JESSICA BAILIFF - Since Always

In the series of twelve monthly releases scheduled for 2008 by the Distant Noise label, after so many worthy underground artists, it's now the turn of a name already well known and widely appreciated.

True as ever to her reluctance to put herself in the spotlight, Jessica Bailiff releases for the small English label, in the series' usual run of a hundred copies, a very brief thirteen-minute EP that — aside from the split EP with Annelies Monseré and the recent collaboration with Au Revoir Borealis — breaks the two-year silence that followed the hints of a folk transition shown on her last album, "Feels Like Home".

Across the five tracks contained on "Since Always", the muse of dreamy slow-core psychedelia offers a broad yet concise survey of the musical spectrum she's currently drawn to, not only emphasizing lo-fi twists of homespun psychedelia worthy of Charalambides, but also touching on ambient snapshots and revisiting more recent, graceful acoustic drifts. A common thread running through the five tracks is undoubtedly the slow layering of sounds, their incremental unfolding, wrapped in the elusive, sinister electric iterations of the first two tracks, or only partly spelled out in acoustic hints with a vague folk flavor and in embryonic song sketches that, while not fully developed, are already dense with ethereal charm (particularly "Dear One") and dotted with small noises and guitar notes carefully doled out.

Despite having all the hallmarks of a minor work, "Since Always" should certainly be regarded as further proof of the class and versatility of an artist perfectly at ease applying her hushed psychedelia to both lo-fi experimentation and more intricate melodic fragments.

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13/12/2008