Premiere: Memory Rounds, ‘Glances’

Kevin Bronson on November 20th, 2015

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* Updated with full album stream

“Time tells lies,” Ryan Kirkpatrick sings in a soft croon over a throbbing beat and queasy synths in “Glances,” the first song from Memory Rounds. Well, it does and it doesn’t. But “Time Runs Low,” the debut album from the new L.A. duo of Kirkpatrick and Matt Aveiro, certainly explores how we move around in it. The project finds Kirkpatrick, the former bass player in L.A. indie-rockers Red Cortez, and Aveiro, the former drummer for Cold War Kids, charting new territory. “Basically, it’s two guys who have been in rhythm sections the past 10 years coming together to work in a way they hadn’t,” Aveiro says.

The project began when Kirkpatrick gave the drummer a copy of a solo album he’d finished, and Aveiro expressed interest in working together. It grew to a co-writing situation with a fresh batch of ideas, with Aveiro manning the beats and Kirkpatrick working on keyboards and bass. “We felt complete freedom to do something where our hearts really lie,” Kirkpatrick says. Eventually, they convened with producer Gus Seyffert in January, with Kirkpatrick’s former bandmate, guitarist Calvin Love (now helming an excellent solo project) coming in to add guitar parts. The album, which the duo will self-release on Nov. 27, was mixed by Hugo Nicolson and Sam Petts Davies.

It’s minimalist pop-rock with “a lot of attention paid to sonic details,” Aveiro says. Like the single — in which the narrator seems caught between feeling detached from the world and being completely engaged, even overwhelmed, by it — the album wrestles with internal struggles. “In the end,” Kirkpatrick says, “we’re all trying to find an emotional intelligence that helps you make it through the bureaucracy of your day.”

The album is available on Bandcamp.

||| Stream: “Time Runs Low” (full album)