The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons by Lights Fluorescent

Dave Harrington and Benjamin Jay collaborate on a new venture under Lights Fluorescent, debuting their first album The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons on Kingdoms.

Photo by Kingdoms

Made up of Dave Harrington (Darkside/Dave Harrington Group) and Benjamin Jay (NDF/Benoit & Sergio), Lights Fluorescent is, as the two describe it, an "experiment in the spaces between song and texture, idea and reference, of past and present". On their debut album "The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons" the duo developed an atmospheric, slant-pop sensibility that leans toward the experimental tendencies of improvisational and ambient music.

Entirely percussion-less, recordings drift on the tenderness of guitar, revenant feedback, and vocals of autumnal intimation. "Space Metal" and "July 9th" process layers of bespoke noise and washed out chords to tarry with integral depth, light, and shadow, while "Hotels" distills country-western longing into a dimensional essence.

From within these sonic panoramas, vocals emerge more as watercolor traces than coarse etchings. They aim to capture evocative, lyrical intensities, eschewing the solace of the literal. As such, the album favors "the gestural, the implicit, and the miniature over the more adolescent urges of grand narratives and epic".

"J Girls" reveals a hint of the story buried, like its context, deep in whorls of feedback. Fleeting images of monuments, cathedrals, or epitaphs on tracks like "Palace Walls" or "Small Sacrifices" speak to a sense of memory and community paradoxically ungrounded by the material instantiations meant to keep things in place.

Lights Fluorescent - The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons
Release Date November 2019
Label Kingdoms

Tracklist
A1. The Oldest Sons Of The Oldest Sons
A2. Our Earlier Years
A3. Space Metal
A4. Palace Walls
A5. Epitaphs
B1. Hotels
B2. Neil Young/Cues
B3. Small Sacrifices
B4. J Girls
B5. July 9th