This is the second album for Julie Carpenter‘s Less Bells pseudonym and furthers her explorations pairing drifting electronics with choral vocals and the application of tension.
There is a whimsical feel to the electronic wash that opens the album and cymbals glow with a kind of spectral sheen, but there is a sort of tension to the sounds due to an inertia that prevents the track from moving on. It rolls around in a KLF-style drift while the lovely chant rises and falls like sleeping breath. It feels as though mist is slowly receding, but the constant tone leaves things somehow unresolved.
There is a touch of Tangerine Dream to the keyboards on “Fiery Wings”, but the groan and slow build of a cello lends a mournful air that covers up something trying to make a connection. It is sublime in its drifting ethereality and it feels as though throughout the pieces on Mourning Jewelry that they are struggling to show you a glimpse of something that is just beyond your perception. It is an interesting sensation, that desire for resolution that the music doesn’t always offer. The second side opens with something more pastoral; a banjo moves through a landscape like a dream on “Queen Of The Crickets”, with sparks of memory appearing like tiny spots as the rest of the soundscape reflects and mutates around them. It moves gently but with a shimmering grace, the contemplative strings whispering of neo-classical, but the effect is just too gossamer for that. Finally, something dark appears on the horizon in penultimate track “Plait” with a rumble of muted thunder. That sense of impending arrival continues into “The Fang”, but it is still hard to explain how the lulling banjo chord with drone against drifting keys is going to resolve this tension.Does it happen? There is only one way to find out. Pick the album out and allow it to work its gentle mystery on you.
-Mr Olivetti-
