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I must admit that I’d been looking forward to the release of this album, which is collaboration between Faris Badwan from The Horrors and Rachel Zeffira who is a Canadian opera soprano and multi-instrumentalist. I’d been turned back onto The Horrors following their excellent “Primary Colours” album, a significant improvement on the debut, so the prospect of this varied couple sounded promising.
It has taken a number of listens to begin to resonate. The first few left me feeling the album was at best lightweight, but at worse sickly. Thankfully these feelings have given way to far more pleasurable ones as the delicacy of the music has started to become more apparent.
The 10 songs here tell the story of a short lived relationship; from attraction, infatuation, deception, jealousy, bitterness, regret and acceptance. The genre is primarily 60’s pop which is at it’s best on the opener ‘Cat’s Eyes’. The album highlight ‘Over You’ sang by Zeffira, is one of the finest feel good break up songs I’ve heard. ‘Sooner or Later’ is the closest it gets to anything reminiscent of The Horrors with Badwan singing in deep baritone set to a sinister back drop.
As the album’s story progresses there’s a definite feel of the male character being in the driving seat for the early part of the relationship, with the cocky strut of ‘Face in the Crowd’ following on from the self depreciating ‘I’m Not Stupid’ sang by Zeffira. Listeners may liken this to ‘Milkwhite Sheets’ by Isobel Campbell. The roles later reverse with the regretful ‘The Lull’ and ‘I knew it Was Over’, the latter wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Carl Barat’s solo album.
At times the 60’s kitsch does feel a little overbearing. An example would be Zeffira’s backing vocals on the afore mentioned ‘Face in the Crowd’, which makes you feel like performing the cringe worthy dance that students used to do at the end of Blockbusters. Luckily, these moments are few and far between and there are many highlights such as Zeffira’s cat hiss on the title track and her ha-ha’s on ‘Over You’.
I now feel really positive about this album and I also feel I’ve only started to scratch the surface of it’s hidden delights. I hope this is the beginning of a long fruitful relationship for this pair.
Rating: 8/10
Mike
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