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Lush only recorded three albums, but the amount of music the group amassed in their brief career is astounding. I count four distinct phases in their time: an an abrasive noise phase followed by a wall-of-sound (shoegaze?) prettiness, a brief flirt with some deep introspection, and ending with Britpop. Now that they have announced their re-emergence, 4AD has assembled this collection which I'm excited about, yet only slightly annoyed at.
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Winning points for the collection include the inclusion of numerous demos, sessions, and B-sides, the beautiful packaging, and the updated sound. I don't know if the music has been fully remastered, but it certainly sounds louder and fuller, thankfully, than the original releases (without any "brick-walling"). This was always a point of contention for their earlier music: as bombastic as it was, there was something about CD mastering in the late '80s and early '90s that didn't serve this music appropriately. Mastering could be simply atrocious sometimes: low frequencies were dampened for the sake of vinyl mastering, since phonograph preamps would correct for that end of the spectrum, but CD players didn't, and many companies simply handed over the LP master recordings to the CD plant. Despite the music spanning the various phases of the group, the rich sound on Chorus remains consistent and doesn't waiver from disc to disc.
Aesthetically, however, Chorus doesn't make for a great listen start to finish. Lush had evolved so much that to throw everything together with an approximate chronology feels a bit clumsy. The 3 full length albums, Spooky, Split, and Lovelife are bookended by the collections Gala and Topolino. The group's history, however, begins with the mostly dissonant 1989 EP Scar. When heard first, followed by the follow-up EPs of Mad Love and Sweetness and Light, the trajectory makes sense: it is evident how quickly the group evolved into a pop song powerhouse but didn't leave the noisy roots behind. Gala, on the other hand, was a collection, arranged primarily for the North American market that didn't purchase and promote singles/EPs in the way the Europeans did. So it makes sense that the current single appeared first on Gala, but on Chorus, it's awkward, even moreso when radio sessions from 1994 and 1996 appear as the bonus for the disc that is primarily 1990 material.
Spooky was the first full-length album, and with the production of Robin Guthrie, was a monster debut. The guitar layers are rich, blanketed by the shimmering vocal harmonies on top, neither of which detract from the driving rhythm section. Bonus material comes from the Black Spring and For Love EPs that led up to Spooky, including many fantastic B-sides such as "God's Gift," "Astronaut," as well as "Outdoor Miner," one of two Wire cover tunes Lush recorded and released. But then it gets awkward again. Instead of including the demo versions from 1991 (which end up on disc four?!), the 1999 remix of "Sweetness and Light" (from the Splendor soundtrack) and the 1994 DJ Spooky remix of "Undertow" appear. Did some youngster at 4AD mistake _DJ Spooky_ with the album Spooky because this mix is out of place.
I think I started to fall out-of-love with Lush on Split. The album was inconsistent on the whole and a bit of an identity crisis. It was more melancholy than not, and lacked the overall vigor of Spooky, furthermore I was never a fan of the breakthrough hit single, "Hypocrite." "Desire Lines," on the other hand, released as a single on the same day, is a masterpiece: an epic piece of pure bliss that patiently evolves over its creepy 7¬Ω minute duration. It was a bold choice as a single and pure heaven, even in the demo version which appears oddly on disc four of the set. Split also had a the pop genius tune "Lovelife," with an undeniably infectious riff that could have easily been made it a hit single. Once again the bonus track selection leaves me confused. The two tunes from the Hypocrite EP appear, including the wonderful Young Marble Giants cover, "Love At First Sight," and two tunes from the Desire Lines EP appear, however the remix of "Lovelife" is left off and appears nowhere on the set. Also notably absent on the set is the version of "The Childcatcher" from the 1994 4AD compilation All Virgos Are Mad and the version of "Tinkerbell" from Volume Ten. I'm thankful for the acoustic versions featured, but they're all from 1996 and are out of place here, especially as two appeared as B-sides to 1996 singles.Other 1994 recordings such as "Rupert the Bear," "Lit Up (demo)," and "All This Useless Beauty," would make more sense here, rather than scattered between discs four and five.
