Haley Fohr, three albums into her run as Circuit Des Yeux, puts a powerful, classically trained voice to work in rough-edged rock-into-blues experiments. Her album Portrait is out now on DeStilj. I reviewed it today at Dusted, ending:
"Fohr showcases the cathartic, heavily amplified impact of her show in “I’m on Fire,” the sole live track. Here she spits and moans and banshee shrieks against a crashing clamor of guitars, sounding more like Jarboe at her scariest than any latter day diva. There’s something so primal, so self-immolating about this track that you forget, for a moment, how young Fohr is. That is, until she reminds you, chanting “Twenty-two…to be twenty-two…twenty-two…to be twenty-two.” If Fohr can light herself on fire like this now, at barely legal drinking age, imagine what she’ll be like at 30."
More
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I need to listen to her stuff online when I get home, but this sentence - "Like Zola Jesus’ Nika Roza Danilova, Fohr has a strong, resonant voice, tipped with gorgeous vibrato in the mid-range and thinning to ghostly delicacy in the upper register" - just sold me on it. I wish more reviews were this specific on a singer's vocal abilities.
Thank you...I was just reading a Serengeti review at PopMatters and thinking, yes, surely at some point he will get to what's on the record. (He did, but maybe 500 words in.) I mean, I know with instant downloads and all, there's less of an urgency to describing how the thing sounds, but to me that's the fun and the challenge of it. This record is pretty stunning, not surprising, pretty much everything on DeStilj is at least interesting.
As soon as I saw DeStilj and read your recommendation here, I knew I'd get to it. Then I read the entire review and knew I had to get to it. With instant downloads, I think there's more of an urgency to describe. What if its a song that needs more than a minute of my time to get a fair hearing? Cos if it sounds too much like something else I've heard that's better (or worse) I may listen to the whole thing without some extra information on why it's supposed to be good. There's even my external hard drive that's full of downloads. Why not just not listen to new music at all and listen to the stuff I've archived there? I'm a sucker for Zola Jesus, but it's very helpful when reviews are as good as this one. Otherwise it feels like cycles of hype. A big reason I've been reading Dusted and Tiny Mix Tapes more has been the lack of meaningful content in reviews at my usual outlets.
Post a Comment