Double on Time by Picastro

For fans of Kathryn Mohr, Mope Grooves, The Caretaker, modern classical music, and the golden age of professional boxing, Double on Time by Picastro haunts us by combining uncomfortably intimate vocals and lyrics with the subtle use of melancholic samples. Music has many ways of feeling haunted, especially in an age of dead-end culture and endless reruns, but here Picastro haunts us in an extremely literal sense, persistently calling out to us in anguish as their personal, spiritual, and familial origins lay in ruins. What better way to vocalise this suffocating loss than through samples from modern classical music, a creative movement already in mourning of a Western society which once supposedly earnestly believed in itself yet now revealed to be nothing but the lowest forms of human moral degeneracy cynically wrapped in a gaudy veneer of sickeningly glistening gold. Now, that movement’s dejected, discordant cries of existential pain gain the voice of an uncannily present singer-songwriter, unpacking a lifetime of treatment as human filth by a world which anxiously awaits our return to the dust from which we came.