Out Today: West Philly’s The Goodbye Party releases somber new effort Silver Blues

Silver Blues is the latest home-recorded effort from Mikey Cantor, aka The Goodbye Party.  Out today on Salinas Records, the album’s twelve songs are steeped in isolation and introspection.  Bowed guitars, stitched-together tape collages and lo-fi decay add to the warped, vacuumed atmosphere of the collection, which at times is reminiscent of Panda Bear’s interpretation of Beach Boys-esque harmonies (“Heavenly Blues”) and at others reaches power pop perfection (“Disrepair”).

Cantor, formerly of DC / Philadelphia outfit The Ambulars, is now based in West Philly and working solo. When listening to Silver Blues it’s easy to picture Cantor holed up in a drafty row home, moving from room to room and becoming intimately familiar with every creak, crack and shadow filtering though:

A true labor of love, Cantor recorded most of the album himself, aided by drummer Joey Doubek (Pinkwash). Learning about recording and production as he went, he spent the better part of a year closed up in a makeshift studio, augmenting his album with cassette and analog 4-track recordings.

 

The result is an album that exists within its own universe, one that weaves in and out of itself, floats and sinks, held together by its own internal logic. Silver Blues is full of lush orchestral strings, built on top of degrading cassettes and feedback and ecstatic power-pop anthems that bleed out into vocal dirges.

Listen to the poetic Silvers Blues below.  The Goodbye Party heads up to Brooklyn to play Glasslands with Steve Gunn and Waxahatchee on December 10th, they are planning a Philadelphia show for the new year, and we’ll let you know when it gets announced.