Lovelife has to be my least favorite Lush album. Despite it being much more upbeat than Split, all the power, energy, and innovation gave way to snotty Britpop. Miki Berenyi's accent became over-exaggerated on just about every single song: it's almost as if this was an entirely different singer from the early EPs. "Ladykillers" seems like "Hypocrite" part 2, "Single Girl" wasn't much better but at least more tolerable, and "Ciao!," featuring Jarvis Cocker remains pretty unlistenable. "Last Night" is clearly the album's highlight, as it sounds like they took their time and focused well on composition, rather than simply tossing together any old riff and attitude. (The stellar hexadecimal dub of "Last Night" on the 500 EP is criminally absent from this collection too.)
The fifth disc, Topolino, was originally a collection of music from the singles released from the Lovelife album. As a collection, I enjoy it much more than Lovelife as an LP. Highlights include the stunning cover of Magnetic Fields' "I Have the Moon," the original "Sweetie," (for the first time on disc), and "Piledriver," a rare song written by drummer Chris Acland, who took his own life later in 1996, ending Lush. Once again, however, the chronology of bonus material is wrong. I can't figure out why the 1996 acoustic versions of "500," "Kiss Chase," and "Olympia" ended up on the 1994 disc 3, but it's a pleasure to have "Rupert the Bear" finally!
Perhaps I'm being too harsh (fans are the worst, right?), and there's plenty more to be thankful for (radio sessions, demos, and other previously unreleased music along with a very nice sounding mastering job) than not, but I wouldn't unload all your original singles yet!
 
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Improbably, this is Leigh’s first true solo studio album after a slew of limited edition home recordings and a lengthy and illustrious career of collaborating with damn near every major artist in the fringes of the improv music scene (Jandek, Chris Corsano, Peter Brötzmann, Smegma, etc.).  Given the volume and diversity of her previous work, I was not at all sure what to expect from I Abused Animal.  I know I did not expect it to sound like it actually does though.  While there is certainly a fair amount of Leigh's distinctively warped and iconoclastic guitar playing, Animal often feels far more like an otherworldly outsider folk album than the work of an experimental/improv guitar luminary.  For the most part, that was a sound directional choice, as Animal is a legitimately unique and compelling album.  I suspect it will probably be a bit too strange and hermetic for some listeners, but that is their problem.
As a genre, the blues has had an extremely unfortunate stylistic trajectory, steadily degenerating from the incredible promise of Robert Johnson and his milieu into a bunch of white baby boomers jamming out and making guitar faces at rib joints.  Fortunately, there was also a much stranger, darker, and more abstract concurrent evolution that eventually yielded artists like Heather Leigh's erstwhile collaborators Jandek and Christina Carter.  Leigh is a similarly intense and idiosyncratic member of that pantheon, channeling life's anguish with uncomfortable directness and casting away any clutter or structure that could potentially distract from the catharsis.  In fact, she even sets aside her pedal steel guitar for the opening title piece, delivering her cryptic and creepy confession as a quavering a capella performance that resembles an old spiritual, a form that she is no doubt intimately familiar with having grown up in West Virginia.  It is a gripping, gutsy, and intimate performance that sets the bar quite high for the rest of the album.  I am not sure the rest of Animal quite rises to the same level, aside from late-album highlight "The Return," but the consolation prize is that Leigh's listenability increases as her intensity decreases.  Great art is rarely comfortable, passive entertainment.
While the addition of guitar does generally make the remainder of Animal somewhat less haunted-sounding, the other five songs are still quite a long way from anything remotely conventional.  Even at her most melodic and vibrant, as she is on the unexpectedly This Mortal Coil-esque "Quicksand," Leigh reduces her guitar playing to nothing more than an echoing, hyper-minimal four-note repeating pattern.  Elsewhere, such as on the gnarled, vibrato-crazy "All That Heaven Allows," she stomps her distortion pedal and erupts into a wild, one-woman psych-rock freak-out that she somehow manages to wrap a vocal melody around.  It might not be entirely successful as a song, but it is certainly a bold, memorable, and striking effort nonetheless (it sounds like someone mashed together a Big Blood album with an especially lysergic and free-form Blue Cheer live recording).  Later, "Passionate Reluctance" abandons the guitar again for an unexpectedly pretty and folky second vocal performance before Animal plunges back into darkness for good.  "The Return" is my clear pick for album highlight, enhancing one of Leigh's strongest vocal melodies with a distorted, ugly, and intermittently disrupted pattern of heavy guitar swells.  The final "Fairfield Fantasy" achieves a similar degree of warped beauty, albeit in very different fashion: its finger-picked arpeggios are frequently derailed by wild vibrato that transforms the otherwise heavenly piece into something that sounds like a curdled and disorienting Hawaiian nightmare.
