Brother-sister duo Rebekah and Josh Riley have joined forces in new Southern gothic outfit Driving Sirens to release new LP, Undercurrent. The two started collaborating over the pandemic using a private YouTube channel since she was in Charleston and he was in Greenville. By the time they met up in Greenville to get into the studio, the pre-recording process was complete.
After opera-focused vocal training at North Greenville University, Rebekah Riley, a concert pianist, packed up her car and drove to New Orleans to play in quartets and jazz ensembles in every area of the quarter for a few years, where her brother, multi-instrumentalist Josh Riley, joined her for a stint. “New Orleans has the same antebellum feel that Charleston does and we definitely brought it together for this,” Rebekah Riley said.
“This might sound kind of lame, but with me it always starts with a muse,” she said of the songwriting process. “Every song on the album is written about a person. I would take my feelings toward them — whether for bad or good or ambivalent — and try to come up with a themed concept. I start vocally and lyrically, and then I sit down at the piano and figure out the tones and keys. Josh would come up with certain chord patterns that I would either add to or craft vocals around.”
The pandemic standstill was a strange blessing for her. “I require intense solitude to be around my influences and my muses.” The material was not derived from playing together in free form. “We came up with all the compositions first. It’s a very refined product.”
With influences just as R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Siouxsie and the Banshees and British trip-hop, the style of Driving Sirens is no mystery. “I feel like as musicians we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, and we all owe a tremendous debt to the predecessors who inspire us,” she said. The mood-based, lyrically driven songs capture curiosity. The 30-minute album moves from choppy bass and eery vocals to ambient bird chirps and folky serenades.
The album cover was shot in Charleston at Magnolia Cemetery. “We are trying to capture that beauty that is haunting. Anywhere we walk in Charleston we are walking on graves. You can feel it in the air, in the Spanish moss, in the heavy breeze that never quite refreshes you — it makes you feel like someone is running their hands through your hair.”
“The entire project is like a siren song. It’s beautiful, but you’re not sure if it’s dangerous.”
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