textura

Albums
A Gap Between
Animal Trainer
Robbie Basho
Olga Bell
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Christoph Bruhn
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Children Of The Stones
Loren Connors
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EOMAC
fibreforms
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Soft Machine Legacy
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sPacemoNkey
Spotlight Kid
Stein Urheim
Strata Florida
Strom Noir
subtractiveLAD
Vittoria Fleet
Antje Vowinckel
Lionel Weets

Compilations / Mixes
Maya Jane Coles

EPs / Cassettes / Mini-Albums / Singles
AGC Esquire
Mombi
Paris76
Alix Perez
Philogresz
You'll Never Get to Heaven

You'll Never Get to Heaven: Adorn
Mystic Roses

Chuck Blazevic, whose Dreamsploitation work has previously been reviewed in textura's pages, has a new project in the works with partner Alice Hansen called You'll Never Get to Heaven. The band's dreampop sound is memorably captured on its debut outing, Adorn, a six-song EP issued in cassette form by Blazevic and Hansen on their own Mystic Roses imprint (a vinyl edition is forthcoming on another label). The duo not only squeezes a lot of music into the release's eighteen minutes but more importantly succeeds in presenting a cohesive portrait of You'll Never Get to Heaven by the time the EP's done; it does so, also, despite allocating two of the songs to works by other composers.

The opener, “Caught in Time, So Far Away,” effectively establishes the group's sound in embedding Hansen's bright vocal (a delivery that understandably might invite comparison to Julee Cruise's) within a hazy dreampop mix of vinyl crackle, synthesizers, bass, and drums. “By This River,” the Before and After Science song that Eno composed with Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (aka Cluster), is so lovely one wonders why cover versions haven't been more forthcoming. Perhaps the prospect of trying to better Eno's seemingly definitive rendering has been seen as too daunting; regardless, while You'll Never Get to Heaven's version certainly doesn't supplant the original, it's nevertheless a credible treatment. Hansen's Cruise-like delivery gives the song an entrancing quality that's even more pronounced than in the original, and the addition of string washes to vinyl crackle and bass strengthens the song's impact, too. Sequenced fourth, the title track is arguably the song that comes closest to capturing the group's sound: melancholy, vocal-based electropop smeared in crackle, reverb, and haze. Adorn also includes an Erik Satie piece, “Enfantillages Pittoresques: Berceuse,” (featuring Hansen on piano) that, given its brief duration, feels more like a bonus instrumental, though it's no less pretty for being so. The covers make for interesting listening, but it's the four originals (two of them crackle-smothered instrumentals) that bring the greatest degree of clarity to the You'll Never Get to Heaven sound. While the EP content is hardly sui generis, Adorn certainly serves as a promising beginning for this new project from Blazevic and Hansen.

May 2014