Silent Pictures – “Twisted Smiles” (audio) (premiere)

The sound coming out of Silent Pictures is less a formidable wall and more a shifting dune of sand, all-enveloping and immersive but also weary and accommodating. It’s new music, for sure, but it’s also rooted in the sounds of 40 or 50 years ago, when no matter how fancy the analogue recording equipment, you couldn’t beat the sound coming out of a garage. Let It Beginboasts an impressive resume of producers and engineers, almost all involved with some aspect of offbeat alternative rock through the decades, and as such the music has got snatches of everything — straight psychedelic rock is the name of the game, but there’s some art-pop, some disco, some country twang. In other words, it’s the kind of purportedly vintage music which is somewhat disingenuous in a good way: it sounds older, but it couldn’t have been made without the stylistic changes of the past 20 years. If this record shows anything, it’s that old and new can coexist happily, each benefiting from the other.

“When I think back on it now, I am still dumbfounded by the amazing amount of talent and their connections to music history that contributed to making Let It Begin,” says vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Alexander Mann. “In these modern times where the industry is so detached from its cultural history and yet classic records made by these talents are outselling new music, why wouldn’t I want Silent Pictures to be more apart of that era then the industry’s new push button song in a box paradigm?”

Let It Begin releases July 15th.