While both the songs themselves and Leigh’s singular guitar approach are the obvious draws, I actually found Leigh herself to be Animal’s single most compelling aspect, as her aesthetic is quite a fascinating puzzle to try to wrap my head around.  Aside from frequently sounding possessed, somnambulant, and otherwise alien, Leigh has quite a singular knack for bringing together seemingly very disparate threads and making them all seem perfectly natural (albeit within the context of a very unnatural album).  I can perhaps see how her harsher, more cathartic fare is the inverse of her more melodic, simple, and tender side, but outliers like "I Abuse Animal" and especially the perverse "All That Heaven Allows" muddy the waters quite a bit.  "Heaven" truly feels like someone amusingly dared Leigh to try to make a coherent song from the craziest, messiest acid-rock excess imaginable, which sits quite bizarrely next to the quiet, wide-eyed intensity found elsewhere.  I think she won the bet though.  More importantly, Leigh's many facets somehow all fit together into a satisfying whole and they never feel at all like a jumbled, schizophrenic mess (even though it seems like they should).  In fact, all the various threads only serve to deepen the listening experience, as I Abused Animal easily ranks among the most gripping uneasy listening of the year.
 
 
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On her third solo album (the title being Icelandic for "Allow the Light"), Hildur Guðnadóttir presents a performance that is entirely live (without audience) of just cello, voice and electronics, which begins deceptively simple, but is soon molded into a rich work of intimate beauty as much as it is a complex study of the most rudimentary sounds in a compelling structure.
Consisting only of two pieces, the short "Prelude" is exactly that:a short, sparse opening of dry, unaffected cello playing that may have functioned as much as a warm-up for Hildur as it does for the album as a whole.It leads directly into the 35-minute title track, and the album proper.
Opening with the continued cello and the addition of delicate vocals, the same sparse, intimate vibe continues, insinuating basic expectations for the rest of the album:from the sound and manner of recording, I was expecting an entire album of only strings and voice.Soon the cello drops away entirely, leaving just the vocals to be carefully looped and processed (in real time) into layers, any actual words become secondary to the melody created from the effects.
The returning cello cuts through the fragmented pieces of voice, resulting in a rich combination of natural and electronic sound that builds in density, resulting in a swirling mass of sound that takes a slightly darker turn, hovering ominously over droning low-end cello.The sound shifts in its closing, where the cello becomes less about texture and more about taut, rhythmic swipes that are layered upon themselves, resulting in a jarring, rapid motif that builds and builds into a suspenseful coda, ending what is mostly a reflective, contemplative piece on a tense, almost unsettling note.
As a completely live work, Leyfðu Ljósinu speaks volumes of Hildur Guðnadóttir's ability as both a composer and performer.The building of sound from a delicate voice and cello to a heavy, swirling mass of sound and closing on a tense, rapid note works extremely well from a structural perspective, and the fact that it was all performed in real time with no overdubs or post-processing makes it all the more exceptional.
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The underlying concept on Below Sea Level is Simon Scott's study of the fens in East Angila, a bit of formerly marshy land that he visited many times in his youth. Utilizing hydrophones and other home made recording devices, Scott captures the sound both around and below sea level (hence the title) and processes it into an often unrecognizable, but nonetheless fascinating world of sound that conveys the nostalgic feelings Simon intended to.
The recordings were then heavily processed and effected via DSP, resulting in the swirling, slightly disjointed but completely effective ambience of "_Sealevel.3" and the slightly sinister splashes of dissonance that arise on "_Sealevel.6" which eventually comes together to resemble the sound of 1990s shoegaze dissembled into its most rudimentary components.
