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With a title that almost reads like a manifesto, 10 songs divided by 2 movements and song titles that reek of early 20th century Paris ("Soleil Radieux", "Anais no.4"), there is hardly any doubt prior to listening that this is going to be an ambitious and stylized record. What isn't apparent until the burst of sound on the first song is just how effortlessly Mahogany manage to convey such warm and subtlely stylish beauty. The way lynchpin sound-sculptor Andrew Prinz programmes the drum machine so that it is simultaneously gossamer fragile and militaristic and creates a racing delicate canter leaves me breathless every time, and to do so on the opening "Chance" while two cellos weave magic and Allysa's voice as clear and pure as crystal soars is a spectacular way to open an album that may well be both their debut and epitaph. Since recording this Allysa has left to concentrate on her sculpture full-time and Andrew has decided to continue under the name Mohagonny, and I'm sure he will continue to blur the distinction between the streamlined and the impressionistic as successfully as he does on these songs. Like My Bloody Valentine mahogany use the guitar mainly as a layer in the overall sound but with a startling clarity in definition rather than the woozy haze most bands have adopted; in their hands it becomes a percussive tool. Listening to the tin soldier drums and fluid guitar/synth noise of "Soleil Radieux" it's like listening to the charge of a light brigade of dragonflies with their wings becoming a blur of purring. Those bloodrush moments are frequent in the first movement and towards the end of the second; they never bludgeon away obviously but are subtlely executed and more surprising, therefore more intense and breathlessly exhilarating. Towards the end of the first movement and for the most of the second the mood changes and becomes more reflective: an autumnal expanse to the earlier excitement of spring, if you like. Mahogany's melodies, so beautifully sung by Allysa, are revealed to be almost nursery rhyme like in their simplicity (especially "The Mystique of the Locomotive") as the guitar strums form a glorious cloud of reverb vapour trails around her. The air of lost childhood is compounded by the use of melodica. The cello has to be one of the most moving of all orchestral instruments and there are some magnificent moments when its tremulous tones swell like a heart fit to burst such as the end of "Anais no. 4" and the gossamer soft "Red Marrow, His Sorrow." "Vista-dome" brings an unusual looseness to the music and a jazzy swing to the vocals. The change in atmosphere from the crepuscular to the bright-eyed is marked by the penultimate "On the Threshold of the Absolute" and finally the extraordinary "Synchromie no. 1" where Section 25-esque flickering electronic beats vie with chirruping multi-tracked melodica. It sums up the perfect meeting between the modernism of early Factory and the blissed out blur of Slowdive et al that Mahogany have created a new and daring ideal form. reviewed by: Gayle for Boa Fanzine |
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