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Stars of the Lid make the finest drone-rock around, and everyone knows it. I remember hearing them for the first time and turning to a friend and saying "Who needs drugs when you can listen to music like this?"
Upon experiencing them live and then hearing "Gravitational Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life" a few years ago, SotL redefined for me the aesthetic of 'ambient' music and just how beautiful it can be. Now Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride (and others, including previous collaborator painter Jon McCafferty and film artist Luke Savisky) return with 124 more minutes of sleepy soliloquy.
Although this release came out first in 1999 through Origin in Sweden, it has only been picked up by Apollo (an R&S sub-label) earlier this year. Graham Lewis (Wire/Dome/He Said) and Andreas Karperyd (Omala) have teamed up again, but not as He Said Omala this time. While I have been a Wire fan for nearly two decades, the Graham Lewis material can always be hit or miss, yet when he's paired up with a good collaborator, the results can be incredible. Fortunately, the collection of ten songs deftly combines the strengths of the Karperyd's undeniably hypnotic electronics and the super sexy voice of Lewis.
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Anita Lane first came to music circa the late '70s via the Nick Cave-led posse The Birthday Party and later as a founding member of his solo band The Bad Seeds. Since the mid-'80s she has recorded some singles and the solo album Dirty Pearl and has collaborated with Die Haut, Bad Seed Mick Harvey, Barry Adamson, Einstüzende Neubauten and Gudrun Gut. In particular, Harvey is her longtime musical guru and is once again responsible for production and much of the instrumentation for this 10 song album.
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Okay, first things first: I know there are going to be some folks sitting at home reading this and rolling their eyes at the idea of a 'Feminist band' and sighing, "Yeah, I'm all for womens' rights and everything but you know, their music is all the same... and well, it ain't always that great. And like, how many times do I have to listen to yet another bitchy band simulating Hole or Babes in Toyland?" so, for those people, I've got three words for you: fuck that shit.
Five films by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson have music featured on this compact collection. While over the last few weeks I have been listening to more soundtracks than ever, I've been finding that listening to them straight through (for many) can be quite repetitious. Themes frequently get repeated ad nauseam with jumbled up arrangements between instruments, scatterings of 1-minute tracks seem rather incomplete, and there's always a sense of something 'missing' — but that's just the nature of the beast. A collection like this, however provides a ton of well-developed music, carefully collected and organized, and sparks an interest in the works of both HÖH and Fridriksson.
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