Label: Satellite Format: CD
Hmmm – I found myself reciting a mantra over and over as I loaded up the pretty blue-backed disc… “Please don’t let this be like Marilyn Manson, please don’t let this be like Marilyn Manson, please don’t…” It isn’t. At all. Psycho patience may as well get in the car and volume up, rev up, run over some beautiful people along the way.
Like gas masks are ever-present and dark mourning tones go so well with bastard offspring of Jazz, Sand are as smooth as a glass-surfaced lake of woe and purpose. Urgent rising soundtrack for deliberate deconstruction of psychosis. Horns and bass stalk slowly across a landscape of elektronix-like urbania. Tiny tolls keep it all nervous, anxious; I want to see this movie, no, I want to live this movie. “`Hello Mrs Apple’, we are here to blow your pretty face off.”
There is even a seduction scene, laced with irritation and rapid pulsed annoyance; beauty lurks in the background, faithful horns call it out to exposure. For all the junk noise, even bass, twang and guinea pig like crying, Sand keep continuity and slip in and out of the consistent spell casting, one track into another, relentless. Sometimes this goes so quiet I forget I am listening and being charmed all the while. No worries, though, the noise keeps coming back to remind. This music is manic; fast, slow, aggressive, enchanting, soothing, nerve-wracking… multi-purposed beyond ordinary. O yes, even nostalgic, in an Argento sort of way.
Sand played Islington recently, the 1977 all-night put on by Sounds Of The Universe. No one said anything bad about them. I didn’t go, had the ‘flu. Probably should have loaded on cold medicine and endured. Somehow I’m just as happy to be indoors with the CD, slipping me all the way through nine tracks of grainy clarity. Beautiful People Are Evil? Sometimes; and beautiful music has edges.
-Agent 99-
