Hope Sandoval - Mazzy Star - A Siren in Los Angeles

“The rock siren”, “the Chicana Nico”, “the heartbroken ghost”. The music press has used plenty of striking images to describe one of the most sensual and seductive singers to have graced the pop stage over the past twenty years: Hope Sandoval. Most remember her as the magical chanteuse of Mazzy Star, one of the great revelations of the last decade in the psych-pop field. But without ever putting a full stop to that experience, the alluring Hope has recently built a solo career that has largely confirmed her gift as a bewitching “muse” of the new indie scene across the Atlantic.

Born in 1966 in Los Angeles and raised on the city's East Side within a family of Mexican descent, Hope Sandoval made her debut in 1986 with Going Home, alongside her friend Sylvia Gomez. The duo's folk repertoire earns a fair amount of success on the Californian club circuit, and the turning point comes when Sylvia sends a tape to Kendra Smith (Dream Syndicate). David Roback, who was with Smith in Opal, offers to produce the duo.

In 1987, during an Opal tour, Kendra Smith disappears, and Roback asks Hope to take her place. When Kendra Smith returns, an argument breaks out that ends with her departure and with the consolidation of the David Roback-Hope Sandoval duo into a new band, named Mazzy Star.

But Hope is no mere image-girl, good only for drawing a few extra spectators to shows by swaying on stage. She takes charge of writing the lyrics herself, yet she's hardly a party-girl: she keeps public appearances to a bare minimum and hides a deeply shy personality behind the microphone. “I prefer the recording studio to the stage,” she admits without hesitation. “Live, I get nervous, and on stage I find it very hard to move around and talk to the audience. I just sing.”

But it's also this enigmatic charm that makes her such a special figure within the varied indie scene of the Nineties. Almost a mystical icon of that dreamy, psychedelic pop that forms the DNA of Mazzy Star.

While the nihilistic fury of grunge devours America, a generation of musicians retreats into their bedrooms to dream along with dream-pop lullabies and shoegaze vertigo, filtered perhaps through the sensibility of indie-rock gurus like Galaxie 500 and Yo La Tengo.

Bands such as Codeine and Low transfigure rock, stripping it down to its bare core and letting it float in stretched-out, bloodless textures. Narcolepsy becomes music.

Mazzy Star introduce a decisive variation on the formula, drawing on their psychedelic background (Roback had been part of the Paisley Underground, a school steeped in guitars and flower-power nostalgia) and a melodic gift rooted in folk-pop.

She Hangs Brightly, the debut album of this seven-piece ensemble, follows in the footsteps of Opal, treading the paths of an ethereal, dreamlike pop lost in a haze of sounds and chimes.

Mazzy Star range across a multitude of styles: from country to folk, from Delta blues to psychedelic rock, from soul to noir.

The songs drift by impalpably, built on fragile harmonic structures, from the bloodless “Halah” and “Be My Angel” to the more “bluesy” “Taste of Blood” and “I’m Sailing”.

The slender melodies of “Ride It On” and “Give You My Lovin” lend a sense of almost celestial serenity, only barely “disturbed” by the dark dirge of the title track. Sandoval’s hushed, sensual register gives the songs that extra touch of magic.

Three years later came So Tonight That I Might See (1993), which heightens the dreamlike, spectral dimension of their music. More than the classic psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane, the model now is the murky ritualism of Doors and Velvet Underground.

The single “Fade Into You” captures exactly that sense of love's fading senses: a gentle piano, faint touches of slide guitar and tambourine framing a haunting melody, intoned by Sandoval in her trademark diaphanous, enchanted whisper, making for one of the most beautiful ballads of the decade. The other moonlit serenade is the cover of “Five String Serenade” by Love, with violin lending sweet folk-pop languor. A sweetness that slips into trance on “Bells Ring”, thanks to a dizzying swirl of shoegaze distortion and reverb, and even more so on “Mary Of Silence”, a raga of organ strikes with sleepwalking cadences, where Sandoval’s Nico-esque intoning grows ever more detached, while Roback weaves a dense web of feedback and wah-wah.

