Sculpture Club – “Not Impressed”

Sculpture Club – “Not Impressed”

Sculpture Club hails from, of all places, Salt Lake City — not exactly what you think of as an epicenter of post-punk. And yet, the band is adept at channeling their forebears from the darker, charging end of the post-punk spectrum while counting themselves amongst a current generation of artists — also within darkwave and synthwave — who revisit the moodier and more sinister corners of certain strains of ’80s music. Having formed in 2013, Sculpture Club released their debut A Place To Stand in 2016. It was a collection of punchy and goth-y tracks, and it was a promising start for the group.

They’ve yet to follow that debut, but today they are sharing a new song. Titled “Not Impressed,” it’s their contribution to Songs From Under The Floorboard, Vol. 1 — a new compilation linked to DJ Dave Cantrell’s radio show Songs From Under The Floorboard on Portland’s XRAY FM. While Cantrell started the show as a conduit to dig back into the origins of post-punk that he witnessed in London and San Francisco in the late ’70s and early ’80s, it soon grew beyond that into a document of how the influence of those bands crops up today in contemporary post-punk and darkwave. Songs From Under The Floorboard, Vol. 1 compiles previously unheard and rare material from 10 different American and British artists from this milieu. With proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, the compilation is intended as the first in a yearly series that will benefit similar organizations.

“Not Impressed” is certainly of a piece with Sculpture Club’s previously available work, but there’s also some qualities that differ. Where a lot of the songs on A Place To Stand were dirty and visceral — gloom heaped upon guttural guitars and barked vocals — there’s a glossy Cure-esque tint to the twilit sounds of “Not Impressed.” Combining more muscular bass rumbles with flickering then duskily gleaming guitar work, the song seems to come from a grey and haunted place but uses those guitars to shoot outwards, hinting at someplace brighter. Check it out below.

Songs From Under The Floorboard, Vol. 1 is out 4/6 via Accident Prone Records. Pre-order it here.

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