Adult Fantasies

Towers Of Silence finds Adult Fantasies finally held up to the light they’ve always seemed to be writing toward. Long buried in late ’80s and early ’90s LPs for Antler and Sub Rosa, their songs drift in that uncanny zone where you swear you’ve known them for years even if you’re hearing them for the first time. Stroom’s selection sifts out the most potent gems from 8 Neo‑Pathetic Scenes (1988), For The Time Being (1989) and The No‑Sleeping Feeling (1994), framing the band’s “Belgy dirge pop” as a fully formed mood: urbane ennui, poetic gloom, and a darkly sexy kind of resignation that sits somewhere between Nico, Coil and the more haunted corners of contemporary art‑pop.

From the opening “Under A Steelplate Sky,” the record plays like a dark dream of city nights that never quite end. The song’s slow pulse and steel‑grey synths recall everything from The Velvet Underground’s deadpan drift to Jonnine and CS + Kreme’s modern twilight murmur. Dirk Seghers’ vocals carry that same late‑hour weight: close‑miked, slightly numbed, simultaneously intimate and distant. His delivery anchors the compilation, threading through keys and synths by Gerrit Valckenaers and guitars from Gerry Vergult in a style that feels dedicated to the small hours – the time when thoughts stretch out and light thins, when every sound seems to arrive with its own shadow attached.

The palette is minimal but rich in implication. Slow drum machines, glassy keyboards and spare guitar figures are sculpted in the mix to exquisite degrees, leaving plenty of air around the voice while quietly ramping up tension. Tracks like “Twilight” and “Life In Transit” lean into Coiled dirge territory: loping tempos, distant chimes, low‑lying bass and lyrics that move between observation and confession. “Cage” strips things back even further, an icy, minimalist piece that hangs on a handful of notes and a voice that sounds half resigned, half spellbound. Throughout, the sequencing is key: songs bleed into one another with a woozy, quietly oozing logic that makes the compilation feel less like a best‑of and more like a single, drifting film.

Part of what makes Towers Of Silence so compelling is the thread it traces through Stroom’s wider map of obscurities. The music carries fine mycelium veins of low‑key oddness that link back to NSRD’s sideways pop, Pablo’s Eye’s rhythm‑driven ambience, Fred A’s off‑centre experiments and Hessel Veldman’s home‑recorded hauntings. Yet Adult Fantasies are never reducible to influence. Their sound is faithful in its brooding, darkly sensual tone, but it also carves out its own specific corner: Belgi dirge pop as a genre of unheimlich familiarity, songs that feel like they’ve been waiting in some overlooked tape box for you to finally catch up.