Caethua – ‘Red Moon’
The mysterious and enchanting Clare Hubbard strides slowly out of the forest, guitar in hand ready to make her presence felt, finite and powerful, with Red Moon. While Red Moon can be classified as a folk record, it packs a punch. This is a record that swells as well as it swaggers. Hubbard brings to mind classics such as Karen Dalton and Judee Sill, while managing to even cross the boundaries and bring to mind even PJ Harvey. There’s moments of wonderful dissonance packed between the fuzzy ruckus and burners. Deep droners that Hubbard can chant and moan incantations atop of. In a way, it’s a hard album to exactly define, while it resides under the blanket genre folk. It falls right in line with Bathetic’s musical presence and list of musical weirdos standing out, doing their own thing. Hubbard is a pioneer, stalwart and striding. She’s brought a wonderful rock and roll album to the table, folky and weird and psychedelic. This album will stand head and shoulders above a lot of so-called folk-rockers. Hubbard’s been in this game for a long time now, and she’s spent a lot of time tucked away, perfecting a beautiful record.
Terrors – ‘Ensorcell Qori’ LP
Elijah Forrest returns to the Bathetic stable once more for an LP of vaporous burners, signature of his Terrors moniker. Ensorcell Qori is a diminutive as well as it is wild and cosmic. Forrest can’t be left to simply bend the light psychic and just float some guitar strings into the woods. No, he’s got to pack a crystalline serenity behind the wire and show us the light coming through. This album, sure, it can be classified as downtrodden, on such tracks as “Without After Life” or “Two Words (6 Jan 2013)” — the latter of which sounding like a acid-damaged and ice-submerged Bonnie “Prince” Billy — but there’s always more to the celestial sludge Forrest is concocting. “Twist Form and Memory” with it’s Everyday Loneliness origins or opener “Betrothal Patterning End” show us the side of Forrest that is not just hushed guitar and warbled croon. It’s these tracks that show how Forrest’s angel-hair ambient dirge hangs from the ceilings in his palace of ghostly folk. Ensorcell Qori is the type of weary loner folk we’ve come to love from Elijah, and if you like listening to abstract music that lifts you as much as it splits you, vibe on it. Let it swallow you whole and feel the water shake from your psyche as your surface.