I've felt drawn back to Beauty Pills's Instant Night EP recently. The DC group released the album last year and it is named for a song that bandleader Chad Clark wrote after watching an episode of Real Time where Anne Colter predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. Dark predictions feel very relevant at the moment for obvious reasons, but what has pulled me back into the album, and kept me there, is the placid unreality that it conjures and cultivates. It is a feeling like your head has become detached from your body, which you can still see at a distance, but can't quite recognize as your own. Or, like the floor has receded from your footsteps, midstride, and you have yet to cognize the fact that your forward momentum is about to send you tumbling into the baren gulf. The title track, "Instant Night" is particularly well-calibrated to this end, with Erin Nelson's voice sounding like it is echoing up from a well, musing on empathy amidst a gradual plummet as a heavy curtain of shadows envelops her calamitous progression. As if on the otherside of the impact, "Common Chockcherry" is shaped by the clanging quality of its instrumentation, a tin outline that brackets disassociative chamber pop and jazz with a suppressed frenzy that seems to want to look at anything and everything but the object of its anxiety. The last track I want to mention is "You Need A Better Mind," which leans heavily on the blubbery tones of a discontinued Roland TB-303 synthesizer to produce something akin to a medically induced haze, where rhythm and feeling bundle together in an ever-tightening ball of rubbery recoil that clips between the loops and gaps of Chad's searching musings like a ping-pong match between two dissolving marble figures. It's a short EP, but even at fewer than five tracks, it manages to maintain a sense of infinite suspension. I'm not sure when the ground will finally rush to meet me, but I know that I have a lot to contemplate before it does, and I'm thankful for the intermission in this moment.
