Luster is the second album from Maria Somerville and her first since signing with the iconic 4AD Records.
Based in her native Connemara, she has at least one albeit virtual foot in London, hosting as she does her twice weekly radio show on NTS, where she alternates deftly between the likes of Gia Margaret, The Innocence Mission and Brocken Social Scene and the classic sounds of Nick Drake and Brian Eno.
Luster takes the ethereal dreampop of Grouper (a regular on her radio show) and Julianna Barwick, and channels it through the prism of the classic 4AD sound of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance.
At times, she sounds like Nico re-imagined for the 21st century (‘Trip’), while at others we’re treated to what My Bloody Valentine would sound like if the vocals were given prominence over, or at least parity with, the soaring industrial feedback (‘Garden’ and ‘Up’).
Happily, she’s as impressively ethereal and as regally distant live as she is in the recording studio, as her recent shows at the Button Factory in Dublin testify. Comfortably one of the albums of the year.
Watch the video for Garden here:
Beirut is essentially made up of Zach Condon and whichever assortment of musicians he’s working with at the time of the album’s recording. And A study of Losses is his and their 7th album.
Beirut and Condon first burst on to the scene with his debut album, Gulag Orkestra, in 2005, which was literally recorded in his bedroom, before being polished in the studio under the tutelage of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeremy Barnes.
Heavily influenced by what was then termed ‘world music’, specifically by music from the Balkans, Gulag Orkestra’s melding of flugelhorn, ukulele, mandolin, trumpet, accordion and organ, all of which are played by Condon himself, produce a sound that evokes a very specific and heady atmosphere.
It seems to serve as the soundtrack for a troupe of east European circus performers, lost in thought in the early hours of the morning, as the sounds of the cheering crowds that had buoyed them earlier have long since dissolved into the lonely depths of the darkened night.
But none of the five albums that followed have quite lived up to that dazzling debut. That are all of them unquestionably good albums, but none of them quite have that same spark. Which isn’t that surprising, given that during those intervening years, there was a cancelled tour, and a hospitalization, both from exhaustion, and a debilitating divorce.
So it’s quietly gratifying to be able to report that A Study of Losses is both a return to form and an album that sounds very much like an unofficial follow-up to Gulag Orchestra.
It is undoubtedly a little ironic, as the boys from Pitchfork note in their review of it, that it is the very thing he’d been trying to distance himself from that has allowed him reconnect with his natural sound. Namely the circus.
Unsurprisingly, he was initially uninterested when first he’d been approached by the Swedish circus troupe Kompani Giraff to produce the soundtrack for the project they were working on. But after he read the novel it was based on, by the German writer Judith Schalansky, happily, he changed his mind.
The result is his and their most fully realised album to date. Watch the video for Caspian Sea here:
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