The songwriting nucleus behind New York indie band, Madder Rose (they of 1993’s well received ‘Bring It Down’ album) Mary Lorson and Billy Cote have just released the largely (and bravely) instrumental ‘Piano Creeps’. They may have ended their formal arrangement with the release of ‘Tragic Magic’ in 1997 but the two have been virtually inseparable ever since, collaborating in part on Lorson’s Saint Low project.
An innocent and pretty collection of musical vignettes, the album portrays the same sparkling innocence of Madder Rose but without the usual constraints of start-middle-and-finish that the lyrical content of songs (as well as the label director) will generally insist upon.
Taking up where the Cocteau Twins left off with their hanging interminably on one note or within the squarely defined limits of a three-chord trick, ‘Piano Creeps’ obeys few of the usual rules of popular composition and instead pursues the delicately offbeat path of the chamber. Loosely like 4ADs hugely influential This Mortal Coil and the languid but sometimes fruity loopy ‘Plunkett and MacCleane’ soundtrack by Massive Attack’s Craig Armstrong (see ‘Dig A Hole’) it’s a largely expressionistic affair, having all the meticulous attention to mood and detail as a finished score, but with few of the learned disciplines; and this, whilst frustratingly incompletist, is still a seductive enough stance by anybody’s standards.
Swathed in layers of hippy gossamer, it’s moody, eerie, delicate, foreboding, indulgent – and well worth checking out and listening to in the wee small hours.