My good friend, the musician Bill Stair, may be a walking encyclopedia of select strains of rock music, but he is truly an expert on bands from Bristol, England, as he himself hails from there. Bill offers this review of Fathoms Deep, the new release from Bristol's Ilya. -S.L.
Review by Bill Stair
Fathoms Deep is the latest
release from Bristol’s Ilya, a duo comprised of vocalist Joanna
Swan and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Nick Pullin. You may only
know them from a song-snippet featured in some perfume adverts, but
they’ve spent the last few years assembling a body of work that
represents one of the most fascinating discographies this decade has
to offer.
Their 2004 debut They Died For
Beauty was one of those embarrassments of riches that seemed to
have arrived fully-formed from another, saner dimension where
inventive, innovative, insane music was the norm. Of course, it
wasn’t really some kind of sui generis miracle; Joanna and
Nick had been slogging away in the trenches for years. It wasn’t
so much that their music attained perfection in 2004, more that their
sound at that point in time dovetailed with the zeitgeist and the
aspirations of a slowly expiring music biz.
The cynical thing to do after that
would have been to keep on churning out more of the same; there would
probably have been more than a few satisfied customers. But that’s
not the way Ilya work. After the almost overpowering lushness of
They Died For Beauty, they followed it up with the sublime
Somerset - a record that retained the cinematic swoosh of
their John Barry and Ennio Morricone devotionals, but which
introduced harsher, darker elements into the mix. The standout track
“Winter in Vienna” began as richly as would be expected, but then
slid into territory first staked out by Holger Czukay’s shortwave
dalliances and finally ended up dangerously close to something by
This Heat, England’s finest exponents of post-prog, post-punk,
quasi-kraut anti-commerciality. And Ilya managed all this without
losing sight of the epic post-rock universality they’d staked out
with their first album.
But two albums in a row with some kind
of coherent stylistic feel was clearly making things too easy for the
punters, so their next step was to release the manicured howl of rage
entitled Hootchi Coochi. Attributed to Jo Swan, it was an
Ilya album in all but name and, just to keep everyone off-balance,
contained a bona-fide pop/R&B gem called “Play With Me”. The
next logical step was obviously to follow that up with the banjo and
bouzouki weirdness of Carving Heads On Cherry Stones - a
record so haunting and gossamer-like that it should probably only be
available on prescription. (Although its opening track “Prairie
Dogs” is indisputably the best song to be written in cod-Esperanto
since the Beatles’ Sun King.)
And so here we are with Fathoms
Deep, their fourth (or fifth) album, and which is very much a
return to roots - Ilya's Get Back, if you will.
Except Ilya was always a studio project
- the brainchild of two people - and there never was a live band as
such. But even so, the concept behind Fathoms Deep is still a
back-to-basics one. The idea was very neat: to assemble a core group
of excellent musicians in one of Britain’s last remaining
high-level studios, present them with the material there and then,
and to record the results immediately. It’s your basic 180 degree
volte-face from their earlier, meticulously manicured albums;
an escape from the endless tweaking of recording on computers and
getting back to the way people did it in the olden days. So how did
it turn out?
Well, it turns out that - amidst
recurrent themes of birds, water, seabirds and drowning - Ilya have
produced a record that is, of course, entirely different from their
previous albums but which has very clear callbacks to all of them.
In fact, when you look at their body of work as a whole, there is a
remarkable consistency; dragging all their stuff into a playlist and
hitting shuffle doesn’t make Fathoms and Cherry Stones
sound weird so much as it reveals the twisted sensibility at the
heart of their seemingly sweet earlier albums. Ilya have always been
about darkness and sugar.
Of course, the one element that
consistently holds their obsessive eclecticism together is the almost
frighteningly transcendent voice of Joanna Swan; rarely has one
person been able to channel so many sounds and personalities in one
set of pipes. Her one consistent attribute is that her voice gets
better and better with each release. By now, seasoned Ilya listeners
can expect that when hypnotized by her ethereal angelic register,
they will shortly be sucker-punched by a sudden switch to a
gargantuan blues howl. But I must confess - the first time I heard
the ending of “20 Fathoms Deep”, I felt afraid. Jim Morrison’s
“Horse Latitudes” is a playground ditty compared to the kraken
she unleashes on the coda.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about
Fathoms Deep is its insistence on using only piano and Hammond
organ in the keys department. Ilya’s vast repository of influences
combined with the ubiquity of the Hammond in sixties music means
that, for music nerds at least, a single song can be a juddering
travelogue through multiple genres and epochs - because the Hammond
can mean many things. But ever since the Crazy World of Arthur Brown
released “Fire” in 1968 - at that point, the heaviest record
imaginable, and one which was made without recourse to the guitar -
the Hammond in rock has meant one thing above all else: prog.
