‘With Our Arms Wide Open We March Towards The Burning Sea’... To be honest, with a title like that I don’t even need to listen to this album to know that it’s going to be my cup of tea. Portentous, melodramatic, gothic, all of the necessary ingredients to get my juices going!
Obviously though, I have listened to it, and what a rewarding experience it is too, but how to describe it is the quandary. Gothic, operatic ambient? Baroque post-rock? The soundtrack to the long dark night of the soul? It takes me back to my dark youth, listening to the output of 4AD Records as if my life depended on it, evoking the ghosts of This Mortal Coil, Miranda Sex Garden and Dead Can Dance, but that’s not to say that this record is derivative of these acts, far from it, it’s just they draw from a common source, a well of darkness so deep and so bleak it’s a wonder they can emerge unscathed.
Elly May Irving is the possessor of a voice that can pierce souls, it is so clear, so pure it is almost terrifying. On the unbelievably epic ‘Floods’ the emotion is wrought right out in front of the listener, backed by haunting piano and gorgeous strings the two voices entwine beautifully and the opening few lines of ‘With A Kiss And A Tear’; ‘I know your name, I know your name, I know your face...’ made the hairs on my whole body stand up, the mournful intensity across the whole record is harrowing.
When Elly May is not doing her thing, much of the album is made up from stark atmospherics and perhaps this is the only weak point of the record. There’s sometimes just not quite enough going on to sustain the atmosphere over the huge sweeps of time that they attempt, ‘Like Everything You See’ stretches to over 15 minutes and pushes the listener towards a coma, but when they focus, when they bring to bear the double weapon of that voice and the music, they can make wondrous beauty.
This is a rich and ambitious album, and perhaps best listened to in the dark of the night. Along with stable mates Her Name Is Calla, Glissando are going a long way to re-establish Leeds’ reputation as the spiritual home of bleak, scary and above all inventive music.
Top Tracks: Floods', 'With A Kiss And A Tear'.
Released 23/06/2008 on Gizeh Records