1 Matching Annotations
- Apr 2019
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thequietus.com thequietus.com
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As I listen to this album again and again I find myself reaching for roundly-voweled, softly consonanted words. Words like ‘home’. It’s welcoming, there’s comfort here. But it's full of feelings that are not uncomplicated. This is also Freud’s home, and ETA Hoffmann’s. It has secrets. The great warmth of these songs, their strange aching languor, is always tinged with a seam of anxiety. Listen to the uncertain syncopation between drums and high plucked bass strings at 03:40 in on the album opener, like a murmur tinged with regret, the careful bottling of a rising panic. Listen to the way Dougall’s uniquely bruised voice swells forward and almost catches against itself a minute into ‘Simple Things’, the tiny pause just after that feels like a cliff edge you just stepped over unawares. Here is both the little luxury you reach for to take the edge off things. It is also the edge itself.
This is a beautiful way of writing about this album. Kudos to both The Quietus and Rose Elinor Dougall.
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