Cemeteries is the brainchild of Portland’s Kyle Reigle, joined by Jonathan Ioviero and Kate Davis in a live setting. Their latest album, 2015’s Barrow, is an ambient album that combines dream pop, shoegaze with goth pop. Kyle has an affinity for David Lynch films and it shows in his music, as the music becomes completely visual while listening. A gorgeous album that can feel haunting, the album is one of those you fall immediately into it’s world, coming in as one of our Top 40 Best Albums of 2015. We asked Kyle to give us a little more insight into him and the music he makes by asking him about his influential album, an album that had an impact on him and has helped shape his musical journey to where he is now.
More on Cemeteries: Cemeteries is the dream pop transmitting over the truck radio of teenagers driving the dark labyrinth of outlying woods in a mountain town. It’s the requiem to a sleep walk in the dead of night, bare foot across the pinecone bed of the forest. Cemeteries explores a curiosity in darkness that poses the question, “what if it’s safer out there among the owls and coyotes?”
We listened to it for a few weeks in the house and then it lived in the truck tape deck for awhile but my dad bought more records and I was on a roll listening to everything that I could get my hands on. It fell into a forgotten territory. As a teenager, I developed a weird attitude about liking things. I’d say “Yeah, The Cranberries are great”, and it wasn’t a lie because they never felt like a guilty pleasure but I had a bad habit of listening to music or saying that I listened to specific music because I thought it was a cool character trait.
I moved to Portland in 2014 and had a great cassette setup for the first time in years so I scavenged through my parent’s collection when I visited home. Everybody Else… was one of the only tapes that I brought back. The hard case had been long gone so it awkwardly stuck out on my shelf for some time. When I finally listened to it front to back, I was hit just as hard as that kid who first heard it on an ugly brown living room rug. If the term applies to cassette tapes, it’s been on regular rotation since.
There’s really nothing like this album. It feels like everybody agreed to be a shoegaze band but the drummer was too busy listening to Phil Collins to shake hands on it. On the surface, the tracks feel similar but there are so many brilliant ideas scattered throughout. “Not Sorry” has this little electronic snare that makes the whole song (until she repeats the line “Keep on looking through the window again” at the end and my heart breaks). It’s obvious why The Cranberries had the success that they did, O’Riordan’s vocals are equally intense and sincere. Every occasional moment of anger has warm-hearted bookends. If I had been born a decade earlier, “I Will Always” would’ve been my first request at prom.
Everybody Else Is Doing It So Why Can’t We? never feels stale. It’s one of the few records that I loved as a kid and still love as an adult. I’d like to curate a compilation and have the whole thing covered. Every track deserves some love and attention. I would do the closing track “Put Me Down”. Like the album, it’s something that I wish would go on forever. I spent last weekend on the coast and found a cassette of their sophomore release No Need to Argue and I’m really glad because I’ve never heard it before.” /- Kyle Reigle
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Twitter: @CemeteriesMusic
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