Name: Slow Learner LP by The Ol' Dark House Band
Duration: 54 min 6 s
Description: Oskar Werner also appears in the fourth series finale of Columbo

Oskar Werner also appears in the fourth series finale of Columbo

Slow Learner LP

Eloïse Decazes & Eric Chenaux - La bride
TFR043
http://www.three-four.net/releases/TFR043
Out april 14th, 2017. Available on LP, CD and digital.
Order: https://wearethreefour.bandcamp.com/album/la-bride

La bride [The Bridle], which is here released by the Lausanne-based three:four label (Norberto Lobo, Danny Oxenberg & Bear Galvin, Mike Wexler, etc.), is their second album and it is perhaps even more surprising.
What do we find here? Ten new songs from old times, reimagined from top to bottom, arranged with equal parts madness and precision. One dies always and often in the rolling waves and riptides of these songs without refrain. You can only love furiously and you lose yourself almost everywhere. One hears vicious tales sung in a language characterized by insane turns of phrase. Animals have the word and the forest frightens to death, children make love, and if fathers die by the swords of their sons, it is well deserved. But Eloïse Decazes, more dancer than actress, more visual artist than storyteller, more musician than anything else, does not embellish the literal, never dramatizes her narratives, preferring to blow her melodies like glass or scrub and distill them to limestone and chalk, seeking air in the wooly outlines of verses. Her voice like dawn and her curious formations accompanied by the multiple sonic stances of Chenaux are like myriad flares that inscribe a ballet of shadows and lights in the dark material of the themes, very slow and very beautiful. One hears these firmly unstable arpeggios played on nylon strings that interwoven patterns of electric guitar come to disturb or even liquefy like waves. It is comprised of surprises and conflicting emotions. Furthermore, we are stunned by the way this curious album sometimes induces vertigo, with its vocal majesty and fake crawling violins, its harmonic suicides and misleading solos; how handily it subverts its forms, but without fuss, with kindness and in the utmost calm.
Let us be clear: La bride is not folk music, nor even so-called traditional music. It is an album of new music dreamt and conceived from very old melodies, an observation testified to by its production - all in shifting stereo - its soft psychedelia, a dialogue with a certain intrepid modernity (Monk, Cage, Derek Bailey and the "Obscure" records of Brian Eno are all visible from here), the love of inquiry and peregrinations for a present that is ceaselessly renewed.

La Bride

Eloïse Decazes & Eric Chenaux - Au jardin des amours

A diminutive footnote even in proportion with the fragmentary annals of Cardiganshire's briefly flourishing post-surf cowboy-muzak scene (which, persuading nobody, local hack Belinda Hymen of defunct music rag Rhythm Method dubbed the 'Quilted Underground'), the Old Dark House Band of Fferm Llawenydd, Llanfihangel-ar-Arth were a group of little commercial or mental significance. It was their misfortune and ours that they anticipated this much-vaunted music scene (and concomitant goldrush) by several hours, missing the thing entirely, as feckless urchin front man and out-of-work beekeeper's clerk Eden J H Davis (previously of the Twenty-First Century Cowboy-Muzak Jug Players) set an alarm for 9 AM, where he needed to have been up the previous Tuesday to have caught the coach. In this, they were the canaries in the cultural tin mine: some new voice was needed to meet the social and political ferment of the Damp February, and fill the cultural lacuna between Newsround and Neighbours. For those of their station in life, there were two ways out of the smallholding: Rock and Roll, or steeplechase. They chose Rock and Roll. They'd later revert to steeplechase. But for a fugitive moment, the Aeron valley reverberated with the artless strings and detuned congas of this short lived group: the Boys from Co. Piss; the Four Lads who Shook Ystradgynlais.

Slow Learner LP

The Ol' Dark House Band

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