Listening to Gnomes’ new EP, “Microclimbs,” feels less like hearing songs and more like stumbling upon a meticulously catalogued collection of internal weather systems. The Berlin artist has shed an acoustic skin, emerging with a sound that’s electric, nervy, and complex. This is music for feeling overwhelmed in a way that’s almost, dare I say it, cozy.
The warm, watery warble of a Wurli synth gives everything the uncanny feel of a half-remembered educational film from the seventies—the kind with a surprisingly bleak ending. On “Lonely Preaches,” a plea for connection arrives so heavily-armored with conditions and self-protective clauses that it feels more like a legal summons. It’s a song about asking someone to come hold your hand, but only if they promise not to warm it up too much. This tense, transactional view of relationships is oddly familiar, like trying to negotiate peace terms in a war only you are fighting.
This feeling of being preyed upon, either by others or one’s own psyche, slinks through the entire release. “Chilblains” describes having one’s very thoughts invaded by a parasitic influence until you feel hollowed out, betrayed into a corner. Then there’s “Acitng Up,” a title whose strange spelling seems to mirror its theme of waking up as a slightly altered, disoriented version of yourself, a stranger on a brief layover in your own life.
It’s a harrowing and hilarious predicament. The peak of this glorious discomfort comes with “Gameboy. 1998,” where a childhood betrayal blossoms into an adult desire for complete, suffocating control over the source of that pain. It’s a profoundly unsettling impulse set to a deceptively gentle melody. The whole EP is full of these quiet contradictions, these small, excruciating climbs up the rock faces of our own damaged hearts.
What a wonderfully strange question to be left with: what if the safest place to be is inside the paradox itself?
