A mesmeric, cutting-edge, experimental tapestry of dark, magical, musical textures and songs by an English duo of seasoned, innovative collaborators – My Bloody Valentine bass player Deb Googe, and pianist and composer Cara Tivey in a superb debut LP together. As well as being integral to MBV since its inception in the 1980s, Googe has variously played with Primal Scream, Snowpony, across several albums with Thurston Moore, and with Brix Smith’s more recent all-female band. Tivey is best known as a Billy Bragg collaborator, but has also played with artists including Everything But The Girl, Blur, The Lilac Time, The Au Pairs and Robert Lloyd of The Nightingales. So that wealth of experience between these longtime friends brings a fascinating intermingling of beautifully strange noise-rock, shoegaze, pop, classical, psychedelia and more, through a combination of a six-string bass and other guitars, various loops and ingenious pedal combinations, drone sounds, alluring, understated vocals, and Tivey’s perfectly placed keyboard notes.
Perhaps best experienced through headphones or quality speakers, in a quiet space, walking through woods or in a late-night room, it’s a transportive experience, from opener Bad Habits with its rich, drone, scratchy strings and alluring melody, or The Longest Wait, mixing the explosive thrum and electricity of Googe’s bass guitar with Tivey’s deliciously dark piano improvisations. You Take It With You When You Go interweaves a continuous blurry, drone with ghostly vocals. Rant ups the pace with Tivey’s lower-register, rippling exploration of the keyboard, mixing with Googe’s beats and feedback that arrives like a screaming train. Every one of the eight tracks offers different powerful moods and evocative sounds, but among the standouts is Dumb, a menacingly brilliant indictment of western ills, sung with an icy anger on high and low pitches across a bed of claustrophobic yet intimate sounds with added gentle percussion and guitar. Mad Mike (Mark My Words) is another highlight, a deep, stormy echo chamber evolving into a scary, almost nursery rhyme-style melody. The Last Tear Falls is a quieter, yet beautiful exploration in piano and feedback, while Secret Place brings a livelier, oddball, psych-folkish finale. Decorated also by some clever, entrancing videos also created by Googe, a fabulously original release, truly unlike anything else out there. Out on Tiny Global Productions.
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