There’s a quiet energy behind The Wandering Hearts, like a low thrumming sound that everyone can hear, but nobody notices until it stops. I can feel it on the phone to them; I swear I can actually hear it. I check my phone’s not playing up again. It’s probably the phone.
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We’re all chancing along the precipice, of course. The gentlest of pressure applied to the glued-up, duct-taped seams of the responsible world finds the whole thing bursting apart, and with it our job titles, rictus grins, marriage vows, sobriety chips, management buzzwords. On her second album There Are No Saints, Siobhan Wilson identifies herself as “neither Cathy nor Anna Karenina,” but perhaps an interlocutor between the two: pulling at the scuzzy fabric and binding it into something both prettier and more substantial.
Continue reading at God Is In The TV
There’s a pivotal scene that closes out the first season of Spaced, the cult TV debut of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and director Edgar Wright, in which Tim has an epiphany waiting for his ex-girlfriend to arrive at the bar. “It’s like walking in on yourself, you know? Like, ‘What are you doing?’ That’s how I felt tonight feeling my heart miss a beat every time the door opened. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” On her fourth album as Waxahatchee, Out in the Storm, Katie Crutchfield’s natural introspection transcends navel-gazing to place distance between herself and a toxic relationship, and the effect is both vituperative and life-affirming: in its most brutally honest scenes, we catch the Alabama native walking in on herself.
Continue reading at Drunken Werewolf
The details of Katie Crutchfield’s personal experiences are irresistibly stitched into the fabric of her work. More than anything, when confronted with such honesty in art, our first desire is always to pull it apart at the seams: is this a break-up album? How toxic was the relationship? Which side of the bed do you continue to leave empty?
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The world is a sharp place, and art that serves only to map out its painful edges proves as useful and welcome as Owen Smith’s post-election hubris, or chlamydia, or waking up and realising that Owen Smith’s post-election hubris has somehow given you chlamydia. The scenes that leave a real scar are those that locate the intersection of tragedy and farce; the ragged contours, the poignant moments Simon Reynolds once described as “the exquisite meshing of two contradictory feelings”. It’s driven by characters who compromise the expectations attached to their role, and by proxy, the way we identify ourselves within them. The world’s villains are still easy enough to caricature. But if you happen to fall outside the heteronormative matrix, chances are the heroes don’t look anything like you either.
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‘All I wanted comes in colours,’ Victoria Legrand once sang, and while it’s tempting to mark that as a collection of euphonically pleasing words rather than a mission statement, there’s an element of both. Perhaps I’ve read too much into Beach House’s artwork over the years, but all those records seem to hold together as cohesive shades from start to finish: the woozy amber of the first two releases; Teen Dream’s pearly whites; the cobalt midnight of Bloom; Depression Cherry, of course. It’s no coincidence that their reviews tend to be written in visual terms, too, with inclusion of the term ‘widescreen’ increasingly mandatory since their 2010 breakthrough. Whichever way you cut it, Beach House records tend to come in colours.
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Matthew Neale 