There’s a circular joke in the band name All Known Aliases… who was one known as Stranded Sullivan who is also known by his real name Brandon Krebs. It’s not so much about hiding behind personas as it is about uncovering different layers of the same songwriter.
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While Stranded Sullivan dove into drone-heavy guitar textures and his last album under his own name was an album borne of synth-driven 80s pop, All Know Aliases finds Krebs in a more atmospheric and cinematic idiom. Acid-washed and kaleidoscopic, his new 7” “In The Moment” / “No Time Left to Run Away” is a heady double-header. It’s moody and dreamy and catchy AF.
Sounding like a decelerated and Valium-induced retelling of Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” the carpe diem sentiment of “In The Moment” is at odds with its pacing. Textural and expansive, it’s midnight dance music for when the drugs wear off. “Live in the Moment / Live in the Moment / Lost in the pain we forever remain in this place,” Krebs intones, his vocals sounding half hallucinatory, half submerged in gloom.
Written in the post-depressed haze of melancholia induced by a break-up, “In The Moment” is a plea for escape from the heartache. Add the solitary loneliness of the pandemic and you got the makings of an epic song about tortured existence.
“I wrote this song during quarantine in the post-COVID 19 world,” Krebs unloads, maneuvering his grief like a shopping cart full of expired items. “[It was] written as I contemplated a difficult breakup, leaving my job and ultimately, Seattle.”
While the conviction reads like a surrender, it actually leans into rebuilding and learning to sublimate the heartache into something more tolerable. Instead of dwelling in the mire and the endless cycle of regret, he strips away the reeling emotions and posits himself in instant actuality. “[‘In This Moment’] is about coming to terms with all of it and trying to stay present in the current moment and not getting trapped in a mental spin cycle of the painful past or an uncertain future,” he confides. “Live in the now. The present moment.”
On the flipside (literally since this is, after all, a 7”), “No Time Left to Run Away” explores not the aftermath but the immersion in a relationship that is all sorts of wrong. A collaboration with friend and vocalist, Sarah Pierce, “No Time Left to Run Away” was written Postal Service-style via email. “My friend Sarah asked me what I was working on” says Krebs. “I sent her demos and she would send them back the next day basically finished.”
Hopeless and stuck in an inescapable unsteadiness of a relationship that’s not only run its course but has also tuckered out all sense of usefulness, its enrapt in melancholy, like if 4AD’s Xmal Deustchland wrote the score for an A24 film. “[It’s] a song about the realization of being in the wrong place with the wrong person and the weight of knowing it’s time to go,” he explains.
If there’s an overall theme to the two songs, it’s about the transformative nature of breakups and the vague concept of what lies ahead. In a sense, it also mirrors his musical transformations, signaled by the changes in band name. Allowing him to shapeshift and remodel, it helps him explore his own creativity, especially in the light of coronavirus-induced social distancing and isolation. “These events upending society as we know it caused me to reassess what I value and how I want to live,” he says, “and – equally importantly – inspired me to say goodbye to things that no longer serve me. We must let go of our old selves or lives, however painful, and move towards the open door of newness and the unknown and what lies ahead.”
Whether the next transformation comes in the form of a vaccine or a new sense of self, one thing’s for sure, Brandon Krebs probably has yet another alias ready to go.
