The Laughing Chimes

While The Laughing Chimes debut was an admirably assured debut, written while songwriters Evan and Quinn Seurkamp were still in high school, it was also a record born and brushed by its influences. After a stretch of exploratory singles and EPs, the band has resurfaced for a sophomore album, shedding some of the skin of their lighter jangle fare for an album that’s shouldering the weight of The Rust Belt, catching the wind as it whispers through the crumbling specter of the American industrial age. Dipped in drama, the record watches the jangles of C86 slip quietly away in the rear view, aligning itself with the sublime sweep of The Church, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Psychedelic Furs.
Like contemporaries RVG, the band tends to evoke the atmosphere, rather than merely the aesthetics of those influences. Over the course of the last few singles the band has leaned into an increased presence of keys on the album, thanks largely to their expansion from the sibling duo to a full blown four piece with the addition of Avery Bookman and Ella Franks. Bookman and Franks round our the band’s sound, turning pencil sketches into plush paintings full of dark corners and dramatic light. Whispers in the Speech Machine feels like the work of a band that’s not afraid to be untethered from expectations, a band not afraid to make an album completely unlike their last. Tracing the tire tracks of Primal Scream, perhaps The Laughing Chimes exist to take on the skin of each record anew, 2020s pop chameleons that never seem to sit still. Here’s to the Speech Machine and wherever it takes them next.
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