Peaking Lights
Daytrotter Session - Jun 18, 2012
- Cosmic Tides
- Lo Hi
- Midnight
The initials for Aaron Coves and Indra Dunis, the married couple and sole contingent of the Los Angeles band Peaking Lights spell out ACID, something that they readily point out on the band’s Facebook page. It’s most likely an out-dated, or tongue-in-cheek insinuation, now that they’re doting parents, but there’s an incredibly trippy value to everything that the pair does musically.
While they might not be dropping acid while they’re making these feverish and mutated compositions of club bangers that would be most suitable for the homebodies who wished they were out, who wished they were being seen in fluorescent ways, they must seriously hope that a great number of people listening to them are under the influence of something.
There’s a distorted sense of reality that permeates the air, even when Dunis starts singing. The manipulations that she sends her mostly sweet voice through sends them shivering sometimes into very spacey realms that make you feel like you’re sitting down to a home-cooked meal on another planet, just never questioning what’s lying down on that plate that’s rested in front of you, with utensils on both sides.
These songs are sidewinders and shape-shifters. They occasionally sound as if they could be mistaken for lullabies and then, in a matter of seconds, they change into bizarre entries from a Jamaican hallucination – distorted and hopped up on peyote or something native. They are warm feelings, all of them that are offered by Peaking Lights, and yet they feel as if they’re intense, warped versions of what warm feelings are supposed to be like. They’re melted bits of sanity that suddenly get dripping and splattering into a new blanket of trance-like comfort.