A Ghost Could Live Here
Murky and morbid, the Philly five-piece Bells Bells Bells is a slow-burning, ever-churning garage-psych band that would’ve made Edgar Allan Poe proud. Amandah Romick’s eerily blank intonations come drenched in alternating shades of garage-y keys, bleary shoegaze and Rickenbacker magic, always with hypnotic pacing.” - Doug Wallen, Philadelphia Weekly
Watch Bells Bells Bells - Housekeeping By the Lake.
Psych-folk darlings Bells Bells Bells are nearly as haunting as the works of Edgar Allan Poe... their latest release A Ghost Could Live Here is full of eerie reverb, soaring chords, and chilling lines. Fronted by lit lover Amandah Romick, Bells Bells Bells’ vocals have an operatic nature. Well-read and far from shy, their tracks are inspired by fictitious and real legends alike. From the unfortunate fate of a canine cosmonaut in “Lakia, An Astronaut,” to the organ dirge of “Housekeeping by the Lake,” Romick and her bandmates are mesmerizingly ethereal, through enchanting riffage and bewitching reprise." - Dianca Potts
Throw Down Your Anchor
Bells Bells Bells are set to release A Ghost Could Live Here, a well-crafted follow-up ’07’s Throw Down Your Anchor, which brought them, if not quite riches and fame, then psych-folk darlings status. At least around my house, anyway. The album opens with the epic “Laika, An Astronaut”, which conjures the final thoughts of the doomed Russian astro-dog who braved space ‘50s, only to die in orbit. With its dreamy reverb and eerie organ chords, compliments of keyboard maven Kat Paffett, the song sounds like a cosmic funerary hymn for poor Laika. The band’s sound hinges on Amandah Romick haunting but gorgeous vocals and literary fixations and Paffett’s creepy organ swells, which bring to mind spooky cult classics like Carnival of Souls and those trippy ’60s Poe double features starring Vincent Price. Sometimes they sound like a menstruating Doors, or if Black Sabbath had vaginas, but mostly they sound like a latter-day indie reincarnation of Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees circa Kaleidoscope. Which works out well, seeing as Siouxsie & The Banshees are, to quoth the raven, nevermore. –Dianca Potts
Resident psych/freak-folk outfit Bells Bells Bells ring out the summer at JB’s. Gorgeously gloomy with chilling reverb, their latest release A Ghost Could Live Here mixes guitar shreds with organ and opera with rock. Aided by frontwoman Amandah Romick’s haunting vocals, tracks like “Prophet on the Horizon” are driving, dramatic, and fierce. The cosmic riffs of “Laika, An Astronaut” are melodic amidst distortion. Notes bend, sounding much like shrieks. In “Little Hours”, Romick resembles Siouxsie Sioux with a pinch of Kate Bush as her hypnotic voice eases into a near instrumental end. - Dianca Potts
Bells Bells Bells featuring lead vocalist Amandah Romick have a new video for the song “Housekeeping By The Lake” from their album A Ghost Could Live Here. From the band:
The song is inspired by Marilyn Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping. It contemplates how one’s identity is shaped by land, and the generations of people and choices that prop up reality as we perceive it. Director Andrew Bateman brings another level of texture to the song through imagery, and conveys beautifully the way the children we were and the adults we become coexist within our sense of selves, as well as the surreal and psychedelic nature of our dreams and memory through film. Shot in the Pine Barrens and a historical Victorian house, the history and the timelessness of nature evident in these locations captures the mood of the song. —John Vettese, wxpn.
