3 out of 5

Label: digital self-release

Produced by: Alan Sinclair

On his journey to becoming one of my favorite darkwave / retro-synth artists, Repeated Viewing – Alan Sinclair – had to figure out where he was going to land on the Carpenter / Giallo spectrum: are we doing nostalgia mimicry; are we going towards dance grooves; or are we going off map somewhere else? And while RV’s first full release, Six Dead Orchids In An Eagle’s Talons, is not the most grabbing album overall, it shows how Sinclair – even at this stage – was trying to stay true to the genre while finding his own particular sound. So it’s not off map; it’s very much on, and you’ll get notes of those classic Carpenter elements and Giallo psych, but it’s not exactly those things either.

The net result is pretty uneven: some solid darkwave themes surround more ethereal fare, with the 10-minute Underwater Brother both kind of a mic drop of dedicated ambience and also what typifies the album’s issues: it doesn’t really sync with the rest of the material, and so fails to tell a coherent story. But, on its own, it’s an interestingly moody, subtle piece – and you might spot an internal discrepancy there also: its subtlety. In cautious avoidance of the above-mentioned sounds-like tags, which are always the first references for stuff in this genre, Sinclair works hard to make most of the tracks somewhat distinct and also a little… angular. The beats feel kind of brittle, which is super fascinating: paired with the somewhat abstract cover image (a bullet hole a curtain or sheet, maybe?), this is Repeated Viewing as more of an experiment. If you further consider this alongside some of Sinclair’s demos, which are very accessible, the experiment feels especially purposeful.

It would take Sinclair at least a couple releases to feel more comfortable playing directly in the retro realms, but that stuff (to me) has lasted exactly because there’s personality in it; that personality was forged across these earlier, less direct experiments.