Somewhere along the line, coldwave became frighteningly good at keeping its shirt tucked in. The drum machines behave, the bass sits precisely where expected, everyone owns an appropriate black coat, and occasionally you begin wondering whether an entire subculture has been sentenced to spend eternity posing beside the same concrete wall. Then along comes Mercury Girl with Low Altitude, sounding sufficiently nervous to remind you that this music once existed because somebody had something eating at them.
Mercury Girl is the project of Filipino American San Diego musician Aaron Pena, whose debut album, A NuTone, arrives October 10. Low Altitude is its first single, and anxiety is practically another instrument in the arrangement. The drum machine keeps clipping forward at odd little angles while synth lines twitch overhead, creating the sensation of machinery functioning perfectly while its operator quietly considers pulling the emergency brake.
Then there is that bassline, lofty and strangely buoyant beneath Pena’s dissonant vocal, which seems emotionally several rooms removed from the comparatively hopeful chords surrounding it. A guitar eventually climbs through the arrangement with considerably more grandeur, briefly opening the ceiling before everything settles again into the song’s peculiar state of suspended agitation.
Black Marble, Harsh Symmetry, Molchat Doma, and Oppenheimer Analysis provide obvious relational coordinates, yet Pena understands the essential reason those records work: electronics can be emotionally merciless precisely because machines have no obligation to console anybody. Put a vulnerable voice beside a rigid drum pattern and suddenly every beat sounds like another second you have survived.
“This song reflects on a breakthrough I had when coming to terms with my depression,” says Pena. “I wanted to write a song capturing the internal isolation I’ve felt within me for a long time while echoing the catharsis I had after fully acknowledging it.”
Which could have produced a painfully earnest five-minute therapy session set to synthesizers, an occupational hazard of anybody writing openly about their own head. Pena has enough musical sense to leave the feelings inside the machinery, where they become stranger and more useful. Low Altitude carries its emotional trouble through repetition, distance, and those unexpectedly optimistic chords, suggesting the peculiar moment when understanding yourself provides relief without magically solving anything.
Listen to Low Altitude below and order the single here.
Recorded at home in San Diego, A NuTone will expand upon Pena’s experiences with depression, isolation, love, and the difficult business of accepting affection when your own brain occasionally argues against the proposition. Low Altitude makes an excellent introduction because beneath all those cold machines sits an old rock-and-roll problem with a very human soul, trying to figure out how to live inside himself.
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