Crooked Words #21: Helen, June McDoom, Elanor Moss
June McDoom
In the text that accompanies the first single from June McDoom's album it references dub and shoegaze, a search for restraint amid a sonic wash of influences. Those richly absorbing colours aren't immediately obvious on the the enigmatic 'Without You' but the search for them, the peeling back of its layers, makes for a fascinating endeavour.
Other references include Dionne Warwick and Minnie Riperton and it's perhaps here, on the introduction to October's Follow The Light LP, where those touch-points make most sense, the song shimmering with the classic touch of yesteryear. There are moments of skewed enchantment, however, nuanced othernesses that show a flicker of the signature currents that dance in the hazy depths of the craft here.
And it all makes for something wholly compelling, a shining but heavy-hearted first-step that leads with sincerity, and leads, too, with a voice that sings with a friction; a kind of inherited authenticity that will quietly sweep you off your feet.
June McDoom Live:
Sep 05 - End of The Road Festival - Salisbury UK
Sep 08 - Rough Trade West - London, UK
Sep 09 - Venue TBC - London, UK
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Follow The Light LP is released in October, via Jagjaguwar
Helen - Linda's Head
I'd being paying close attention to Grouper's instagram page lately, hoping for some UK live dates to follow on the heels of a bunch of recently-announced US shows over the coming months.
Little did we know there was actually new music from Liz Harris sitting right on the cusp of it all – not via her Grouper project, however, but in the form of Helen, the shoegaze-y, indie-rock project she fronts alongside Scott Simmons (bass) and Jed Bindeman (drums).
Out of nowhere, the group have announced Linda's Head, the first new Helen album in more than a decade, and the long-awaited follow-up to 2015's wonderful debut LP The Original Faces.
Alongside news of the new album, a ten-song collection that will be released this-coming October, Helen are also sharing the first two songs from it, in the form of the strange and fleeting title-track, and the more robust and jaunty 'Dead Shark II'. While both songs hold strange and intriguing shapes of their own, it's the latter that immediately digs its heels in, bursting through its two-and-half-minutes in a sugar rush of swollen guitars and Harris' gorgeous vocals that lend a real sense of melodrama to it all.
Available to pre-order via CD and LP over on the Grouper Bandcamp page, you can stream both new songs below right now.
What a treat, what a flush of something shimmering and special.
Elanor Moss - Fixer
There's a moment about three-and-a-half minutes into the latest single from Elanor Moss' forthcoming album where everything subtly drops away, only her voice left but that too surrounded by space and quiet. It feels like the end of the song, the moment it all fades away, but then it picks up once more and the pieces fall back into place to drift on for a further two-minutes. It feels like unexpected patience, the kind of patience we aren't even aware we can muster for someone else until we have to. The ways in which we can hold each other, and let each other fall. The ways we can dance.
'Fixer' is the third single from The Knife, The Needle (August 21st) and it stopped me in my tracks today, framing the morning inside of five-and-a-half minutes of gentle, engrossing melodrama; so deft it's sometimes hardly there at all, but so beautifully, poignantly compelling you just have to sit right there in it.
A tender pirouette of Moss' striking voice, subtle instrumentation and almost gripping vulnerability, 'Fixer' is something singular and spellbinding. I detailed some of the album's story in a previous post back in early June, but the new single is a further reminder of what lies ahead: surely one of the year's most enchanting records.
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