Guitar also appears sporadically, usually in the form of identifiable, but filtered, plucked notes that become the focus of whatever track they show up on."_Sealevel.1", perhaps the most sparse piece here, puts the clear, resonating notes with the sounds of nature around, creating an intimate, personal feel that is struck down when the lower-end noise and dissonance kicks in later on.
Consistent throughout are field recordings of the fens, but not in the traditional sense:the music was played via speakers and then re-recorded with the natural surrounding ambience, providing a very different character to an otherwise well-used sonic technique.Rather than sounding like one piece of a more complex composition, instead the bird songs and foliage rustling feels like a natural and integral bit of ambience that ties the album together.
Not to overly draw comparisons and parallels, but Scott's use natural, marshy ambience and occasionally overt guitar is reminiscent of some of Fennesz's best work, especially with "_Sealevel.4"'s staticy, vintage-laden effects.They have a similar, though still different sense of pleasant nostalgia and hazy, humid summer evenings of years gone by.
The use of heavily layered, processed sounds and unidentifiable environments mixed with familiar ones give Below Sea Level a distinctly unique feel that is an oddly intense album.The feeling is pretty laconic and relaxed, but the sheer amount of layering and manipulationon make it almost overwhelming at times, but it never becomes too much, and instead becomes just the right level of complexity.Simon Scott clearly is working with gentle ambience, but in such a way that it demands attention, never fading into the background like the work of less capable artists.Below Sea Level is also available with a lush, 80 page hardcover book of photographs and essays by Simon on the topic of the fens, fleshing out the themes and imagery greatly.
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On their debut EP, Relations deliver four tracks that could come across as hipster synth-pop nostalgia, but the earnestness and catchiness of the songs make that a non-issue, resulting in a set of tracks that sound familiar, yet new to anyone who grew up with the music of the early 1980s.
The duo of Terence Murren and Michael Sanders go the extra mile to develop an "authentic" sound:while the drums are programmed, the synths are live, bringing back the slightly imperfect, but memorable days of pre-MIDI electronic pop.The repetitive melodies and rhythms of "Take No Sides" more then recall a bit of Suicide, with slightly more polish and actual guitars, while keeping that occasional punky sloppiness.
"A Savage Way To Live" begins with a lo-fi synth bass line that is initially a bit too dull, but after pulling off in different directions comes together nicely into a catchy stomp that keeps the pop hooks even amid noisy, raw outbursts.On "Careless Days," the mix is scaled back for a more rudimentary structure, with some noisy and therefore great guitar coming in later on.
Considering this is a debut EP, the biggest shortcoming is understandable and easier to swallow.The vocals on all four tracks have the detached, monotone sound that so many post punk and new wave artists traded in, but sound a bit too similar track to track.With more time and recordings, I would not see this to be an enduring problem.
With that out of the way, Relations' debut EP reminds me of a less goth Cold Cave in the sense of they create music aesthetically rooted in the early 1980s, but come across not as a nostalgia act or hipsters riding a trend, but earnest artists working within a genre that they truly love.These four tracks get that precarious balance of pop hooks, odd electronic sounds, and dissonant outbursts right to create memorable "songs," which is too often ignored for the sake of texture and noise.
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It is a true pleasure to announce the third full length release from West Coast dub heads Peaking Lights: Lucifer. With it, the golden duo of Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis continue to crystallize their mesmerizing sound and find new dimensions within. Lucifer also comes at a time of great transition for this married couple and it reflects the possibilities that they have found during this new life era, especially with the birth of their son, Mikko- a guiding light muse for the album.
Recorded in Brooklyn at Gary’s Electric studio over the course of a month, Peaking Lights consider Lucifer a nocturnal version of their sound. It's slinkier and full of grooves. "To us this record is about play and playfulness, unconditional love, rhythms and pulses, creation and vibration," says Coyes. Lucifer is also Peaking Lights' most ambitious release to date in terms of its approach and scope. Through their studio experiments, the duo has managed to link their musical loves—dub, krautrock, analog electronic dance music, sound collages, pop music—all while maintaining cohesive songs. Lucifer was self-produced and engineered by Al Carlson (Yeasayer, Ford & Lopatin, 0PN).
