Turn on, tune in. Kansas City cosmic art-rock outfit Monta At Odds returns with gusto – and a fantastic collaboration with Taryn Blake Miller (Your Friend) – with the hallucinatory single, “Other Side of Yesterday”. The psychedelic mind journey for the track brings to mind the stylings of 60s giants Traffic, Blind Faith, Cream, early Yes, and Ten Years After, or more modern outfits like Spiritualized, Foxygen and Mac DeMarco. Truth be told, Other Side of Yesterday can be easily imagined as a cameo in one of those oddball late-night Turner Classic Movies 60s B-movie lineups, following up The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, or highlighted as a lost track from the Monkees’ Head.
Monta At Odds births the music of the future, forged from phantoms of the past. “Other Side Of Yesterday” is a gently wild ride into the subconscious. The song is simultaneously resplendent and luminous; Miller brings a warm richness to the tune’s epic layers, tossing the listener into a captivating sonic vortex. This is a gorgeous glimpse at Monta At Odds’ forthcoming album, Peak of Eternal Light.
“The vibe of Other Side of Yesterday captures the song’s looking-back-while-looking-forward intensity, with the words reflecting a feeling of symbiosis — a connection so strong that two people seem to read each other’s thoughts,” says Monta At Odds.
The accompanying clip for Other Side of Yesterday is a kaleidoscopic landscape of half-memory: the track is illustrated with lush shadowy figures, shallow focus, bright colours and sweeping dreamscapes. As we transcribe our lives to a digital realm, what remains of our history, what remains of our future?
“The video for Other Side of Yesterday is about escaping to a past that never was,” explains director Mikal Shapiro. “Equipped with a glitchy memory, we’re left to re-imagine our past by resurrecting pixels. Most of the archive has been (gladly) lost to static. Meanwhile, the screen has become our substitute horizon. A self-fulfilling prophecy — we asked to get lost and then invented the means to do so. Our bodies have almost completely disappeared from view only to resurface as ghosts in the machine.”
Watch the video below:
Twenty years after the formation of Monta At Odds, brothers Dedric and Delaney Moore have held down the fort as their sound and lineup evolved; collaborating with numerous fellow travelers and taking cues from Italian cinema, the avant-garde, and psychedelic disco-funk.
Listen to the track below and order Peak of Eternal Light here:
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