This third album by the quartet fronted by singer and harpist Serafina Steer, is another wittily droll, darkly humorous collection about love and modern life’s absurdities and mundanities, with influences from The Pet Shop Boys, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Kate Bush, Heaven 17 and even a referential shake of Salt N Pepa. But perhaps the biggest influence, as shown in a parallel album cover artwork, is that of The Slits, and that legendary female post-punk band’s second album Return of the Giant Slits.
Return of the Giant Slits (1981)
Joined again by Charlotte Stock, Emma Smith and Rachel Horwood, this is certainly gentler material than that of Ari Up, Viv Albertine and co, but there’s still a simmering, if repressed anger coming up from the metaphorial swamp of modern state-of-mind and culture, awash with pleasing arrangements of melancholic, beautiful violin and other carefully crafted instrumentation, lush chorale effects, orchestral hewn loops, electronic beats and group vocal harmonies alongside Steer’s talky-singing style. Highlights include the droll opener On The Counter (“I’m at the counter / I’m on the corner / I’m in the bedroom / Living my best life”), the depression-themed No More Swamp (“it’s not what I want”), Credit Card (got one at last and is going to use it), Margaret Calvert Drives Out, the vivid, time-themed Ding Dong, and Cried A River. Charming, sensitive, humorous, candidly downbeat but as ever, inventively beautiful. Out on Fire Records.
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