Marky
Group: Members
Posts: 390
Joined: Sep. 2005 |
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Posted: Mar. 30 2006, 02:20 |
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A review of Clodagh Simonds' latest work, with Brian Eno and others, for those who like this lady's voice.
FOEVA HEX
Bloom
(Die Stadt)
"Cry, baby, cry," Fovea Hex founder Clodagh Simonds sings on Bloom opener "Don't These Windows Open," her buttery brogue afloat on a star-dappled cloud of zither (hers), fretless bass (Brian Eno's), and voices (hers, Eno's, Laura Sheeran's). "Cry for your father." Trapped like living human arteries in black marble, madness and grief course through her stately cant, all the more poignant for their containment. Incarnation management mini-epic "We Sleep You Bloom" finds Simonds shedding her hedge druidess' cloak to harmonize with fellow weird sisters Sheeran and Lydia Sasse. While earthier than its predecessor, the song's instrumental bed is no less mysterious. To wit: How the hell did composer Carter Burwell (Fargo, Being John Malkovich) end up adding "disappeared piano" to Simonds' keyboards and Cora Veunus Lunny's violas? Ask Eno, his harmonium-contributing brother Roger, or better still, the Hafler Trio's Andrew MacKenzie, who mixed this EP, number one in a series of three. You could even put the question to Stephen Malkmus, whose live cover of Simonds' 36-year-old "The Poet and the Witch" appeared on Dark Wave. Simonds has been flickering in and out of the limelight's margins ever since her stint with Irish folk-rockers Mellow Candle in the early '70s, gracing tracks by Thin Lizzy, Mike Oldfield, and (most recently) sound artist Russell Mills with down-to-earth otherworldliness between disappearances. Who knows how long she's been working on this thing? Sure, clumsy antecedents—ranging from Eyeless in Gaza to Current 93—abound. But the singer's got such a knack for marrying traditionalist tropes and melodies with up-to-the-minute-after-this-one experimentalism that you'd think she was born with eternity in her gut. ROD SMITH
Here
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