But the record isn’t all aching ecstasies and melodic swoons. On “Bells Rising”, for instance, Roback’s acid guitar work takes centre stage. “Wasted” revisits a classic blues riff in a lethargic key. “She’s My Baby” unleashes a vibrant rock'n'roll. The transformation is completed by “Blue Light”, a slow, atmospheric number that leads into a smoky 1950s night-club.

The folk ballads “Unrested” and “Into Dust” set the stage for the final apotheosis of the title track. A narcoleptic mantra lasting over seven minutes, updating the Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs” for the slow-core era, amid tribal rhythm, echoes, guitar drones and reverb; Sandoval is the vestal of the temple, but by now she’s distant, unreachable. A hallucination.

Hope, which means “speranza”, instead proves to be “the voice of melancholy”, almost an “Emily Dickinson of the narcoleptic generation”, as she has been described. And through the notes seeps a trickle of dark unease.

As Taylor Parke pointed out in the pages of Melody Maker: “If rock and roll is dead, this record is the moon over its grave”.

Mazzy Star's sound doesn't change much on the follow-up, Among My Swan (1996). Back are the delicate Nico-like nursery rhymes (“Disappear” and “Happy”), along with the country atmospheres of “All Your Sisters” and the mystic solemnity of “Cry Cry” and “Take Everything”, but there's also no shortage of exotic flourishes, as in the sinuous “Rhymes Of An Hour”, spiced with Eastern touches and guitar embroidery. The reference points are many, from Cohen to Dylan, from Neil Young to the Cowboy Junkies, all the way to the Paisley Underground scene, for a handful of “psycho-folk-rock” ballads that, depending on taste, can seem either magical or soporific.

What emerges above all, though, is Sandoval’s talent, including as a songwriter. “My songs are born by chance,” she says, “out of all sorts of emotional situations. When you feel the need to express an emotion in a song, a painting or a poem, anything can become the right reason to do it. Any emotion becomes important. In fact, it becomes the most important thing in that exact moment”.

Having set the Mazzy Star experience aside for the time being, Hope Sandoval forms a new band, Warm Inventions, together with former My Bloody Valentine drummer Colm O’Ciosoig. “It's a project that slowly took shape only after I met Colm in San Francisco,” Sandoval explains. “We started spending a lot of time together, and in the meantime we were both writing songs and working on them together. In the end we had recorded enough to put them together into an album”.

So after the “trial” EP At The Doorway Again, the project comes into full focus with the album Bavarian Fruit Bread (Rough Trade, 2002), which boasts guitar work from ex-Pentangle man Bert Jansch.

Drawing on the French pop of Serge Gainsbourg, the introspective songwriting of Tim Buckley and Harry Nilsson and English folk, Warm Inventions conjure an evocative sound that echoes film noir atmospheres (“On the Low”) or western ones (the cover of “Butterfly Morning”, from the soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah's “The Ballad Of Cable Hogue”) and the Dylan of “Blonde on Blonde” (“Suzanne”), ranging from the sumptuous folk movements of “Drop” (penned by William Reid, ex-Jesus And Mary Chain) and the moving “Charlotte” to the relentless melancholy of “Around my smile”, from the magnetic melody of “Feeling of Gaze”, accompanied by a tender cello, to the long psychedelic ballad “Lose Me On The Way”.

The songs are played with delicate simplicity, at slowed-down tempos and with the fine outlines of just a few instruments. The arrangements are always elegant, with acoustic guitar often arpeggiated, timid electric touches and sparing embellishments of harmonica, trumpet, glockenspiel and cello. Hope Sandoval lavishes sweetness and melancholy, weaving in her soft vocals, yet seems to remain withdrawn inside her own shell. As critic Riccardo Bertoncelli wrote, indeed, “this music, beautiful and voluptuous, communicates a distance: Hope is only seemingly here, but in reality she hides in a strange recess of the spirit, in a distant, rarefied world she tells us about in a voice that, in order not to be overwhelmed by emotion, has become as clear and sharp as crystal”.

