B-Side Guys

Recontextualization often reveals more than original creation. Wild Blessing’s debut single “Michael Who Walks By Night” demonstrates this principle through its thoughtful excavation of a forgotten 1980s composition, transforming Strawberry Switchblade’s pop artifact into a contemplative nocturne that exists between revival and reinvention.

Released as a preview of their forthcoming EP “From Dust” (due June 5), the Washington DC-based project’s inaugural offering establishes their artistic approach through deliberate subtraction rather than addition. Where the Scottish duo’s original version sparkled with characteristic ’80s effervescence, Wild Blessing strips away period ornamentation to uncover the composition’s emotional skeleton. This archaeological process transforms a dance-adjacent pop curiosity into something approaching chamber folk—a quiet revelation that demands attentive listening rather than passive consumption.

The production, helmed by Ben Etter (whose credits include Belle and Sebastian, Cate Le Bon, and Deerhunter), deserves particular recognition for its spatial awareness. Rather than treating silence as emptiness to be filled, Etter approaches negative space as structural element, allowing notes to breathe and decay naturally. This technique creates the sonic equivalent of night photography—familiar objects rendered unfamiliar through alternative illumination.

Netherlands-based vocalist Tara Pasaveer provides essential counterpoint through “otherworldly backing vocals” that hover like condensation in cold air. This atmospheric contribution reinforces the track’s central metaphor as “a sonic portrait of a walk on a winter night—that crystalline quiet where breath hangs visible in the air and footsteps echo with heightened clarity.” The resulting soundscape encourages listeners to imagine themselves as nocturnal flaneurs, moving through urban spaces transformed by darkness.

What distinguishes Wild Blessing from contemporaries operating in similar aesthetic territory (The Sea and Cake, Yo La Tengo, Air) is their commitment to patience as compositional principle. The arrangement unfolds with unhurried confidence, layering drum machines, “pillowy bass, pitch-shifting electric guitars, arpeggiated synths, and finger-picked acoustics” into what they describe as a “constellation” that feels “both thoroughly modern and somehow outside of time.”

This temporal displacement proves particularly fitting for a cover song, allowing Wild Blessing to simultaneously honor musical heritage while establishing distinctive artistic identity. By choosing to debut with another artist’s composition—particularly one largely forgotten by mainstream audiences—the project signals an interest in conversation rather than declaration, curation rather than conquest. In a musical landscape often fixated on originality as primary virtue, “Michael Who Walks By Night” makes a compelling case for transformation as equally valid artistic pursuit.