The Synthwave Radioshow
See Thomas Howl
'Mischief night'
Best track: knock knock ginger
click album cover to listen
After a brief hiatus, See Thomas Howl comes right back at us like a banshee from the darkness. In review is his latest release Mischief Night.
The title track Mischief Night raises from the dead and right off the bat you’re treated to a creepy dialogue cooling your corpse in preparation for whats in store.
Bloodcurdling bass sweeps you up as a panicked heartbeat like kick provides the spine. By the time the double bass kicks engage for the devilish drop you can’t help but bang your head.
On to Knock Knock Ginger, the mixing on display here is stellar and some of the best I’ve heard in general in the scene. The searing bass and hammer like beats really sit together like… Cadavers and caskets. The leads are rowdy and the track is mysteriously melodic but also hair-raisingly heavy at the same time. The breakdown leaves a chance for you to appreciate the percussion before you’re dropped back into the sizzling synth bass and crushing beats. Awooooo.
The introduction to Dark kitty is an ominous and foreboding experience. As the track moves along you get some awesome filter cutoff action in the low end along with full sounding syncopated beats. Like the name suggests the organ like synth gives you connotations of feline familiars going about their dastardly business. This is a frightfully funky track.
Moonlight Trance is a remastered and re-edited version from the Lunar Halo charity release by Steel City Collective and the STH treatment really shows here. When the bass opens up you can really imagine a terrible presence creeping out of the darkness behind you arms open intent on stealing you away, it gives you shivers. When the track drops you can envisage that this is full swing live STH in the early hours, controlling our pulses like dancing dead.
Closing out the EP My Dead Friends opens and the bass manipulation makes you feel a sense of imminent danger and an air of phantom panic. The melody work is wicked as the track builds up to a progression providing a momentary respite from the John Carpenter esque pads and arpeggios from the afterlife.
To conclude, you can really feel and hear the love See Thomas Howl has put into this Halloween themed release. Funky as hell, gorgeously produced and chock full of callbacks to movies. (some obvious and some not so obvious.)
Mischief Night see’s darksynth at its most fun because at this time of year you get treated by artists exposing us to frightening aesthetics and spine chilling sounds. Taking us back to what we all love so much about that all powerful, all hallowed night. Jack Gregory 9/10
a visual representation of the album:
