The Shyness of Strangers ~ If It Serves You [2⊘17]

Perhaps unsurprisingly a band named The Shyness of Strangers wouldn’t be the most unabashed. True to form, it might be more selectively-social and steadfast in its coldwave, post-punk sound. It might even be distant or indifferent. but those would be easy generalizations masking the reality.

Polish-born Canadian Vadim Kristopher describes his music as, “Exploring sonic landscapes with repetitive themes through corridors of human emotion, loudly. Drawing inspiration from life’s more melancholy moments, but deafening the sadness as his music turns the sorrow into celebration.” Further, his sound might be described as a beating heart of shadowy substance pumping its veiled essence of truth through blood-drenched arteries to his listeners ear’s wonderment.

“Make me feel lonely,
You are very hard to please,
High expectations I am struggling,
To reach,
We have the passion,
Just a fraction of sanity,
Let’s spill our secrets,
In these treatments,
With a creep.”

Try to imagine living with an unimaginable loss and then fervently reinterpreting that debilitating pain as art. Vadim explains, “The Shyness of Strangers kinda started to help me process things after all my immediate family passed away. ‘If It Serves You’ is about love and loss.”

A lover might not fathom the damage done, might not comprehend how one changes when their existence has been butchered by life’s cleaver, or the final gyrations one’s mind might adopt in reparations or at least as self-protective mechanisms.

“Did you know baby,
That maybe I would be,
A little more loving,
If we only could agree,
On different opinions,
Ghosts of our minions,
Haunt our lives,
Why do I bother,
When I’m the Father,
Of all lies.“

A devilishly-simple metronome marks time inside monochromatic barriers seeking to inhibit and exclude what dead-socket sunglasses belie. The music spirals with grinding guitars meshed askance trip-syncopated snares building to hypnotic lullaby choruses of monotone plaintive lyrics. Promises of future dereliction while staring heavenward.

“If it serves you well I’ll try,
But I have to warn you that I lie.”