New Music – The Black Mirror

The Garden is a band that comes around once in a lifetime. In this experimental age of music, The Garden ignores all rules and forms a directionless drive that never follows any sense of structure. It is a wild ride from start to finish, with some pop and punk influences that can entice your heart.

With Mirror Might Steal Your Charm, there is a focus on creating something that is twisted and strange from a distance. Upon initial listening, The Garden feels like a small conglomerate effort of twins, both Wyatt and Fletcher Shears. It is, but their sound is more avant-garde, more flashy, and more intriguing that ever. With club-esque drums and percussion that forms into a hardcore two-step, the band motions to experimentation as a source of the madhouse that is The Garden. They open with “Stallion” which has a quick hardcore style with crashing cymbals, snare that pumps, and guitar that is frantic and loose. Then the tempo suddenly shifts without much warning and becomes this moving mix that taps into that inner animalistic instinct.

“Stallion catches the listener with surprise, pushing them off balance, and continuing to stomp around the room like a behemoth. With their jester appearances that shine through on the on the promotional videos and even cover album, The Garden plays a group of many tricks. With the following track, “Make A Wish”, the band moves to become more hip-hop focused with synthetic drums and a swinging boom-bap beat. Then as the lyrics form, there is a cockiness behind their stance that invokes a smile. “I don’t make wishes; I make things happen. Let the tide drag me out, find my own way back… My partner and I, we don’t take shit. Enough getting thrown around to cog a toilet.” While coming off as simple in introductions, the lyrical content of The Garden is singular and stands alone in a sea of lyricists.

The band that never forms a true sound, The Garden shifts again as they move into “Shameless Shadow”. It is cheerful and has a polka performance on the percussion with horns and jazz influenced progression that is an avant-garde dream. The random schizophrenic synth pieces fit into this broken puzzle that has no end pieces. Not that the band is missing anything, Mirror Might Steal Your Charm is incredibly full and well-rounded in a sense of adaptability. The album just does not seem to have much structure behind, making it an experimentally outstanding album that can be recognized for the leap of faith it takes in progression.

Hard to define and even harder to pinpoint, Mirror Might Steal Your Charmtakes a sampling note from the energetic 90’s styles of grunts and laughs from supervillains. With an interlude that comes within “: (“ as a phone rings, the hardcore influence punches right back into frame and delivers with a sense of aggression. The first half, however, is a rapid fire slap with a mix of authentic and synthetic percussion to build this wall of sound and distance in the mix. The Garden follows with the cheerful “Good News” where the sound is overly poppy and movement heavy. It features a strange sample of phone ringing and a bouncing snare and bass combination that feels like a Top-40 hit. Then barking dogs and 808 bass becomes the centerfold that leads the bizarre and attention-clutching band into the final moments.
The Garden takes the rule book and not only throws it out the window, but destroys any mention of the strict structure for sound. Their rules involve the chaotic, dramatic, but entertaining as they take Mirror Might Steal Your Charminto bounds almost unknown. The hard strong fight goes into the final track before The Garden fades into the abrasiveness that started the same mess.

Listen To Mirror Might Steal Your Charm Here!!! – /BandCamp/Spotify/Amazon/iTunes