Uma Chine - Changes

Uma Chine - Changes

Label : DE W.E.R.F.

Format : LP - Album - White

Release : 23/04/2021 

Style :  Dream Pop - Belgian Pride

Info

Belgian dream pop six-piece Uma Chine craft unusually bewitching music. The new band has two albums under its belt - the debut self-titled (2019) and Changes (2021) - which have been beautifully received by the music press in the Benelux region press and beyond. The most eye-catching endorsement yet has come from Belgium's godfathers of synth music dEUS. dEUS asked Uma Chine to play at their party in Antwerp, which is a pinch yourself moment for any purveyor of futuristic music through analog gear.

Uma Chine being at the forefront of the Belgian alternative scene comes partly thanks to frontwoman and principal composer Nele De Gussem. De Gussem has been in some of the country's great modern bands before -- BRNS, Maya's Moving Castle, Future Old People Are Wizards. But it's in Uma Chine you hear an artist embarking on their most personal work to date, whilst conceding that the idea of the self is perhaps an egoistic social construct, and that truly divine ideas pass through you.

"I believe that the most important ideas come to us, they want to impose themselves on our consciousness. The only thing we can do is listen quietly and examine them without fear, " says De Gussem, with the air of a Victorian auteur.

With her dream catcher in thoroughly good order, the sound of magical-realism as pop ensues, strikingly so on the new album, Changes. It's a largely blissed-out listen accented by an embrace of the odd. A case in point is the shifts from shoegaze-y dream pop to tribal drum wig-outs on lead single 'Visits'. Or the era-blending 'The Frog', where dirty synth bass intertwining dazed folk-y fireside vocals. The singers have an eeriness to sound truly like oracles. Meanwhile, 'Changes' offers the unexpected as analog oscillators make way for a cranky burst of lead guitar.

De Gussem comes across, ultimately, like the luckiest composer in the world to have such enigmatic co-singers in her presence in sisters Rana and Sherien Holail Mohamed. Meanwhile, the band musicians Simon Raman (drums - Ivy Falls, Steiger), Nils Vermeulen (bass - Jukwaa) and Gilles Vandecaveye-Pinoy (Steiger, Peenoise) all pull in the same musical direction to make this a perfectionist psychedelia, with everything feeling like it's justified as a texture on a trained musical level, with the puzzles worked out in her dreams.

This blend of articulate classicism with truly tasteful production ideas will see Uma Chine blast far into orbit and remain one of THE bands to know in 21st century music.

Tracklist

A1. Uma Chine - Hold
A2. Uma Chine - Leads
A3. Uma Chine - Visits
A4. Uma Chine - (Delirium)
A5. Uma Chine - The Frog
B1. Uma Chine - Changes
B2. Uma Chine - (Rachida)
B3. Uma Chine - Uphill Song
B4. Uma Chine - (The Grass)
B5. Uma Chine - The Runner
B6. Uma Chine - White Horses