Black Leather Birds – of Children and Their Sorceries
A.G. Syjuco has made a record about the dread that lives inside ordinary things. Not the dread of catastrophe — that would be too easy, too cinematic — but the duller, more corrosive variety: the kind that pools behind the eyes at 2pm on a Tuesday when the post arrives and you realise, with quiet horror, that something is asking you to pay attention to it. Chicago gives him the latitude for this. It is a city that knows how to keep secrets behind a respectable facade, and *of Children and Their Sorceries*, the new EP from his Black Leather Birds project, is a record that understands facades intimately.