Cindytalk – Touched Raw, Kissed Sour

Handmade Birds

Right from the offing, “Dancing On Ledges” is a difficult listen, plies a remarkably fucked-up notion of ambience, shooting your lobes in sherbety shards, like a redux of “Everybody is Christ” from Cindytalk‘s Camouflage Heart (which is 30 years old this year), its heavy drones daggering you brilliantly into submission as the uncompromising vision jousts it through with lathe-like screams. Discernible licks of bass give you fleeting compass points, continually torn up on an ominous blare of differing textures, shattered splints. A great opener that offers little if any sanctuary, taking the corrosion and paradoxical beauty of last year’s A Life Is Everywhere to a whole new level. A gutsy, almost autobiographical delve into the abstract, full of corner of the eye glimpses.

“Fire Recalling Its Nature” is gentile by comparison, awash with nocturnal synth and sustained vapours, these teethy rotations gnawing at you, meta-shifting into a soak of locomotive-like shudders, bringing to mind a dampened thud of Steve Reich‘s “Different Trains,” but with rain-lashed windows and a dread of destination. “Mouth Of My Sky” introduces a narrative zest to the proceedings. A gleam of humanity caught in the disturbed prism of its own making, before eaten in dead raven drone and brackish Chernobyls, its fluid spiderings bringing to mind Main‘s introspective auras but definitely more broken — dare I say septic. A lot of abstract electronica leaves me cold, but this has plenty of gristle, feels eerily composed whilst in the process of ripping itself apart, your senses cascading the instabilities like riding a psychic roller-coaster.

“Reversing The Panopticon” is a jiggeridge of loom-like percussiveness. A ghostly mechanical feel, like an entity trapped in a heavy oak wardrobe knitted to the spiral arms of some spacey texturing, some high-end glints shoaling around, eating into your ears like glassy hypodermics; its message tied to a disintegrating pigeon, telepathically fleeing the scene, leaving you groping a phantomised outline, a resonance. “E Quindi Uscimmo A Riveder Le Stelle”‘s harbour bells bring you a touch of fog-laden reality before pulling away on a bed of weird squid-like whirls, chattering diodes x-ray layered in differing pitches. An eerie 3D feel that becomes more rhythmic, panting away in the ear coupled with a metallic jangling overtaken in elliptical slivers that falls naturally into “Yūgao”‘s Budd-esque jewel encrusted melancholia, its fractured nature akin to their In This World album’s piano filigrees; a yarning, beautifully jaded gem that sucks you in to its empty spaces.

The album signs off on “Mystery Sings Out,” an octo-sea of fuzzing circuitry and shale-like sibilance, with Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet hobo-like vocals (Gordon Sharp‘s own, maybe) crumbling in the bleached wake of a low-laying sun. Scratches fanning out like scythes folding like water over internal scars, dorsal diving the nagging kernel like the mirrored fragments of the soul.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-