Reviews

Bluebeard’S Room – David Cronenbergs Wife

Label: Blang

We put on ‘Bluebeard’s Room’, press play, make ourselves a brew over which to consider its ebbs and flows for all you good people and then almost immediately get distracted by a phone call. We return to it a number of minutes later to be confronted head-on by the following gristly lyrical diatribe: “a vaginal swab on a murder-rape victim / a man decapitated by a samurai sword / a baby suffocated by a crazy nurse on children’s ward” (‘Harry The Morgue’) atop a chilling bed of sinister strings and foggy rhythms, part Nick Cave’s ‘Murder Ballads’, part Bram Stoker adapted by David Lynch in the filthy twilight of the Victorian East End. It’s arresting and a little gag-inducing, as indeed is much on this 11-track debut opus from London’s droning, shadow-dwelling, art-rock/anti-folk black humorists – and not, as the name might suggest, Caroline Zeifman, David Cronenberg’s actual wife. It’s as good a place to be introduced to them as any. The album treads through much quality Psychedelic Furs-esque, looming, consuming psychedelia, with bass lines bubbling like quicksand, creating claustrophobic confines in which morose monologues are free to stalk sinisterly. The humour can feel a little forced at points, as on ‘Runaway Pram’s continuous grappling for tittersome couplets, but largely fills the previously undiscovered niche drilled between Chris TT and Clinic. Songs you’d cross the road to avoid but may end up forming an intriguing correspondence-based relationship with when they end up in the slammer, which they will.

Release: David Cronenbergs Wife - Bluebeard'S Room
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Released: 12 August 2008