely. Moore’s lyrics circle a room that has become a trap, where solitude curdles into habit, and the telephone becomes less a communications device than a guilt-infused organ ringing from inside the body. A glass sits empty, answers fail to appear, and the old domestic safety zone catches fire in the imagination. The terror stems from recognition: the locked door, the collapsing walls, and the feeling that all the frantic activity has achieved nothing. By the end, curiosity fades, motivation halts, and the self is left diminished to smoke and ash.
Devlin’s old school synths and drum programming keep Nightcaller lean, bright, and a little cruel, as if the whole arrangement were smiling with too many teeth. Nothing here slumps under its own cleverness. The beat pushes, the keyboards jab, and Moore rides the arrangement with a voice that can play with panic as an over-the-top performance without tipping over too much into camp parody.
The video, made by Devlin and Moore with additional filming by McClain Nicholas High, gives the song a visual world that understands how ridiculous fear can look when dressed up for television. Its DNA runs through mid-Eighties children’s programming: Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Square One TV in particular, with the rubber-faced theatricality of Peter Gabriel’s classic clips and the handmade oddness of old stop-motion experiments. Then it reaches back further, toward Loïe Fuller’s fabric-and-light dances from the 1890s and Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, pulling early stage illusion into a thrift-store future where every prop seems ready to accuse the viewer of taking doom too seriously.
That mixture of cleverness and silliness saves the video from becoming a museum of references. It has the scrappy pleasure of people making a world from cardboard, cloth, bodies, lamps, and nerve. The gestures are broad, the effects knowingly artificial, and the joke keeps sharpening into a small blade. By the time the house is burning in the mind, the clip has turned playtime into a warning sign.
Watch the video for Nightcaller below:
Nightcaller lands ahead of the band’s album, But For Who?, out July 24 on LP and cassette via Feel It Records. It is a lean little crisis machine, catchy enough to dance to and anxious enough to check the locks afterward.
Listen to Nightcaller below and order the single here.
Follow Odor Eater:
Or via: