Recorded Music Reviews

Animal Magic Tricks - Soil

“For thee, to whom I do good, thou harmest me the most.”
--Sappho

The heart is undoubtedly the strangest of the organs. Its idealised appearance is a guiding compass of the military-industrial-entertainment complex; the sentiments gathering behind it paralyse and poison enough lives to be considered ‘natural’. And yet the average gaze will always shrink from the sight of the organ itself (something like this). There is a heart of the second kind emblazoned on the artwork of my copy of Soil, the first release from Frances Donnelly (she divides her time between Bournemouth and Brighton), ink bleeding around the edges – though it might just as well be a shell, like the one Aphrodite is always shown as emerging from, melting open. The two symbols are drawn into juxtaposition on the second song here, ‘The Shell and the Muscle’. A hail of interference gives way to a guitar-and-glockenspiel ditty you might almost suspect of being a remnant from some Seventies kids TV show theme, save for the lyrics, a strange portrait of the rifts and damage desire itself perpetuates: “The sea-shell was not meant for a boy like you/Her muscle wraps round itself to weep its own bitter tune/Don’t throw your sweet body to the sea” (that last line gave me a bit of a fright). The guitars accelerate, the vocals multiply and entwine like the proverbial serpent of Eden, the only means of survival are divined: “Keep your love on the dry land it’s safe and warm you know it well.” This idea resurfaces in ‘Sea Changes’, in which writhing vocals bleeding feedback tell us: “go home,/Back to your bright hills”. We might consider the old pull- quote from Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ – “What will survive of us is love” – perhaps only for the implication that love will live without us ever having loved, just as the sea will carry on its rhythms if humans don’t see it.

There are implications for this. The possibilities, since Riot Grrrl's boy-girl revolution a decade ago, for female artists to publicly pursue their craft, have thankfully multiplied, but nothing is complete – those unapproved by the media spin- cyclists remain largely subaltern voices. This goes doubly for those artists of queer status (lesbian, gay, bi, trans or other): unless you are prepared to play to stereotype, or able to get a deal on Kill Rock Stars, you remain invisible. This necessarily alters the utterance of love. Everything on Soil is part-obscured, coated in tape-hiss, mike-distortion, feedback bookending tracks as if beamed in from another channel of existence; we hear fractures, fragmentations, the ghost-return of the repressed remainders. ‘Smallish Hooves’, a collaboration with Montreal electro producer Fire Flower Revue, segues from distant samples (are they? It sounds like it’s just playing on the radio) of The Ronettes’ immortal ‘Be My Baby’ (“If I had the chance I’d never let you go/So won’t you say you love me?”) to clip-clopping beats and rippling arpeggios of what sounds halfway between a music-box and playroom piano; the distance between vocal and background only adding to the melodious strangeness of the track itself. The vocals opening ‘Bim Bam, Sugar’, over beats seemingly culled straight from the drum machine, are distorted beyond recognition; everything is coated with the sense of oneiric distance that fills the work of female artists like Inca Ore, Grouper, Jessica Rylan (a.k.a. Can’t) and U.S Girls – or, for that matter, the earlier work of Scout Niblett, whose tales of prowling, demonic lust and deadpan, whimsical strangeness were delivered over a similarly loose, edgy, bare-bones background. It’s significant that Frances has a much stronger grasp of melody, the sweetness of music: in spite of the isolation, the suspended-animation hopelessness at the heart of these songs, love returns, “The recognition of a fellow broken body stripped of glue.” These are love songs that understand their responsibility to those who will never know love, that know love is the least of all evils.

I’ve seen Frances play many of these songs multiple times (and many others, some destined for the much-anticipated follow-up LP, Cannibal); the trembling tenor of those performances felt momentous at the time, a thousand significances crystallising around the moment. It’s strange to hear ‘Bow Bells’ chiming amid a sea of what could almost be vinyl crackle (it reminds me almost exactly of the last Philip Jeck record), then suddenly blossoming with ecclesiastical organ four minutes in, those syllables which seemed to determine an entire world fixed in their place on record. It’s still stranger to hear ‘Poor Heart’ and ‘Cannibal (I)’, the firework synths of the former leading on to the latter’s immortal opener, over the rattling chains of the vengeful sea and droning Casio organ: “Summer in your country had just set in/The warmest lawn on which I’d ever lain”. In spite of memory’s burdens, not even regret, but hope: “Tiny threads/of chemicals/Entwine to join/two vessels”. It’s strange, certainly, but we’d never have it any other way.

Dan Barrow - 26/01/2009