Gazelle Twin – Black Dog (Invada) – There is so much here, so much up those dark dark stairs, up there with her black dog, or with ours maybe? Everything about this new album is dark, beautifully dark, dark all the same, and you kind of want to know but then again you maybe don’t? As a piece of work, as a body of music, as art and as a new album it really is something but then, if you’ve been paying any kind of attention to anything we’ve been saying over the last few years about Gazelle Twin, then you know we hold her in the highest regard.
This is a dark dark dark album, it has been saved here, waiting for the right moment to play the whole thing for the first time, waiting for the right time and place, for the space, the ritual of a new album, you can only listen to something like this for the first time once, you really should take care to pick your moment, you can’t just throw it on. But we’re learning something, and I really don’t want to have to be here writing about it, would it matter too much if I was to just keep this one for myself?
Do wonder what you’d make of this if it was to be your first ever encounter with Gazelle Twin? You probably shouldn’t start here, you probably should go explore Deep England and some of the other albums first, go ask if she can you tell you where your country lies? You probably need to work up to these black dogs of hers, go back to when things were much better in my day before you let the deep dark drone of I Disappear pull you in in such a darkly beautiful way. I Disappear is a bold way to start an album, there it is, straight in, swallowing you whole, the secret beats of her heart, the dreams she had, the walking down a corridor through a dark dark dark house. And you kind of don’t want to be pulling it apart, that black black dog, you don’t really want to have to have something to say about it, I really don’t want to be writing this. Always listening, touching, watching, listening, always…. who’s listening, it feels even deeper, further in than she’s gone before. No one is listening, always touching… Is it intimate? Or is it something else? Ignore the answers, wonder how it started and this may be another reason why there’s something special about everything she does…
Just try, just try, and I don’t want to be glib or throwaway, I don’t want to just bang out some kind of review as if this is just another album like the one I wrote about yesterday or the one I’ll probably write about tomorrow, just another box ticked or list added to. This is far more than that, this is art that really matters, this is dark but this is also bright, this is also hopeful, this is also hope. And you’ll have the best of her.. i can’t write these lines, who writes these lines? I can’t be writing about this album and wow, that bit there, three quarters of the way through Author Of You lifts so much.. Hey look, just go unpack it yourself. Gazelle Twin, aka composer, producer, singer, and visual artist Elizabeth Bernholz, really matters. (sw)
THE ORGAN 
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