So if Ilya have released an album that,
while not exactly prog, certainly doesn’t shy away from it, does
that mean they have gone off the deep-end once and for all? Or does
it mean that they’ve craftily noticed that, in the 21st
Century, prog is more popular in Britain than at any time since 1976?
Neither. It simply means that they are,
as always, following the dictates of their own muse. This is no more
a prog album than it’s a John Barry soundtrack from the sixties;
they’re just adding ever more ingredients to the Ilya gumbo. No
longer a mere embarrassment of riches, we are now into a full-fledged
supernova of reference points.
For example: the ineffably gorgeous “On
Vauxhall Bridge” (which may or may not be about suicide, but which
certainly does deal with water and burial) is enough of a
Cubano-style toe-tapper to instantly evoke images of dapper old folks
dancing close in the zócalo on a warm summer’s evening. Dan
Moore’s piano is quite lovely, while the infectious “Quizás,
Quizás, Quizás” rhythms - and Joanna’s exuberant vocal - more
than undercut the desperation of the lyric. And Nick’s closing
splice of Marc Ribot and George Harrison works rather nicely as well.
“Lean Down” is another stand-out
track, perhaps something of a stripped-down callback to They Died
For Beauty. The intro alone is breathtaking, more or less a live
performance from the core duo, with Nick’s arpeggiated guitar
backing up Joanna’s heartbreaking whispered vocal. Haunting, yes,
but very, very pretty.
So naturally, we also have to have
stuff like “Falcondale” in here as well. Right from the start of
this one, Nick’s spider-web guitar lets you know you’re back in
Cherry Stone territory - even if he’s not actually playing a
bouzouki, you feel like there’s one in there. And, like so many
songs on Fathoms Deep, it’s built around circular triplet
patterns, like so many hummingbirds whirring around in your head. Or
should that be falcons?
All this and a baritone sax that -
dexterously combined with the low-end of the Hammond - shoves the
song sharply into the strange world of Albert Marcoeur, until the
organ takes over and kicks us into the page-boy haircutted world of
The Nice. But only for a little while, mind. Our next stop is in
Stevie Smith/This Heat territory, as it seems that we are decidedly
not waving and quite probably drowning. Until the halfway mark, that
is, when Joanna’s storm-petrel vocal comes skipping over the waves,
a reverse siren that pulls us out of the endless deep. It seems that
Ilya are neither waving nor drowning but dancing round the maypole.
And have somehow managed to condense “A Plague of Lighthouse
Keepers” into less than six minutes.
Another standout track is “Little
Lamb”, a sweet, frail, blue little thing that evokes the late,
great Johnny Ace’s posthumous 1955 hit “Pledging My Love” - as
used on the soundtrack of Abel Ferrara’s midnight-black Bad
Lieutenant, naturally. Joanna’s distant, glacial vocal is
perfectly offset against Nick’s bizarro Ron Grainer guitar and a
chord progression that occasionally shines on like some kind of
diamond. It may be the way that, for some reason, this song is now
inextricably linked in my mind with Abel Ferrera but - given Ilya’s
longstanding obsession with John Barry - the only conclusion I can
draw from this song is that James Bond is now a toothless Appalachian
smackhead.
But that would be too easy wouldn’t
it? The coda lurches abruptly to Jimmy Smith/Djangoworld, Joanna
switches to her megafaunic voice, and the go-go girls start it up in
their white plastic boots. Bonkers, in the best possible sense of
the word.
“All I Got” is perhaps the album’s
most perfect song; it drifts into view amid Harold Buddy piano and
backwards guitars, like some unjustly forgotten outtake from Side 2
of Before and After Science. The lyrics once more deal with
bitterness and regret, but the utter beauty of the music and vocal
make it the sweetest of bitter pills. Quite perfect, in fact.
