Synth Single Review: “City of Once” by W O L F C L U B

by Karl Magi

W O L F C L U B’s “City of Once” begins with a languid melodic pattern that glimmers like skyscrapers on the horizon and a synth creates muffled delicacy before the exhaling vocals caress like soft hands on warm skin. The lead singer finds the essence of the lyrics, in touch with their affection and emptiness, bringing together brokenness and desire. 

In the distance, a drift of notes floats before massive percussion presses on. Sunburnt passion fills the vocals as they reach me with their earnest yearning. Phil Smith’s guitar has a slightly gruff tone carries melodic entanglements that tremble with ferocious feeling. 

The lead singer’s voice has a vulnerable quality that permeates the music with tragic love above a heavy reverberation. The chorus climbs with a nostalgic haze that extends above the foundational pulse before the song comes to a close on Phil Smith’s guitar as it reflects bereft passion in its interwoven sound.

As she drowns herself in the song's subject's past, our storyteller is "trapped in a figure of eight" as she trips over the words she wants to say  "forever, that there's no escape." She feels clumsy with the other person and her soul as she fails to “call myself brave." Ink from the photograph’s frame covers her hands and "the monochrome spills from the page."

Feeling "grazed by the summer," the narrator doesn't think she can recover and she's being kicked out anyways. She says there's "no time to remember, just time to surrender." She'll "meet you in the city of once," and embrace the song's subject there for eternity but that won't be enough. she adds "I'll starve or suffocate in your love” if that's what she’s feeling.

"Stand by the glass just to watch you sway, I'm vacant in all the right ways "as our storyteller tears at her heart so that the song's subject could stay, "an ultrasound mapping your veins."