Leo Records: LR942
Carolyn Hume: piano, keyboards; Paul May: drums, intimate metals; Bernd Rest: baritone guitar; Duke Garwood: vocals
Recorded by Gareth Young at Cube Recording.
As with their previous recordings on Leo, Hume and May create disquieting, cinematic experiences. There is an eeriness that is akin to the taut psychological thriller or film noir. The opening tracks, ‘Fatal’, ‘Bill and Marty’, ‘There are no words’, and ‘Poison melody’ seem to flow in a narrative arc that is very easy for the listener to fill-in with plot, character, location.
The changes in drum patterns across these the tracks and the switch between piano and keyboards indicate the changes in focus but the underlying feeling of the music is maintained. On ‘Poison melody’, the addition of Rest’s sonorous baritone guitar nudges the mood towards Twin Peaks territory, albeit in a glacial slowness that presages some scary plot twist. This segues into ‘Bergerac on Ice’ which is a haunting piece of echoing percussion lightly peppered with short chords and sustained keyboard notes and phrases.
On the closing track, Garwood approaches the vocals in the style of David Sylvain playing the role of a prisoner confused and confined in a distant room – although I wasn’t able to interpret the lyrics with any clarity, the repeated phrase ‘from the other side of a dream ‘ (?) gives an idea of surrealism that the repetitions in the music seems to emphasise.
Just like the previous recordings, the music is difficult to pigeon-hole into a single genre and simply speaks in the language that they have been honing for the past few years. Allowing yourself to sink into these tunes creates an experience that has the unsettling effect of reading a Murakami novel and shares the deceptive simplicity of presentation with an ability to twist reality in ways that sustain an unfathomable logic that draws you in until reality becomes a poor reflection of this experience.
