Violet Cries

Brand new audiophile vinyl with inner sleeve. Includes download voucher.

The video for Esben and the Witch's "Marching Song" is one of the most morbidly transfixing clips I've seen in recent years. It opens on rotating close-ups of the band's members, each cut timed to a chord change. As the song escalates, their faces grow progressively bloodier and more battered. It's rough stuff, and it becomes increasingly difficult to watch, but it wouldn't be half as unsettling without the song, which builds its descending bass line into a knee-trembling wall of guitars, with lead singer Rachel Davies' full-throated wail on top. It is profoundly arresting, suggesting a hybrid of Pornography-era Cure with Florence's evil sister on vocals.

If the resulting full-length were half as compelling as that heady sales pitch, Violet Cries would be one of the best albums of the year. Unfortunately, Esben and the Witch, a Brighton-based three-piece signed by Matador last year, aren't quite as potent or frightening as they want to be. They are one of the highest-profile of a recent crop of bands that have reached back to goth for inspiration; their name is a reference to a ghoulish, Hansel-and-Gretel-like Danish folk tale, and Davies' lyrics are purple with references to "strange metallic voices" and other macabre signifiers.

They've certainly got the pure sound of it nailed down. More than most mini-genres, goth demands ambiance-- the mood is everything, and on this front, Violet Cries succeeds tremendously. The record is mixed by Rodaidh McDonald, who produced the xx's debut album, and there is a similarly ringing gorgeousness to the sound here: Every chord and drum beat echoes into a cavernous emptiness. The guitars, in particular, sound fantastic, drifting like graveyard fog on the verses and then digging in like meat hooks on the choruses. Davies' voice is a spectacular instrument, as commanding in its dusky lower register as when she scales up into a shout.

Violet Cries gets so many of these little details right that it's perplexing that it isn't more compelling. But they haven't quite figured out vivid songwriting yet. The songs are frustratingly drowsy, a series of interludes with the surrounding meat seemingly excised. Despite her alluring voice, Davies struggles to form memorable melodic lines, and dirges like "Light Streams" and "Hexagons IV" drift by and melt together without leaving much of an impression. The album's through-line is so slack and billowy that when it suddenly snaps taut, as on "Marching Song", or the commanding "Warpath", or the screeching build in the last minute of "Euminides", you are left with a bracing sense of what could have been. Violet Cries never delivers on its promise, though-- in order to deliver, goth needs to be pitched at some sort of extreme, to risk ridiculousness through abandon, and the members of Esben and the Witch are too tasteful and careful to take the plunge. The cumulative impact is more tepid than bone-chilling.