Io is the sixth album from Haley Fohr in her guise as Circuit Des Yeux. And it succeeds somehow in marrying and merging her twin terrains of grunge folk and experimental rock, and in a way that manages miraculously to evade any hint of pretentiousness.
The result is an album that sounds like extracts from an imaginary rock opera. But instead of arousing the usual dread and embarrassment that those two words traditionally evoke, it moves and impresses in equal measure.
Listening to Fohr’s imperial baritone channelling Diamanda Galás, scaling who knows how many octaves, as the strings reference mid 70s ELO, you imagine a David Byrne production, but at an off Broadway venue in a yet-to-be gentrified seedy side of town.
An album born in melancholia, the resulting music soars.
Fragments is the first album in five years from the LA based British DJ slash producer Si Green, who releases albums under the moniker Bonobo. And almost everyone agrees that it’s a wonder to behold and as joyous a way to usher in the new year as could possibly be wished for.
NPR’s All Songs Considered, the Guardian, the Independent, UK and Irish, NME et al. Only those perennial scrooges at Pitchfork held out, giving it a curmudgeonly 5.4 out of 10, here.
The album starts out promisingly enough, and sure enough, tracks 2, 3 and 4 do indeed seem to promise that much needed and proverbial tonic. T3, Rosewood, even hints at the kind of hoped-for ubiquity that Rose Rouge, the opening track on Saint Germain’s Tourist achieved when it was released in 2000, and which it seemed to maintain well into the following year and beyond.
But after those first few tracks, Fragments sinks into mid- and increasingly slower tempo fare. And very quickly, you quietly drift off.
If you find yourself at a club where Green is spinning his discs, you’ll enjoy his use of those first few tracks as part of his set (and perhaps track 8…). But there’s absolutely no need to sit down and listen to the rest of the album. I’m afraid the boys from Pitchfork get that one right.
You can see the video for the opening track on Circuit Des Yeux’s Io, the Vanishing, below:
And here, if you need it, is a reminder of what St Germain’s Rose Rouge sounds like:
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