Listen to The Bug Vs Earth’s Track “Don’t Walk These Streets”:
Let’s finish the week with a listen to The Bug Vs Earth‘s new track “Don’t Walk These Streets” off the duo’s upcoming LP Concrete Desert out March 24th via Ninja Tune. The cut premiered this week via Decibel Magazine, and as the Berlin-based musician Kevin Martin (The Bug) explained, it was influenced by his experience walking around Los Angeles during the making of the record. He says:
“‘Don’t Walk These Streets’ was really written as a reaction to feeling absolutely alienated and set adrift in the surreal manifestation of the American Dream that is L.A. It’s a smacked out jazz, fuzzed up trip, into a social void, that I wrote after realizing there is zero safety net in the States for anyone that falls off the gravy train…I attempted to conjure the feeling of sheer dread that I felt wandering across the Hollyweird landscape.”
To which Dylan Carlson (Earth) adds: “Well, it’s something Kevin really noticed about LA and I confirmed it for him. You’re viewed as crazy if you walk anywhere in LA (more than a block or 2) or use mass transit…”
You can think of “Don’t Walk These Streets” as a recast of Missing Persons’ classic “Walking In LA”. Okay, probably not! The Bug Vs Earth unleash a serious maelstrom of freezing dread here. Carlson’s guitar, which he explained to Decibel was “abstracted from traditional guitar sounds” more than on any other track on Concrete Desert, sounds like it’s been obliterated into a noxious cloud of ozone melting smog. Martin’s beats shuffle and pace about in the haze echoing with a cavernous reverb that casts the city as a vast, impersonal space. Meanwhile, soot-filled drones darken the shadows as sonic landmines threaten to go off around every corner.