Though the name Lucifer may carry sinister connotations to some, to Peaking Lights it represents the start of something new. "All of our record titles have come to us in dreams, daydreams and epiphanies." says Coyes. "Lucifer sat so strong with us. It means 'Venus, bearer of light' and is the first sign of the sunrise. There are some major astrological and astronomical events involving Venus in this year of 2012."
The songs on Lucifer, by most people that have heard them, so far conjour a night time version of previous works, music to soundtrack the moonrise to the sunrise. To Indra and I, though there are similarities to earlier recordings, this stands on its own its changed us, or maybe we were already changed when we wrote it and it is that cathartic release. There was a new approach to recording our rhythms and we were able to see thru many more influences. To us this record is about play and playfulness, unconditional love, rhythms and pulses, creation and vibration we are really happy to share these recordings!
Aaron and Indra have garnered attention for their amazing mixes of super rare and smartly curated jams-here is one to check out with a selection of as-yet unidentified snippets of music from their new record on the newly-live Lucifer.fm
The album comes out on June 19th. More information is available here.
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Despite recording some landmark works with GRM (including a masterful triple LP with Pierre Schaeffer in the '60s), Guy Reibel is a name that is often forgotten when discussing musique concrète. While fame (as far as fame for experimental 20th century composers goes) has eluded him compared to other members of the GRM, his music has always delivered. This album, originally released in 1978, shows Reibel in particularly good light as he creates an unprecedented, and since unmatched, sonic vocabulary.
Although Granulations-Sillages/Franges Du Signe has been issued on CD, it has been difficult to track down and, like the Pierre Schaeffer LP also out this month, Editions Mego have done a wonderful job on their reissue via the Recollection GRM sub-label. As well as sounding incredible, the sleeve notes fill in some of the difficult details around the two compositions presented here. Both take the idea of space and rhythm to a point beyond what can be explored with normal instruments. Reibel’s background in engineering and his interest in the mathematics behind sound or indeed how mathematics could be expressed using sound makes for complex, indecipherable music that challenges any common assumptions about what music is or should be.
Although intended for a sound system consisting of six speakers, "Granulations-Sillages" translates well to a normal stereo set up. While I can only imagine the spatial depth and acoustic effects that would have occurred with half a dozen speakers, here the result is still startling and unpredictable, even after engaging with it many times. Reibel employs very rough noises, probing the limits of human perception across multiple domains. Reibel works in a way that remains abstract but pulls the listener into a rich world of sound by immersing them in a three-dimensional space. It honestly feels that I could reach out and touch the sounds as the form around me.
"Franges du Signe" is a slightly earlier work that preempts and informs Reibel’s work on "Granulations-Sillages." However, where "Granulations-Sillages" was controlled and had an alien beauty about it, here Reibel appears to let loose with a chaotic and fiery piece which takes the idea of a mathematical limit and examines the properties of such limits when applied to real world phenomena like sound. It is remarkable stuff, conflicting rhythms and unusual textures coming together to form an elemental whole. An almost serene mood develops as the volume lowers to a point where I am tempted to turn everything up but I resist that urge for fear of a resurgence of loud noises blowing up my stereo (which, it turns out, is what would have happened…).
Granulations-Sillages/Franges Du Signe, along with Pierre Schaeffer’s Le Trièdre Fertile, represents a significant opening volley from Recollection GRM. With releases by Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari on the horizon, I can only hope that Peter Rehberg returns to Reibel at some point in the future. Mr. Rehberg, if you are reading this, the triple LP by Reibel and Schaeffer would be an awesome edition to your catalog.
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Despite recording some landmark works with GRM (including a masterful triple LP with Pierre Schaeffer in the '60s), Guy Reibel is a name that is often forgotten when discussing musique concrète. While fame (as far as fame for experimental 20th century composers goes) has eluded him compared to other members of the GRM, his music has always delivered. This album, originally released in 1978, shows Reibel in particularly good light as he creates an unprecedented, and since unmatched, sonic vocabulary.
