Southern GothicTHE CONSTELLATIONS

Southern Gothic

[Virgin]

The underbelly of after-hours Atlanta serves as ground zero for the seedy scenarios on Southern Gothic, the debut from that city’s eight-piece Constellations (re-released on a major after an earlier indie run). But the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce can chill—what happens here could happen most anywhere. When the strutting, magnetic vocalist Elijah Jones intones, “If you really want to live/Gotta be ready to die” in “Love Is a Murder” (which features Gnarls Barkley’s Cee-Lo Green guesting), he could just as easily be singing to your sister in Omaha. At times Southern Gothic does tend to tilt toward the heavy-handed and border on the self-important, but even if you were to tune out its words altogether—and that’d be a mistake, because when they’re good, they’re great—the Constellations’ seamless assimilation of frothy ’80s-esque synth-pop, multilayered neo-psych, insistent dance beats and Americana earthiness will win you over.

–JT

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