Although this album could be categorized broadly as coming from the world of indie rock, it’s not a collection of songs but an extended sonic ambience in which fragments of music appear and disappear. I would think most people would find it either irritating or captivating. I’m definitely in the latter group.
How to describe it? Imagine a ghost town in the desert, “ghost” not only in the sense of being abandoned, but in the sense of being inhabited by ghosts. First there are the ghosts of the late 1800s when the town was born and died with a gold rush that soon fizzled out, or was built on the path of a railroad that proved to have no good reason to exist. And then there are ghosts of the mid-1900s, when hippies and rock bands used it as a brief escape from the city. You’ve been set down in the middle of the street (there’s only one) in the middle of the night. And you start to hear sounds coming out of the darkness: distant instruments and voices from the old music hall, a rock band fooling around with half-finished songs, whispers, sad young girls singing of loneliness and longing, encounters with strange beings (perhaps angels) and the sounds of the desert itself.
If that sounds at all intriguing to you, you’d probably like this. It’s mainly the work of two young women, and has a sort of guarded whimsy that I’ve noticed occasionally in sensitive young women who seem to be trying to escape or protect themselves from the brutal sexual climate of the times—notice the cover art, here, where you can also hear samples. And here’s a video; this track, “Airships,” is one of the more straightforward ones. By the way, there’s no sound until about 37 seconds in, so don’t crank the volume on your PC till after that. Length: 3:55.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
Leave a comment