ALBUM: Tess Roby – ‘Beacon’

If you are looking for a soundtrack for your fresh Spring evenings, Montreal-based Tess Roby’s debut album Beacon will envelop you in dreamy waves of poetic synthpop. Accompanied by her brother Eliot Roby on guitar, the album is an homage to their father (who died in 2015). Recorded with the drum machines and synthesizers she found in her father’s recording studio, the album evokes the intimacy of family in the beautiful dawn and mist of Tess’s voice.

Kicking off the album with a laidback pop start, ‘Given Signs’ opens out into sparkling guitar hooks, offering belief and hope – “holding onto to given signs, everything you saw in me.” The two singles ‘Catalyst’ and ‘Ballad 5’ are melancholic and reflective, bringing love to the surface in an ethereal arrangement where every single sound has a meaning in hypnotic repetition.

Elsewhere, whispers, memories, and pain are explored. Experiments with found sounds consolidate the overall cinematic effects; in the wind song used in ‘Air above Mirage’, for example, and the chiming Zen-like effects in the funereal ‘Tripling’ – “When I feel nothing is when I am most present.”

Featuring eight tracks of lucid dream pop, the album inhabits the liminal spaces between light and dark, memory and experience. Each song is a carefully crafted cinematic piece, echoing with classic sounds you think you may have heard before – perhaps because it is brimming with latent melodies from classic ’60s to ’80s pop (echoes of the Exorcist soundtrack even!) brought back to life. A debut with depth; listen to the songs and let them bathe you in hypnotic hues of melody and visuals.

Beacon, the upcoming album from Tess Roby, is out 4th May via Italians Do It Better.

Fi Ni Aicead
@gotnomoniker

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ALBUM: Fenne Lily – ‘On Hold’

Tentative, pensive and poetic, Fenne Lily has the ability to bruise and heal her listeners all within the space of a single track. Raised in Dorset and now based in Bristol, her debut album On Hold is a beautiful collection of soft, yet seething guitar ballads that strike the heartstrings in a brutal, yet beautiful fashion.

Wary of being “pigeon-holed” after her over-night Spotify success with self-released single ‘Top To Toe’ a few years ago, it’s clear from opening track ‘Car Park’ that Fenne is self-aware when it comes to her songwriting style. “I’ll be the first to admit that my songs are far from uplifting,” she explains, “but while ‘Car Park’ chronicles yet another period of false hope and turmoil, it was written following the realisation that damaging patterns are enabled and suffered by the passive. I cannot and will not blame my heartache on anyone but myself, so this isn’t a song about pain, it’s a song about power.”

It’s this quiet “power” that permeates her record, so even in moments of genuine sadness there’s a sense of relief accompanying many of her tracks. ‘Three Oh Nine’ may ache with desperation, but her brave revelations about fearing abandonment make it a therapeutic listen – “it’s a first for me, it’s a pain I need.”

The urgent and quietly consuming ‘What’s Good’ extends a somber but beautiful invitation for connection, and it flows wonderfully into the heavy grace of ‘The Hand You Deal’. The gentle nod to learned experience from others on ‘More Than You Know’ is pure and compassionate and this is mirrored in her simple acoustic guitar sounds.

Title-track ‘On Hold’ is a grateful ode to small acts of kindness, whilst ‘Top To Toe’ documents the seemingly inevitable changes you start to make when mixed feelings start to appear – “So I’m changing all my days to make your nights / it’s just not right.” The light, refreshing honesty of ‘Bud’ follows, with the charming ‘Brother’ behind it, before the penultimate ‘For A While’ opens more tender romantic wounds. ‘Car Park Overflow’ bookends this melancholy but hopeful record.

With the aid of producers Tamu Massif, James Thorpe, PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, and the mixing skills of Ali Chant, Fenne Lily’s debut album is set of delicate but passionate laments about the pain and the clarity that comes with falling in and out of love with others, and trying to be kind to yourself. Don’t put it On Hold, invest in her music immediately.

On Hold is available online and in stores now. Order your copy here.

Catch Fenne Lily live at London’s Moth Club on April 10th (tickets here).

Follow Fenne Lily on Facebook for more updates.

Photo Credit: Hollie Fernando

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut

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ALBUM: Zola Jesus – ‘Okovi: Additions’

A mixture of intriguing new electro-industrial sounds and polished remixes, Zola Jesus is set to release her new album Okovi: Additions, on 16th April via Sacred Bones. The record is a set of four previously unheard tracks and four remixes that fit together to provide an “experiential interpretation” of her 2017 critically acclaimed album, Okovi.

