Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Truth
Elsewhere came across Circuit des Yeux – 37-year old Chicago-based electro-rock practitioner and multimedia artist Haley Fohr – purely by chance about seven years ago.
She was, as we noted in our review of her album Reaching for Indigo, one of the artists featured on a cover-mount CD which came with an issue of Uncut. We rarely listen to such albums but this one was put on in the car when radio seemed quite dire and . . .
Well, she was quite the revelation.
With a four octave range, she shifts from the commanding baritone speak-sing of the late Nico to the falsetto sweep of Anohni by way of Bauhaus and a less histrionic Diamanda Galás.
She's quite something.
We followed her on her 2021 album -io and concluded she was “unlike anything else, other than herself”.
This new album produced with Andrew Broder (Lambchop, Bon Iver), Halo on the Insidedishes up soaring Teutonic electropop of claustrophobic intensity (Canopy of Eden with the repeated “I can make a radio break”) and clattering minimalist Goth gloom on the increasingly disruptive sound of layered vocals and percussion on Truth: “Truth is just imagination of the mind”.
The whispered unease of Cathexis is buffeted by winds of synths.
At the end of this shadowland journey of dramatic music and sonorous vocals, Fohr concludes with the restful sonic wash of It Takes My Pain Away.
It's an uneasy journey getting there from the opener Megaloner where she sings, “all the things you might be are inside of me”.
That might be a bit of a stretch, but there's something magnetic about Fohr's commanding, gender-denying operatic range.
Beguiling, but not for the faint-hearted.
.
You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here
post a comment