Amiture
Brooklyn, NY
Photo by Jack Whitescarver
Amiture is an experimental rock band based in New York City. The group originated as a bedroom solo project by Jack Whitescarver in 2018, then a student at Bard College. Amiture’s debut album, The Beach and subsequent EP Swimmer evoke the cream of early 80s goth and darkwave: Whitescarver’s haunting vocals dance around synthy beats, motorik rhythms, and plaintive, minor-key melodies.
These early works were followed by Mother Engine, a collaborative work with guitarist Coco Goupil. Sonically, Mother Engine leaves darkwave territory behind for an aesthetic far more gritty and industrial. The album garnered a wealth of positive reviews and established the group as a formidable live act in New York. The band’s lineup continues to evolve: over the past year, the band has welcomed bassist Max Beirne Shafer, drummer Justin Fossella and multi-instrumentalist Allie Wrubel into the fold. Amiture’s current output is defined by precise and dynamic rock songs that float somewhere on the spectrum between Glenn Branca and The Beach Boys: hearts get left on sleeves, grooves switch without warning, and a bond formed through pure musicianship is on visceral display in every performance.
The Amiture formula is as follows: one part skittering, industrial breakbeats; one part New Romantics gothicism; and another of buzzsaw blues guitar—it shouldn’t work but it does. Darker, seedier, and sexier than previous EPs, Mother Engine sees the NYC duo of Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil honing in on their particular sound. If you are to listen to one track let it be “Billy’s Dream,” a lurid, skulking nightprowler of a song that lives somewhere between Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” The Cramps’s “Human Fly,” and Prodigy’s “Breathe.” It’s really only fitting that the album was written and recorded “in a dilapidated garage between a sanitation center and a set of train tracks” as that’s exactly the venue I would expect—and hope—to hear it in, ideally at some underground rave on the outskirts of town. Never forget that goths can party too.
–Stephanie Barclay for Bandcamp
"Some of you will listen to Mother Engine, and its majestic sonic cornucopia will be lost. And that’s okay; not all music is for everyone. But for me and my decades-long quest to explore as much music as I possibly can, it’s an opportunity to rediscover music I remember from my youth. Something about the hypnotic nature of this record transports me across multiple decades when I hit play, opening a portal to my teen years that is far more inviting and refreshing than I thought possible. And if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.”
-Kirk Gauthier for Noob Heavy
