Song Sung

Irish twin-sisters, Georgina and Una McGeough, team up again with crate-digging soundtrack-scoring (from Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film ‘Out of Sight’ to killer-femme-phenomenon ‘Killing Eve’) compatriot David Holmes. A 2016 hook-up with Holmes on his cover of 10CC’s ‘Am I? … aren’t I? … I am …. aren’t I’? 1975 ‘love song’ ‘I’m not in love’ set the wheels in motion and now four years on they reunite on the affecting and introspecting ‘This Ascension is Ours’.

Divining inspiration and aligning creation from the muffled thrumbling sounds of a DJ from a downstairs bar in New York, the pair set about layering their vocals within/without the imagination-prompts of the bouncing floorboards. Allied to Holmes’s technicoloured noirish noisescapes with his group Unloved (whose Keefus Ciancia, Holmes’s longtime associate is also on board), the reverberating results are 60s inflected Shangri-La-de-dahs meets mid 80s Strawberry Switchblade-running daydream-visions. Opener ‘Come to the water’ with its shuddering electronica wouldn’t be out of place setting the pulse-racing pace of an instalment of ‘Friday the 13th’. Crystal Lake beckons you.

Tonally and thematically wide-ranging from the hauntological land of Oz-mosis of ‘Somewhere’ to the spectrally somnambulant (‘Testimony of tears’ nods to what was to become and remain Joy Division’s 1980 elegiac eulogy ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Take some time’ is Can-like in its motorik hypnagogia) the album navigates the hinterland between the conscious cumber and the dozing slumber.

The before, during and afterlife states of existence are artfully articulated and matriculated in a spectrum of hazy fantasia. A distorted, ghostly, beyond the grave feel throughout the ten tracks also evokes the slew of 1950s and 60s ‘death discs’ such as Twinkle’s ode to her fallen beau ‘Terry’ and The Shangri-La’s ever-effervescent girl-gang-sprechgesang ‘Leader of the Pack’.

Best of all is ‘The Mind’s Eye’, deluxe-interior plush-melancholia with echoes of both (Celtic cliché alert!) Enya and the eternally wistful ‘Please, please, please, let me get what I want’ by The Smiths: the scaling and flailing sounds augmented by a despondent respondent who ethereally whispers the wilfully optimistic chorus ‘In my mind … there’s always tomorrow’. Hope sings internally.

Cinematically emphatic, Song Sung give you ten quicksilver screen sounds for the enigmatically somatic.