Sims
Catching up with Sims; photographed by Colin Michael Simmons.
Sims dropped the new album More Than Ever today from Doomtree Records that provides an awakening of consciousness inspired by times of trials & tribulations. We are brought down to the personal depths found in the solace of Sims’ own South Minneapolis basement where his latest bath of narratives are further illuminated from production by friends Lazerbeak, Paper Tiger & ICETEP. The Doomtree soldier and fellow No Kings, All Hands affiliate follows up his output of releases like Lights Out Paris, Bad Time Zoo, Wild Life EP, Field Notes with his most urgent & inward searching tape to date.
The flights of fancy between the inertia pull of harsh reality, fears & the urge to soar higher than ever before set the table & the stage of More Than Ever with the mega-mammoth track “A Bad Flying Bird”. That same urge to take to the friendly skies slaps in full effect on “Icarus” where the controls are set for straight to the heart of the sun as things edge to the point of no return with an “I ain’t ever coming down” frame of mind. Uncompromising struggles along with real life battles are exhibited on “Brutal Dance” that illustrates Sims attempts to understand loss & the grieving process in an open hearted type of honesty. That open book mode ventures ahead with a furious passion on the unleashed on the “I’ve been living in a fishbowl” chorus reiterations on the ferocious rhythm racer “OneHundred” that kicks it while keeping everything in the mix one hundred. The situations turn tense & volatile on the slow & soft burning “Flash Paper”, where sinister street tales ignite like barrel drum sidewalk campfires that flicker on the hear breaking “Spinning Away”, the pensive dreams that hover between riding first class & being rolled on by the streets on “Oakland Ave Catalpas”, where Sims provides perspectives of poetics of subsistence & survival with frank assertions of the various head states of the union as experienced on the tribute to both the dead & alive on “Badlands”, right before accelerating the action on the drum & bass intense narrative of extremities witnessed on “What they Don’t Know” (Will Probably Kill ‘Em). The entire arrangement of More Than Ever stands as a testament of Sims’ most towering full-length ever made where the feeling continues to pour out in every beat & bar on “Buckets”, to the heated exchanges recounted on “Voltaire”, where subterranean bass rumbles & quakes the conscious on the desires & fears & affections that collide on “Shaking In My Sheets”, counting the waves of the applied audio mathematics that entertains the flowsnake of the curve that binds the space of the Peano-Gosper curve on the soft-sizzling closer, “Gosper Island”. Sims utilizes the album as something of a therapy session where the complexities and arrangements at work recreate how big life shifting events change & reshape our entire perspectives & the entirety of ourselves as a whole.
Sims’ new album More Than Ever is available now from Doomtree Records.