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The last composition saw 
Pierre Schaeffer break from his long standing experiments with manipulating recordings of real-life sounds, away from the concrète and closer to something more akin to the electronic works of Henri Pousseur or Karlheinz Stockhausen. Utilising only synthesized sounds, this album is a tantalizing glance down a path that Schaeffer never fully explored but based on these pieces, the results of such explorations would be mind-blowing.
This inaugural release for yet another new Editions Mego sub-label, Recollection GRM, will be the first of many classic or unsung musique concrète releases from the GRM archives (also reviewed this week is an LP by Guy Reibel). This particular version of Le Trièdre Fertile has been reissued on CD several times (including the many instances of INA GRM’s wonderful L’Œuvre Musicale box set) but this is the first time it has been issued on vinyl and the sleeve has been given a facelift by Stephen O’Malley. Before I even put the needle down, I am impressed by the care and quality of the album and after I put the needle down, the music makes me forget these material things.
Immediately, it is obvious from the opening seconds of "Plutôt Dynamique (Étude Banale)" that this will be a very different Schaeffer record. The clean, buoyant electronic sounds (generated for Schaeffer by Bernard Dürr) are miles away from the rough concrète sounds of his earlier works. Here, Schaeffer employs a clinical precision that I would associate more with something from a recent Raster-Noton release than an almost 40-year-old recording. Throughout the various movements, Schaeffer takes the themes outlined in the opening section and manipulates, edits and adds to them to form an ever-evolving change in color and mood. Amazingly, it still sounds utterly futuristic in the way that great science fiction from the middle of the 20th century remains prescient and applicable now despite the massive advances in knowledge and technology.
While the range of tones used by Schaeffer are quite limited, he nevertheless uses them to create a vivid and detailed work that draws on his concrète-style insight but with a musical inventiveness that has been absent in his earlier works. "Moins Banal (Interlude, ou Impromptu)" could be a piece of soundtrack music; rhythmic and melodic enough not to offend but strange and suspenseful enough to be more than an exercise or study in technique. Similarly, "Tocccata et Fugue" is a proto-dance work that could be one of Kraftwerk’s weirder moments or even an outtake from Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
It would have been great if Schaeffer had made more compositions in this style but in his later years he devoted more time to teaching before tragically succumbing to Alzheimer’s prior to his death in 1995. I can only dream about what sort of sounds or approaches he might have developed. However, as a parting gift to the world, it is very hard to fault Le Trièdre Fertile which is a stroke of genius by any standard, including those of a man who had previously shook the very idea of music to its core.
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Last year's self-titled, self-released album felt like a major creative breakthrough for Nadler, as she found a very effective way for her distinctive, ghostly songs to coexist with a bit more light and life. The Sister, billed as its companion album, turns out to be something of a lateral move rather than an evolution or continuation. It is certainly more melancholy, spare, and monochromatic than I expected, but it largely overcomes those hurdles by being such a meticulously crafted, focused, concise, and thematically coherent song suite. As a whole, it is perhaps a bit weaker than some of Marissa's other efforts, but some of the individual songs are easily among her best.
Despite a vague continuation of some of Marissa Nadler's lyrical themes and the return of most of the same collaborators, The Sister essentially feels like a total negative image of its predecessor.  The most significant difference is a pretty damn dramatic one, as last year's effort sounded like Nadler fronting a languorously swaying alt-country band and this basically sounds like an intimate and decidedly non-swinging solo performance.  Evidence of other musicians certainly exists, but aside from Orion Rigel Domisse's piano in "Love Again, There is a Fire" and the drums in "The Wrecking Ball Company," contributions are pretty much relegated to subtle coloration.  That is perfectly fine by me, as the melancholy, nocturnal feel of these songs is well-served by their spare, minor key arpeggio accompaniment.  The album would be a trainwreck if it was not, as Nadler only departs from her wistful acoustic arpeggiations once (on the aforementioned "Love Again," the album's weakest, most heavy-handed piece).  That is not an exaggeration at all, as she never even builds up to strumming an acoustic guitar–these are unwaveringly slow, fragile, and achingly poignant songs.  The whole thing evokes old, lonely New England houses, heartache, and moonlit nights, which is a pretty wonderful aesthetic in small doses, but could get suffocating sad and numbingly one-dimensional over the course of an entire album.  Nadler, thankfully, was self-aware enough to consider that and wisely kept The Sister to a lean half-hour.  That is the perfect length for this suite.
