London duo
Camila Fuchs' second album is another sprawling, hard-to-place dream-world filled with clanging beats, crackling distortion, and Camila De Laborde's soaring vocals, which can seem equally pained and ecstatic. While her voice is a bit more prominent on
Heart Pressed Between Stones than it was on the duo's 2016 debut, Singing from Fixed Rung, their music still sounds dreamy and free-associative rather than structured and poppy. The songs were primarily recorded and mixed live, and have a visceral, spontaneous feel to them, with flowing rhythms and in-the-moment expressions. (Appropriately, "For All Stable Appearances, He Was Wild" opens with the words "A wild inability to think before doing.") This can result in highly intriguing experiences, such as the industrial drift of opening track "One on One" and the riveting "My Body," which matches its physical lyrics with muscular, glitchy drumming. Other tracks seem to meander a bit, however, and are hard to grasp at first. Still, the duo's haunting blend of challenging electronics and introspective, sometimes cathartic lyrics sounds unmistakably unique. The duo productively tap into their dark side on the path to personal transcendence. ~ Paul Simpson