Vanishing Twin’s new album Archives has an elastic sense of nostalgia and modernism with the band further refining their mix of electronic and organic instruments with their innate sense of scuffing up 60s-influenced pop with sound collage.
“Music is just an energy, it doesn’t belong to anyone. No one channels it. It is bigger than the sum of its parts.” – Valentina Magaletti
The band say that the title Archives alludes to their approach of recording, editing, disassembling and assembling, as Cathy Lucas says, “gathering material together, riffing with it, turning it around on itself, trying to put the pieces together and create a story with it”. You can imagine walking through some dark back alleys in London or Manchester in the 1960s and hearing a strange concoction of music floating up from a basement club. Lured in by the sound you head in and find Vanishing Twin hyper-focused on an array of instruments and electronics, softly breaking conventions and reforming them into something extraordinary.
The band, Carol Lucas, Valentina Magaletti, and Susumu Mukai, created a virtual studio space for the album – Lucas now lives in rural France whereas Magaletti and Mukai are in London. They would swap songs and instrumental passages which would be fed into their “hivemind creativity” and ability to play many instruments. This approach allows for a unique collisions of sounds with Lucas’s unforced and beautiful voice serving as the golden thread throughout all the songs, with her close-mic technique feeling like she has leaned in to sing to you only.
There are often discordant fragments such as the fuzzed guitar that pops into ‘So Calm (Case Study House No. 8)’, the gritty marching drums and synth-horns on ‘Wherever You Are’, the stuttering cut up vocals on the title track, ‘Archives’, and the blown out drums and African percussion on ‘Bring Me The Axe’. As well as the close-mic intimacy of Lucas’s voice she also uses it as another instrument in a band that is full of multi-instrumentalist. On tracks like ‘Bring Me The Axe’ her vocals repeat and rotate lines to become another sonic element in their perfectly assembled arrangements.
Vanishing Twin also have a wonderful ability to stir nostalgia into their modernism, something you hear on ‘Hazama’ and ‘So Calm (Case Study House No. 8) which have the pulse of Massive Attacks’ ‘Karmacoma’ fused with the melody of Patti Page’s ‘Old Cape Cod’.
This is chanson from another dimension and Archives glitches and glides from start to finish in the most glorious way. They confidently mix the comforting and disquieting into a harmonious whole, and Vanishing Twin, now a decade old, continue to find the beauty in that liminal space between the familiar and the strange.
Released through Fire Records and available to order on vinyl here.
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Band photograph by Arthur Sajas.
Review by Paul F Cook
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