Of course, she was never in much danger of overstaying her welcome: despite the very specific formula and limited palette on display, Marissa's songwriting remains wonderful.  She manages to find quite a lot of room for variety within her very narrow scope.  Nearly every song boasts at least one strong hook and Nadler's singular and sensuous voice swoops hauntingly and movingly throughout.  Despite the inexplicable use of a flanger near the end, the sweetly sad "In a Little Town" is a damn near perfect song, and there are at least three or four others that reach similarly great heights (like "Apostle" and "The Wrecking Ball Company," for example).  That is a high success rate for an 8-song album.  Also, Nadler's craft goes quite a bit deeper than just melody and atmosphere, populating her songs with an enigmatic cast of characters whose stories are not immediately graspable.
I love albums with a healthy dose of mystery, as it makes repeat listening seem much more enticing than usual.  It is admittedly a bit hard for me to fully accept this as "the new Marissa Nadler album" given its brevity, narrow focus, and stylistic divergence from her last record, but it is a pretty inspired and irresistible effort regardless of how I ultimately decide to categorize it.
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It is fitting that this album found a home on David Tibet's Coptic Cat imprint, as it is not only unusual, but unusual in a rather novel way: Thiel's lilting, simple ballads (backed by Michael Cashmore) hearken back to a much more innocent time.  On one hand, her wide-eyed, poetic lyrics and earnest delivery recall the golden age of English folk, but in another (weirder) sense it feels like she is quixotically making pop music for an era that is either long departed or never existed at all.
I have to admit that I probably would not have given this album too much attention were it not for the involvement of Cashmore and Tibet and their historic good taste.  That is not to imply that Steffi is somehow lacking as an artist, but there are some superficial issues that I had quite a difficult time getting past.  The first and most conspicuous is the almost total lack of any textural grit or melodic edge or dissonance (traits that the crystalline production only enhance).  For the most part, Steffi's songs are very pretty and bright, with only occasional passing shadows.  Also, her voice is very strong and pure, which reminds me of an earlier era when the actual quality of someone's singing voice was considered important.  It reminds me of show tunes in a weird way too, but without the hostility that usually accompanies such thoughts.
Unfortunately, the album also features one unambiguously baffling misstep: the song "Circling Suns" features a very "'80s hard rock" electric guitar crescendo that totally disrupts the album's prevailing aesthetic and makes me wonder what the hell Cashmore and Thiel were thinking.  That concludes my formal list of grievances, but I also wish Cashmore had stepped into the spotlight a bit more, as I always enjoy his work.  I certainly cannot fault him for allowing this to be Steffi's show though (and his closing untitled instrumental is a pretty decent consolation prize).
Thankfully, I was able to get past most of my issues to some degree (with repeat listens) and realized that there is a bit more substance to Late But Never than is apparent on its surface.  Most of that depth is lurking within Thiel's lyrics, as her deceptively pleasant cooing conceals unsettling lines like "dead factories on smoke grey mornings...the factories, they snap at girls like you."  Also, in a less specific sense, Steffi's words and aesthetic seem to be completely guileless and utterly detached from anything resembling popular music circa 2012.  Whether that is due to naivete or a bold, pure vision is a mystery to me, but it is certainly refreshing and unusual in any case–there is a real sense of joy, exuberance, and authenticity here.  Consequently, it is hugely frustrating to hear that vibrance and heart buffed to a professional sheen.
The raw material for something much better is certainly here (charisma, strong melodies, bittersweet and poignant lyrics, solid songwriting, effective arrangements, etc.), but it is all too bright, smooth, and insubstantial to connect with me on any kind of deep level.  That said, there remains some rather beautiful pieces (particularly "Tonight" and "A Bird") and a whole lot of promise–it just all could have been much more compelling to me if the production had matched the intimate, homespun feel of the songs or if mixing duties had been handed over to someone a bit more deviant and ambitious.
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