New Music of the Day – XV: Lioness by Dems

I’ve never been sure what “haunting vocals” actually means, but it is a term that gets applied to Dems all the time. It’s hardly the stuff of nightmare but maybe it is just the stuff of lazy journalism. There is something rather detached about the falsetto vocal though but only in as much as it sits perfectly with the cold, inhuman beats, minimal and often fragile electronic frame work that this song is suspended in. In it’s slightly futuristic, fey yet dystopian, way it is quite beautiful feeling reflective but not melancholy, musically obtuse, rather than easily categorised and not a million miles away from sounding like Natasha Khan and Vangelis re-inventing ambient Goth for Generation X-box.