A couple of albums today and we run around….

Chastity Belt – Live Laugh Love (Suicide Squeeze Records) – I don’t know, always expected something more from Chastity Belt, they always seems so, well, so nice, so polite in a kind of easy going girl next door American slacker kind of way and i always wanted more than that from a band with such a great name. I mean they do have a great name, a name that conjurors up all kinds of ideas, locks, keyholders (the hits certainly go up every time we mention them), and I don’t know, they’re all nice and riding bikes and tell your girlfriend she’s got nothing to fear. Five albums in now and this is just breezy sunny harmless American slacker music for the hipsters who think drinking coffee and growing a beard in East London is living life on the edge. Polite, pleasant, all very nice, harmless, wholesome and ultimately, even though we’ve been playing it on and off or a good few weeks now, once this review is done and dusted (which it almost is now) I very much doubt I shall feel the need to ever play this album again. Dreadful album art work. Hey, a nice enough album, they sound at ease, it feels like familiarity, it isn’t bad, it isn’t harming, it is kind of enjoyable and sometimes i guess that’s enough, they have a punchline or two, they’re kind of breezy, sunny… (sw)

The new Chastity Belt album is out on March 29th. More via Bandcamp

And then there’s the new Kee Avil album…..

Kee Avil – Spine (Constellation) – Beyond the creases now, a second full length album from the mind of Montréal singer-guitarist-producer Vicky Mettler. This is good, a little more raw in terms of the sentiment this time maybe, kind of on a tightrope and you do feel she might not get to the end every time you listen even though you know she did last time. A little more formed without ever compromising, less is definitely more and she’s (very) quietly blowing it all up just to see. Rather a lot in common with the recent output of Gazelle Twin in terms of sparse space and obtuse texture, in therms of things almost hidden in the depths and the dancing alone in the dark and just the sound of it all. This is as unique, well as unique as anything Gazelle Twin does and really nothing like her, a touch of Whitehouse maybe? Nothing you can (or want to) easily nail down. Fragile, strong, delicate, quietly robust, a touch more of a song feeling than on Crease – very strange songs though, this is different! Songs yes, but she’s not watered anything down, if anything things are even more inside out this time, this is of course a good thing.

Find a way, please help me, find a way, please help me, Spine isn’t an album you are going to want to run on repeat all day (although it has been on repeat here in the studio for hours and hours over several days now while paint is being thrown at canvas, this is great painting music!) and yes Kee Avil’s music is indeed both “adventurous and intimate, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant”. Yes it is quite unnerving, am I little tense? A little more engaged than maybe is good for me? There’s some glorious detail, other rhythms, textures. Yes she is unique, she takes us through her songs in different ways than most do and yes that ending to Crock is very Whitehouse in the best of ways.  

And you and I make the best of sense, but it is unnerving and I am tense, I am going to want to know more but it is going to be one of those albums you ration and she will scream into your bright eyed dreams and your are probably going to need to be alone with her, it is intimate, others will complain about this thing you are listening to again ad again, it is a state of mind, you won’t want to be disturbed as you try and follow it through to the end like a reptile with no strings or a puppet with no limbs and who actually writes anything in their diary anyway? 

Quiet screams to repair you or destroy you or her or me. She calls it folk but ten if it is then what is folk? Hypnotic, slightly off-hinge, kind of post-punk if I was to be lazy about it and this is no album to be lazy about, not something to bang out a quick review about. That post-punk repetition delicately laced around considered electronics to hold you. There are themes repeated and revisited, it is very much one body of work rather than a collection of pieces. Each track intentionally only has four elements – guitar, electronics, and two other instruments, with Kee’s voice and guitar pushed to the front. it is a minimalist framework, a play of your discomfort in a most beautiful way, 

“We’re shaped by many versions of ourselves,” says Avil. “I was looking back at these versions of myself and what could have been, what didn’t end up being and what did end up being, and going back like that through time. Seeing the future, the past.”

“Spine was written in Kee Avil’s home studio after a lapse in writing while touring Crease and working on other projects. She is a well-known and respected member of the Montréal experimental scene, and formerly ran Concrete Sound Studio with Zach Scholes, who continues to work with her as a producer on Spine. Compared to the three years that went into making her debut, Spine emerged in a matter of months — a process that may also be a factor in its intensity and sharpness: “This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch.” In her desire to not simply replicate or extend the sound of Crease, she felt she had to rip up the rule book, write in a different way, and pare back songs against her usual instincts”.

Sometimes, we need to deconstruct ourselves, put what we do back together in a slightly different way without loosing what it was in the first place, find ways or re-examining oursleves and what make it tick last time, get to the core of it all. Spine does that without ever feeling like she’s over-thought it. Spine gets you almost immediately, her self-examination pulls you in without really needing to hold tight, you are more than happy to stay there. Her voice goes everywhere, her guitar never touches on the obvious, her electronics crackle beautifully, het strings creak and have you looking over your shoulder for the source. it isn’t just the atmospheres, there’s more to it than that but that would have been enough, it isn;t jsut the voice or the words, but they would have been enough. this is a significant album, a rewarding piece of art, something different but being different isn’t enough, Spine is more than just different, it is different though and now that I’ve been listening to for a good few days,time to put it over there and go nowhere near it for a few weeks so that when the day comes to play it again everything can be discovered again, the best albums are the ones you don’t play that often, this is one of those albums. (sw)

The Kee Avil album is out on May 3rd

Bandcamp / Linktree / album Linktree