Hope Sandoval - Mazzy Star

“If rock and roll is dead, this record is the moonlight on its grave”

Taylor Parke, Melody Maker

A siren. Or, more likely, a ghost. Perhaps that of a heartbroken young woman wandering among the ruins of a castle or through the mists of the moors. Certainly, an extraordinary creature, mesmerizing and enchanting beyond any human imagination.

Hope Sandoval is already a musical case in her own right. A very young Mexican-American from Los Angeles, gifted with an ethereal, spectral voice (fittingly enough...) that is at the same time sensual and enveloping, she accompanies the dissolution of Opal, effectively replacing Kendra Smith and carrying their trajectory forward under the new name Mazzy Star, alongside guitarist David Roback.

While the nihilistic fury of grunge devours America, a generation of musicians retreats to their bedrooms to dream along with dream-pop lullabies and shoegaze vertigo, filtered perhaps through the sensibility of indie-rock deities 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 bring a decisive twist to 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.

From their 1990 debut “She Hangs Brightly” onward, this seven-piece ensemble (in truth built around the Sandoval-Roback duo plus supporting musicians) sketches out a new idea of psychedelic pop, dreamy and evanescent. A formula that would have to wait for their second album to reach its zenith.

“So Tonight That I Might See” (1993) heightens the dreamlike quality of their music, lingering in stretched-out, spectral atmospheres. Rather than the classic psychedelia of Jefferson Airplane, the new touchstones are the murky rituals of Doors and Velvet Underground, reworked in a listless, subdued key.

If we wanted to stretch a point, the opening “Fade Into You” could be called “the Sound Of Silence of the 90s”. If nothing else, for the shared spirit: melancholy and stillness as an individual refuge from the explosion of mass phenomena (protest movements back then, grunge here), the other side, introverted but no less intense, of the era's youthful dramas. And that generational resonance was confirmed by heavy college-radio rotation, as well as by sales: it would be the only Mazzy Star single to enter the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 44, and the UK Chart (No. 48).

“Fade Into You” captures exactly the sense of a fading, amorous reverie: a gentle piano, faint touches of slide guitar and tambourine framing a haunting melody, half-sung by Sandoval in her signature diaphanous, spellbound whisper, for one of the most beautiful ballads of the decade.

The other moonlit serenade is a cover of the Love song "Five String Serenade", with violin infusing 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 built from sleepwalking organ strikes, where Sandoval's Nico-esque intoning grows ever more detached, while Roback weaves a dense web of feedback and wah-wah.

But "So Tonight That I Might See" isn't just aching ecstasy and melodic fainting spells. On "Bells Ring", for instance, Roback's acid guitar work takes centre stage, forging a ralenti rock with a scorching tail-end. "Wasted" reworks a classic blues riff in a lethargic key, with a lashing guitar counterpointing Sandoval's celestial cries. "She's My Baby" even pulls off a stretch of vibrant rock 'n' roll, complete with an electric guitar solo, only partly softened by the chanteuse's ethereal echo. The transformation is completed by "Blue Light", an atmospheric slow-burner that transports us straight into another era, into a smoky 1950s night-club, riding the notes of a vintage organ and an acoustic guitar trailing behind Hope's soft vocalizing.

The folk ballads of "Unreflected" and "Into Dust" pave the way for the final apotheosis of the title track. A narcoleptic mantra running over seven minutes, updating the Velvet Underground's "Venus In Furs" for the age of slow-core, amid tribal rhythm, echoes, guitar drones and reverb; Hope is the vestal of the temple, but by now she's distant, unreachable. A hallucination.

If Sixties psychedelia was bacchanal and sensory overload, that of Mazzy Star pursues stasis, the final collapse. And beneath its idyllic surface, it reveals an even darker, more dramatic face. That of a depressed generation, unable to shake off its torpor.

The world is a vampire and Hope Sandoval is its ghost.

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27/03/2008