HOPE SANDOVAL & THE WARM INVENTIONS
Bavarian Fruit Bread
Rough Trade
STINA NORDENSTAM
This is Stina Nordenstam
Independiente
· Ex-My Bloody Valentine and Suede vocalists contribute to contrasting pop masterpieces.
I saw a horror film the other day and was reminded of how careless we are of our emotions, prostituting our imaginations for a quick shot of adrenalin, volunteering our desires and insecurities for the most cynical of manipulations. And that was just the pre-show ads.
It isn't simple, for artist or audience, to avoid being consumed by consumer culture: repetition reduces what you want to say to an empty formula, while what you can only hint at gets lost in the flood of 24-7 entertainment.
Hope Sandoval and Stina Nordenstam both recognize this, and agree that the solution is not to try to scream louder than the rest, but to take things slowly, seriously and softly, assuming that those who are capable of hearing will make the effort to do so. Beyond that, however, their approaches are diametrically opposed – Hope being the classicist and Stina the mad scientist.
Sandoval was Mazzy Star – the Warm Inventions replace David Roback with My Bloody Valentine's Colm O'Ciosoig, but the sound is the same, a stately and understated country and western underpinning the hypnotic calm of her sensuous drawl. The music is a little folkier than Mazzy Star’s Among My Swan, and there are a few classical touches (piano and strings), but it's no great departure.
The tender directness of the music carries everything before it, with an almost unbearable honesty, like making love with eyes wide open, telling yourselves you can see beyond each other's nakedness. But we all know how that ends....
If Sandoval sometimes seems naive, Nordenstam is (as befits a child of communist intellectuals who was raised in the Stockholm projects) an innocent with a plan, and a slightly annoying attitude: you'll get dessert once you've done your homework.
Her 1991 debut, And Then She Closed Her Eyes, was one of the sweetest pop albums of the decade, her voice the whisper of a precocious child, the music of amazing subtlety and maturity – pop for people who hate pop. She then decided that she needed to find her own musical language, and spent the decade in an unexpected but invariably successful series of experiments and collaborations with everyone from Anton Fier to Zbigniew Preisner. Her last two albums, Dynamite and People Are Strange, examined how much one can take away from a tune while still retaining its power, how far one can pull away from what the listener expects while still being certain that the listener will follow.
Where so much "experimental" music is blatantly ignorant of even the most basic scientific methodology, Nordenstam not only had a clear hypothesis and sound methodology, but now, after testing her theories, she is moving on to their practical application.
This Is Stina Nordenstam presents 33 minutes of post-pop genius, deconstructed indie-rock rhythms clunking along cheerfully under gliding vocal melodies, skipping between melancholia and good-natured chaos. Mitchell Froom's production is a little more than needed, but Brett Anderson's vocals (on two tracks) fit neatly into the kaleidoscopic sound mix. Accessible without being obvious, demanding for the common good, this is pop at its best.
Two albums to confute the cynical and the jaded.
HOPE SANDOVAL 4/5
STINA NORDENSTAM 5/5
TIMOTHY HECK
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