“These four new songs were intended to be on Okovi,” Zola Jesus (aka Nika Roza Danilova) explains. “Each of them represents a snapshot of my journey in making the record and are just as precious to me as the songs that made it onto the final track listing. The remixes are beloved in their own way, as most were born from organic circumstances, and have drawn the original songs into completely new atmospheres.”

It’s clear from opening track ‘Vacant’ these “snapshots” are as diverse and sharp as the tracks which originally made the cut. ‘Vacant’ is laced with penetrating vocals that ring out across a demanding soundscape. It bleeds perfectly into the captivating ‘Bound’, with its hypnotic, off-kilter, heavy bouncing synths and driving percussion. Her blend of industrial and classical elements makes both tracks sound like tortured hymns.

The flickering keys on ‘Pilot Light’ briefly shift away from industrial tones, but they’re still steeped in Zola Jesus’ confident delivery. ‘Bitten Wool’ flows in the same vein, with its consuming, haunting vocals. This marks the end of the new tracks and the four remixes that follow are all intricate and altruistic to their collaborators.

Johnny Jewel’s remix of ‘Ash to Bone’ doesn’t deviate too far from the original, but his introduction of sharper beats and heavy underscoring synths resurrects Zola Jesus’ lyrical lamentations about disconnection. ‘Siphon’ is transformed by Katie Gately’s anthemic, vocal layering and Randall Dunn & Aaron Weaver’s remix of ‘Exhumed’ is both warped and wonderful.

Joanne Pollock’s subtle re-working of ‘Soak’ closes Okovi: Additions on a powerful, definitive note. As Zola Jesus promises in her lyrics: “you should know I would never let you down,” and her ability to collaborate and explore her sound with others has proved this. Whether you’re new to Zola Jesus or an avid Okovi fan, these Additions will have you hooked.

Okovi: Additions is released via Sacred Bones on April 6th 2018. Order your copy here. Follow Zola Jesus on Facebook for more updates.

Photo Credit: Laura June Kirsch

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut

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ALBUM: Wendy Rae Fowler – ‘Warped’

For most of us, a musical life spent mixing with the great and good of US alt.rock and British trip-hop might be sufficient. But following a twenty year career of collaborations with Queens Of The Stone Age, Mark Lanegan and UNKLE, Wendy Rae Fowler now brings us her debut solo album: Warped. Now based in the UK, and collaborating with London’s finest (including GIHE fave Jemma Freeman), Fowler has tied together the strands of alternative, experimental rock, from both sides of the Atlantic – and her album has both the cinematic feel of US desert/post-rock and the gloomy clouds of its British cousin.

Opener ‘Hollow’ is an infusion of post-punk and post-rock, with its throbbing electronic motif, aching guitar and vocal distortion in the style of Fever Ray. It’s a style that appears later, on first single ‘Svengali’, although with a darker, fairytale opener, and a move into a trip-hop feel at its close.

 

‘Volcanic’ takes things in a more ethereal direction, still carrying the sense of Bjorkian electronic interference in its spacey heft. Elsewhere, there’s the legacy of other female performers – the goth folk of PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? and To Bring You My Love on ‘Lying in the Sun’ and ‘Red Dust’; Nina Simone on the cover of ‘Plain Gold Ring’.  

The latter encompasses an element of psych’s dark blues with its multi-percussion particularly reminiscent of GOAT. Second single ‘Run’ and ‘This is Not a Love Song’ take the listener to a twisted version of the old Wild West, with smatterings of twanging guitars and Rawhide cowboy backing vocalists.

Finally, the album concludes with the glistening shine of ‘Hollow Ground’ – a brooding epic instrumental whose electric lights twinkle through a bassy city smog, conjuring a tumble-twist in the mind’s eye of landscapes, both urban and natural. It’s a fitting conclusion to an album of light and shade, of space and density.

A powerful and moreish cocktail of cinematic sounds and bewitching vocals, Warped is a kind of neo-noir soundtrack to a movie that should, but doesn’t yet, exist. Rae Fowler’s sense of narrative is as strong as her musical nous, and her debut is a brilliant continuation of an already storied career.

Warped is out 30th March.

John McGovern
@etinsuburbiaego

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