Memory Tapes Player Piano

Player Piano is the second full length from Davye Hawk’s Memory Tapes. It was, like its predecessor, the highly-acclaimed Seek Magic, recorded at Dayve’s home studio in rural New Jersey, where he juggles looking after his young daughter and being a musician. While Seek Magic was quite an electronic sounding record with lots of dance music tropes, Player Piano is all about the melody. Simply put, there are lots of catchy tunes here: sing-along choruses throughout the album and songs that feel very immediate and accessible, despite consistently dark lyrics that describe a disconnected mindset and a profound sense of isolation. The template for Player Piano was that it would be “keyboard-based psychedelic girl group songs, a sort of Motown suicide note”. Largely eschewing modern beats this time in favor of “drums that sound like The Kinks’ 60s records”, there are still the spaces of modern R’n’B, along with 50s doo wop, krautrock and a couple of nods to Aphex Twin. Dayve is already working on Memory Tapes’ third album, which is going to be a “space rock, kind of Black Sabbath” guitar based set.