Taste Test, Edition #13: Moonlight Breakfast, Hayes Peebles, Caroline Duke & more

Welcome to Taste Test, a review wrangling of SubmitHub-only gemstones.

“Look Up” by Moonlight Breakfast

Carved into the cavernous walls of stardust electronica and damp disco-pop, Moonlight Breakfast seem to flash like cosmic prisms of light through a pyramid. “Look Up” is a dazzling centerpiece that chomps at the bit of lifeless humanity, cascading across space and time, as a way to rediscover well-balanced and tangible truth. “Come on out into the sunlight,” the lead vocalist coerces the listener, who ultimately falls into a creamy river of synths. “Though it might hurt your eyes, I know.”

“I’ll Be Fine” by Hayes Peebles

Hayes Peebles’ tenor swings low, and he takes a tumble down the mountainside, his guitar slinging by his side. “I’ll Be Fine” is a poetically comfortable ode to the beauty in simplicity. “Clean the counters / And then, I’ll go outside just for a while,” he sings, framing the mundanity of the everyday as a king’s treasured gold-plated trinkets. The Americana man rolls around in the earth’s soil, and you become intoxicated by his charm, which soaks each word with an effortless sparkle. You’ll never need more than what you already have, he seems to say. And we agree.

“Tonight” by Caroline Duke

“Tonight” oscillates through the air as a pendulum in the darkness. Caroline Duke emerges from the titillatingly-sweet dark-pop fog with a clearer and firmer grasp on her identity and her deeply-rooted desires. Her coos feather and flake in the blurry, drug-induced haze, and she basks in song’s dwindling brightness as a mechanism to initiate a lustful plan. “You’re like my drug / You’re like my god,” she professes. The beats trickle out of the speakers with a languid but calculated flow. It’s a buzz that’ll never wear off.

“Follow the Hard” by Blueanimal

Fretting about the bad is the downfall of mankind. It’s almost ingrained in our very DNA to look back at what we could have done and wring our hands over and over on an uncertain future. Folk band Blueanimal sizes up their unfocused existence and wrestles their heartstrings away from such terrible angst with “Follow the Hard,” a cut from their latest album, Hollow Heart. In truth, it’s shrouded in a melancholic veil that seems to weigh heavy on Luke Elm’s scarred, spent and searing vocal. And through an acoustic-hewn ballad, one that feels timeless in nature, we can come to a much greater understanding of our own dog-tired trek.

“Give It Up” by The Sweet Kill featuring Lolita

The strings scrape and sizzle against each other into a cataclysmic storm. The Sweet Kill savagely squirm amidst a downpour of biting electric guitar, which snarl and bend around Lolita’s equally piercing voice. With “Give It Up,” twisted branches of soul-tearing reflections of unquenchable pain, Pete Mills (the man behind the mask) juggles various dysfunction, from alcohol to a lover’s touch. His vocal drains his heart but its poison continues to course in the veins. It’s that dichotomy that serves both Mills and Lolita to great effect, bolstered with the percussion’s bone-breaking nature. “I need you to save my soul,” the sing, almost dancing around each other in the moonlight.

“Swift Ships” by the National Lights

This life is tragically bittersweet. We often romanticize what we can’t have ⏤ and perhaps don’t deserve.Jacob Thomas Berns, of The National Lights, carries his cross with him wherever he goes. The salt air stings on his skin and seems to stick like darts into cork board. “Swift Ships” tussles about on a smooth, crystalline surface of oceanic guitars, leaving his soul exposed to the beastly elements. He spars with the past and the choices he made, and there’s almost a moment when you feel he could have so easily traded it all. But he doesn’t, and therein lies the fate of all humanity, engaged in our cage’s rattling bars and a destiny not yet satisfied.

“A Broken Person’s Game” by Primer

We bury ourselves in the dirt so we aren’t faced with what we can’t take. Even in relationships, our lungs fill with dirt and gravel and smoke, and we claw at our own throats as the pile continues to grow and morph into an unfathomable creature. Alyssa Midcalf, formerly one-half of Parts, mounts a revelation as a soloist named Primer, a ghost-like singer whose vocal is otherworldly and leaps between galaxies at the speed of light. On “A Broken Person’s Game,” synths swimming next to the swell of other electronics, she offers up scattered pieces of her mental health and tries to soothe her pain, even if her lover is blinded by it all. “Game” is one of those lightning in a bottle performances, somehow unnerving and smooth all at the same time.

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