With New Roses, Ben de la Cour delivers the sonic equivalent of that eerie feeling you get when the beams from an oncoming set of headlights brush over you on a rainy day. It’s not quite a run in with your mortality, but there is a sense of a near miss. Although the light scanning across your skin is intimate, the interaction itself is alien and alienating: you’ll never see the person in the other car. There’s something predatory about it.
De la Cour is a master of building foreboding soundscapes, turning over the cracked pavement in our souls and kicking up whatever lies underneath. On his sixth album, de la Cour couches his rough-hewn voice in synthesizers and distortion, supported as always by his careful guitar work. If New Roses is a bit imposing, it’s also contemplative: the quiet observations of characters in a Jim Jarmusch family, who kept living their life until they somehow found themselves to be denizens of the night.
