By Brian Moss

New York, with its breakneck pace of life, breakneck cost of living, and stunning multicultural magnitude, has a way of making easy victims out of fresh transplants and hopefuls. In a place of such intensity, it’s all too easy for aspiring creators to get swallowed by the shuffle and retreat as fast as they arrived. However, for Shock Cinema’s Autry Fullbright (guitar) and Destiny Montague (vocals), the effect of the move has worked graciously in their favor. Since their departure from the bellows of the American Southland last Fall, the two have fused together with drummer Miyuki Furtado (formerly of the Rogers Sisters), played countless shows, made a record, and found themselves embraced by and collaborating with the revered likes of TV On The Radio’s Jaleel Bunton and …Trail Of Dead’s Conrad Keely. Describing New York as “a pre-apocalyptic Gotham city where Halloween is every day,” the band elaborates, stating with grandeur that, “In a way it feels like we’re cataloguing a journey, a march if you will, through the end of the world.” Evidently their locale is providing them with ample influence and a driving sense of purpose. Now centered in Brooklyn, their alluring craft of siren-sung, post-everything, horror-prom-sound-scapes are swelling outward with rapid momentum.

Drawing from an array of genres including punk, soul, hip-hop, and art-school dissonance, Shock Cinema successfully manages to maintain definitively unique characteristics while simultaneously paying homage to some of their favorite way-pavers (see Can, Birthday Party, Unwound, and Prince). Their songs, rooted in seething, often after-hours dance floor inclined rhythmical low-end turbulence, and propelled forward by dynamic guitar work that moves seamlessly between jarring accents and suave fluidity, are all founded around stories or thorough literary allusions. At the masthead, Montague’s voice soars through echo-soaked and haunting melodies, dragging listeners into her all-sensory encompassing narratives. Furthermore, after a listen or two a correlation between the band’s name and art form becomes blatantly apparent. Citing the films of David Lynch and Dario Argento as a source of stimulus, their cinematic undercurrents and usage of psych-ambience and goth subtleties bring to mind the perfectly suited soundtrack for a silent Italian horror flick or a Spaghetti Western set in deep space.

Shock Cinema’s richly intelligent and captivating debut effort, a lengthy E.P. entitled Our Way Is Revenge, has recently been made available to the listening public via Kanine Records. If the end truly is nigh this crew of visionaries wants you catalyzed, alive, and aware when the party starts. “The general public sleeps through their lives and in the words of a Frank Herbert character, ‘the sleeper must awaken’.”

So rise up all you bohemians of the Big Apple’s final days of rot… open your eyes and wipe the slumber from your ears!

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