Sacred Bones (label)
03 October 2018 (released)
03 October 2018
Like a gothic Steeleye Span or Nico fronting Satan’s 666 Symphony, be warned this album contains netherworld noises and spectral sounds.
Celt siren Annika Hendersons’s breathless and deathless hushed usherings commence the album, the lucid ‘Lullaby’ a bedtime beckoning designed to enrapture and entrap before the ‘scream-dream’ descent into the slumberworld. This haunting leads into ‘Open Road’, an anti-pastoral paean to the paths that await, the uncharted lanes that lead the lost to the found, however, the outlook is bleak as ‘some things can’t be undone’.
The residual traces betray on ‘Dark Stains’ is Killing Joke folk, ominous rumbling bass permeates throughout as the bait is laid the prey waylaid, Henderson states ‘I have seen the dark stains of your soul, but I believe you’, attempts at an admission of contrition all adds up a grim fairy-tale that culminates in an electro-freak breakdown.
Coming across like a warped ‘Gabriel and Bush's ‘Don’t Give Up’, ‘Gone Tomorrow’ poses the question of what would you do if tomorrow your steady twosome rendered you ruptured lonesome? Rueful regrets of missed chances, recollections are reassessed, memories misremembered that all equal the realisation of missed opportunity. Too late, mate.
‘Obey’ is nightmarish nocturnal noise, a veritable Hammer House of Horrorshow. A dispassionately intoned ‘Things aren’t quite what they seem’ states the obvious on ‘Letting Go Of Childhood Dreams’ where the advice is to ‘forget what you are doing and what you’re running from’ all backed by nursery-rhyme hypnogogia.
‘Raven Raven’ channels the Silver Apples’s wild oscillating vacillations as the titular bird flies straight off Poe’s pages, the omen of death a reminder that the gates of heaven (or hell) await us all.
Tick tock goes the clock on ‘Rant’, a distant Broadcastesque broadside and a befitting closure to the album as a blithely menacing, ‘like the way you crave those things you shouldn’t’ is expressed. I doubt that sugar consumption is being referred to.
This is an album full of unsettling ambience, a bewitching miasma pervades amongst the torsion-distortion.