The folk-rock madrigals of Bavarian Fruit Bread are about as far removed as can be from the rhythms of blues and soul, yet they keep intact their warm, melancholy spirit, their ability to speak “heart to heart”. They are a concentrate of sensitivity and tenderness that, as Bertoncelli himself wrote, offers “an escape route from the vulgarity of loud and noisy rock”.

Just when almost everyone enchanted by Hope Sandoval's spell had resigned themselves to hearing her only in occasional collaborations (alongside Air, Death In Vegas, Vetiver, Chemical Brothers, Twilight Singers, etc.), here she is returning with a new album alongside Warm Inventions, a full eight years after Bavarian Fruit Bread.

Recorded between North Carolina and Ireland, Through The Devil Softly picks up exactly where things left off, standing as a faithful representation of everything one might expect from Hope Sandoval: sinuous melodies, gentle acoustic arpeggios, whispers of rare sensuality and the odd psychedelic reverb. Yet these elements aren't enough to make the album predictable or in any way obvious, since the carefully measured dosage of Sandoval's voice blends perfectly with shifting sonic settings that confirm her splendid interpretive form and the great care put into the smallest harmonic details and into the very cadences of the lyrics, which seem tailor-made to enhance the allure of a vocal style that remains utterly unique.

It really takes very little for Hope Sandoval to conjure once again the soft embrace of refined atmospheres that never cloy, whether they take the form of soberly elegant, irresistibly immediate ballads ("Blanchard", "Wild Roses", "Sets The Blaze") or give themselves over to hypnotic, slow-building mantras ("Trouble", "Fall Aside") or the recurring romanticism of strings ("Thinking Like That").

On Through The Devil Softly, Hope Sandoval seems to have managed to stop time, crafting a work that eludes any restrictive sense of era, devoting itself instead to the absolute ideal of an indestructible beauty that the American artist, even past the age of forty, continues to embody in masterful fashion.

In 2013, Mazzy Star's return was announced out of the blue, 17 years after their last album. The new record, recorded in California and Norway, produced by David Roback and Hope Sandoval, and released on their own label Rhymes Of An Hour Records, is titled Seasons Of Your Day and features all the original members of the Santa Monica band, plus a handful of guests, including Colm O'Ciosoig (My Bloody Valentine) and the legendary Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch, who passed away in 2011. Ten tracks running between 4 and 6-7 minutes each; a warm, acoustic-hearted framework, enriched by Roback's excellent guitar work, always skillful and discreet in his accompaniment, effective in his slide flourishes and in punctuating the spaces between verses with electric guitar. The other expressive pivot is of course Hope Sandoval, an eternally graceful doll of a singer, mysterious and captivating. Rounding out the picture are occasional keyboards, glockenspiel and organ, plus a restrained rhythm section that never overplays its hand.

A Wurlitzer organ takes us by the hand into the opening track, "In The Kingdom", and it immediately feels as though little or nothing has changed in 17 years. In the dimension inhabited by Mazzy Star, it's as if only a day has passed, while the waves of this psychedelic dream wash away space and time. Mid-tempo numbers and gentle acoustic ballads remain the norm, at the expense of the more acid-drenched episodes the "kids" were once also known for: of that older vein, almost only the closing "Flying Low" survives, an unsettling, lysergic slow blues somewhere between Hendrix and early Pink Floyd. There's one potential single - "Let Myself Down" - that sums up the whole affair, and at least a couple of tracks that, all things considered, feel somewhat redundant (for this writer, that would be the title track and "Sparrow"). But above all there's the great, dearly missed Bert Jansch, embroidering the litany of "Spoon" with his acoustic guitar.

