Elizabeth S – Gather Love

Klanggalerie

Long-time contributor to and performer with Eyeless In Gaza and wife of Martyn Bates, Elizabeth S has just released her first solo album. Gather Love presents twelve tracks that texturally invite you to ask what it means to be human, sparkles with a withering warmth that stays with you.

The blistering “Misborn” throws open the album in stormy vortex, a noisy surprise that rubs into Liz’s powerful presence as percussive shapes smash then fold into a drizzling sitar drone painted in fragmentary poetics. A tour de force that splinters into the minimalist folk fall of “Will Your Love”, a gilded acoustic circling her sorrow. “The Carer” is slivered in synthy halflings too, finely homed textures that scaffold the scenics, drive the words home with a stark economy.

The jaded waltz of operatic echoes and pointed piano that is “The Carter Girl” fold round the loss of her mother to Alzheimers so effectively. The spidery sparseness of “Weathered Life”, its slippery melodica a moth curving the flicker of her words. These are atmospherics that weigh heavily in your mind, swing with a shearing sincerity as she draws on through, doubling-up, curling in serpenting recoil.

These factors effectively haunt each and every track, beam within the twirling panoramics of “Measure Greed” as her weathered voice weaves its grainy magic to stretchy slivers of instrumentation. “The Hill” worms Wicker Man-like at the ancestral past, its pagan flavours creaturing a bramble-torn twilight as she sings “let the soil dance, let the soil sing”.

I’m quite taken by Gather Love; it gristles plenty of soul both in narrative and sonic surrounds, and even when clattering in the machined percussives of “No Rain”, it’s splashing something seriously spectral. An otherworldly connection that continues to smile back at you on “To” in violin detunes and miraging shards, a mournful reflection of things gone, coming and ultimately slipping away.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-