Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Gazelle Twin - The Entire City


1 The Entire City
2 Concrete Mother
3 Men Like Gods
4 I Am Shell I Am Bone
5 Far From Home
6 Changelings
7 Bell Tower
8 When I Was Otherwise
9 Obelisk
10 Nest
11 Fight-Or-Flight
12 View Of A Mountain
13 Untitled

Elizabeth Walling could be Brighton's answer to Fever Ray's Karin Dreijer Andersson, with her queer masked costumes and avant-garde electronica. Her repertoire draws from sci-fi film scores, choral music, underwater life and the paranormal. The visual accoutrements – stark, monochrome videos, theatrical live shows – are striking, but the brooding, atmospheric scores on this debut are thrilling enough to stand alone. The Entire City is named after a Max Ernst painting, and Walling casts her metropolis as both comfort and threat; the safeness and succor of Concrete Mother becomes suffocating claustrophobia on Nest, with its suspense-filled percussion, and the war-like rush of the eponymous track becomes stark isolation on Changelings. The album feels all the more arcane for its nakedness, its mood shifting subtly from sensual and euphoric to eerie foreboding. Walling is both star and morphing other, warping breathy harmonies and siren miasmas into elegant cyborg operas. A stunning debut...www.guardian.co.uk

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