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New Single From Former Loverman Vocalist Gabriel Bruce
Gabriel Bruce’s first solo single, Sleep Paralysis is the sound of the ex-Loverman vocalist finding a new voice, with that band’s primal energies being recalibrated into an impassioned sweeping synthesizer symphony. Gabriel Bruce’s idiosyncratic crooning baritone plaintively insists ‘I’ve got this feeling I were dead’ as the song slowly edges toward climax from hushed beginnings. A shaker drops in, drums fire off in doubles foreshadowing the release of the song’s pounding beat, whilst four organ notes cycle through claustrophobically, mirroring the feeling of sleep paralysis itself.
The track recalls Leonard Cohen’s late 80s synth production on I’m Your Man, yet is altogether murkier and more foreboding, more interested in depth of darkness rather than that album’s surface glimmer. B-side No Love Lost draws the Cohen connection deeper, primarily through Bruce’s deep vocal range, though tonally Bruce reaches something smoother and more versatile than Cohen did, and the track has shades of Nick Cave’s possessive obsessions and fascinations in subject matter.
A hybrid of book and record release Bruce’s debut 7” is incorporated into an illustrated book which looks into the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, featuring cuttings and ephemera of people’s recollections of the remarkable sensation. The book draws from concrete poetry’s emphasis on the typographical possibilities of arrangement, with fragments by Paul Eluard sitting next to spliced out sections of medical texts and anonymous memoirs of the conditions, whilst placing itself within framework of Dada’s cut-up technique, popularised later by everyone from Burroughs to Bowie, where disparate fragments are dissociated from their contexts, and are given meaning cumulatively in the re-presentation of them.
Gabriel will be playing a London launch party for Sleep Paralysis in February and gigging across the UK later in the year.