I nearly chewed my own ears off within a few seconds of the opening number on this. It’s like the sound of white female middle class whimsy condensed into a prancing soundtrack for some natural history documentary about butterflies or something. Indeed the whimsy continues up to the point of “Pumphouse” where C O L L E C T R E S S (which incidentally is extraordinarily painful to type) begin to calm down a bit and show something off that is a bit less frothy and ephemeral and a bit more …what ? What is “Pumphouse” ? What is any of this ? It’s very string heavy and piano orientated but there are also found sounds and whirr-y mechanical noises too and the whole thing is very light and beautiful in tone. I don’t really have any proper reference points for it but it seems to be somewhere between experimental, neo-folk and classical. And while it definitely takes some getting used to it is a rewarding experience for its fragile but odd countenance, because for every bit of bubbly proto-nature documentary soundtrack in waiting song on the album, there is also a genuine, heartfelt and beautifully eccentric song to counter it. I shudder to think how this would fare in the barbaric world of conventional music. It would be like throwing a sacrificial lamb in front of the pointless steam train of EDM (and whatever other shite people pretend to listen to) but in the placid and beautiful oxbow lake formed by the slow but gently insistent work of real musicians, this album deserves a pat on the back (or a curtsy or whatever) for giving not one iota of shit about sales or fashion or any other bullshit that has nothing to do with the creation of music.
Kim Monaghan
Type it however you like. C A P I T A L I S A T I O N is just the album artwork.
A pat on the back for you too, for recognising that we don’t give a shit about fashion or sales but are musicians interested in sound and music.
Many thanks C O L L E C T R E S S