New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Alberta-based Moral Pleasures (solo project of Ryan McKinley, mem. Pkew Pkew Pkew) shares his new single, "Goth" via Beats Per Minute. The second single from his sophomore EP, Sleepy Songs for Dying Loves (out 6/11), "Goth" is a cerebral slow burner with an early 00's-era dream pop angst. Mixing gritty guitar distortion with hard-hitting acoustic strums and harmonica, Moral Pleasures creates a moody soundscape for a mythological exploration of youth and its deterioration.
On the track, McKinley says: "Goth" is more about celebrating youth while you've got it. When you're young, experiences and relationships are so intense and you're so carefree, but that part of life doesn't last very long. By the time you're around 30, you start to look back on your youth as this huge part of who you are that you can never go back to because you dare not behave like that again. I was reading a lot of Irish mythology and fairy tales at this time, so there's a lot of that injected into this song."
And on his production process, McKinley shares: "There's really only two parts and an ending to this one, so I wrote the music first on guitar, which probably only took 20 minutes. If you strip away the other stuff, it kind of sounds like something you'd hear in a folk/country song, which is why I put a harmonica solo in it.
Everything else I did musically was to pull it in the opposite direction. There are strings, a Synclavier with a bunch of filters on it, and a Sonic Youth-inspired guitar part that give some depth. I added the percussion at the very end to give it a greater feeling of space that it was lacking." You can hear more about his songwriting process in his latest exclusive interview with Punk Rock Theory.
Sleepy Songs For Dying Loves is a short collection of simple and dream-like love songs told from various perspectives, times, and places. Diverting from the typical love song tropes, McKinley veers away from themes of straight-up heartbreak, deceit, and lust, taking a more psychological and existential approach, confronting the problem of mortality in the face of love and happiness.
In the collection of cerebral songs, McKinley masterfully weaves together references to art, poetry, literature, and psychology through a nostalgic (but not rose-tinted) lens. Written in a week-long stint cooped up at home in Alberta in January, themes of longing and dreams resurface throughout the five tracks, glued together with an overarching ambient sonic pallette. Combining his love for "weird neo-classical and ambient electronic music," synth pads and drones pervade the undercurrents of the record, giving it a spacey, ethereal energy. The EP was written, produced, recorded, and mixed entirely by McKinley in his home studio, and was mastered by Jon Drew (fed Up, Tokyo
Police Club, Pkew Pkew Pkew).