The rest, or at least most of the rest, is given over to relaxing campfire-under-the-stars moments, soft whispered declarations, bare and seductive: more than Nico or the Cocteau Twins, one is almost tempted to think of the bucolic Led Zeppelin of their third and fourth albums. That is, four English dreamers who, from their cottage, longed for California, in the company of David Crosby or Joni Mitchell. And so somehow everything comes full circle, and the Ferris wheel starts turning again just as it did in the early Nineties: everything has changed, yet nothing is different. At least not in the Luna Park of Mazzy Star.

Three years later, with the invaluable help of Colm O Ciosoig (My Bloody Valentine), the American singer puts together a new chapter with Warm Inventions, an even more convincing and solid album, with a sequence of songs rich in nuance yet stylistically unmistakable.

Like a two-faced Janus, Until The Hunter looks both to the past and to the future, uncovering new liturgies to dip in exquisite psychedelic shades that float over the icy movements of an organ radiating warmth and magic for a full nine minutes of ecstatic beauty ("Into The Trees").

What follows is a collection of delicate, dreamlike ballads, raw material that Hope Sandoval's voice turns into something precious and unique.

Over time, the American artist's music has seeped into the cinematic imagination, heightening its visual suggestiveness: deserted spaces and lonely nocturnal settings have captured, within their potential pixels, her most sinuous and minimal inflections ("Day Disguise").

And it's precisely because of this singular synergy between image and song that it doesn't seem strange or odd to detect the same stylistic concerns found in Lana Del Rey ("Treasure", "A Wonderful Seed"), tempered here by a songwriting approach more devoted to the structures of rock ("The Peasant") and psychedelia ("Salt Of The Sea").

The most intense and reassuring sensation comes from Hope Sandoval's voice, always confident yet shy ("Isn't It True"), at times almost raw and unsure of itself ("The Hiking Sea"), suddenly proud and in full bloom (the excellent duet with Kurt Vile, "Let Me Get There"), and finally intimate and candid ("Liquid Lady").

Five years on, the duo returns with the brief EP Still, containing just three new tracks and a cover of one of their most important songs, the phenomenal raga-trip of "So Tonight That I Might See". Only three new songs, but the Californians prove they still hold the key to unlock the doors into their lost world.

"Quiet, The Winter Harbour" is a melancholy ballad worthy of the smoky nights of "Twin Peaks", opened by a brief classical piano passage followed by Roback's magnificent guitar, so slow and hypnotic it feels as though it should never end. The psychedelic folk of "That Way Again" is a journey through time between Joni Mitchell and Jerry Garcia, a drowsy excursion into Sixties history in slow motion. Mazzy Star still aren't inventing anything new, but everything remains perfect and irresistible. "Still" (as in "we're still here") is more unusual, with its spare, essential guitar work, Sandoval's spoken-word vocal, and a background string drone reminiscent of John Cale's legendary drones in Velvet Underground.

The closing track could have been a huge gamble; offering an alternative version of a landmark song from the '90s like “So Tonight That I Might See” takes real nerve. If the 1993 version had been the high point of a masterpiece album, an admirable slow-core hallucination somewhere between Velvet Underground and Doors, the 2018 version sheds all structure to venture into rhythm-less improvisations, with hyper-lysergic guitars recalling Conny Veit's work on “Hosianna Mantra”, tribal percussion in the style of Maureen Tucker, and long synth carpets akin to the cosmic journeys of Ash Ra Tempel. It wasn't easy to stand up to comparison with the 1993 version, but although overall inferior, this new rendition has its own originality and its own appeal. Mazzy Star are still with us, and after 28 years their world still feels like home.

But on February 25, 2020, like a bolt from the blue, tragic news froze fans in their tracks: David Roback had died. The co-founder of Mazzy Star was 61 years old.

Contributions by Raffaello Russo (“Through The Devil Softly”), Ariel Bertoldo (“Seasons Of Your Day”), Gianfranco Marmoro (“Until The Hunter”), Valerio D’Onofrio (“Still Ep”)

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