Tighten the laces on your Vans and jump on your skateboard, strap on your helmet and hop on your scooter, pump some air into the tires of your cruiser, do whatever you have to do, dudes; Dash, sprint, leap, fly like Olympians to your nearest record shop and lay down the $19.99 for the new Leila Arab album.
Blood, Looms, and Blooms.
Do this. If I were Sam Tellig, I would say, "You
want it." If I were Kal Rubinson, I'd say, "It's mandatory."
If I were Jon Iverson, I would say, "Ah-ah ooh-ooh ee-ee!"
The album is available as a compact disc, but the vinyl is what you want. The vinyl is the real thing, the compact disc but a cheap facsimile. Am I being persuasive like our Web Monkey? Are you digging this? The vinyl is deliciously packaged as a double-LP glossy gatefold with gorgeous artwork. Gorgeous. Lovable. Something to hold onto. And you want something to hold onto, you
need something to hold onto. Even the inner sleeves are thick, full-color wonders, covered in lyrics and lines artfully strewn by delicate script. And the music?
The music. I don't know much about Leila Arab; I've only just become acquainted with her music, but I've read that she was born in Tehran in 1971; she and her family fled to London in 1979 after the Islamic Revolution in Iran; she is a chain-smoker; her early recordings for Aphex Twin's Rephlex Records were an innovative form of electronic soul; she has performed as part of Bjork's live band; her solo material under the Grammatix alias moves in an even more experimental direction; she is tied to
home—the concrete and the abstract—but wonders if she'll ever return; she still lives with her family;
Blood, Looms, and Blooms is her first album since 2000's
Courtesy of Choice, a critically-acclaimed "masterpiece;" the long delay was due, at least in part, by a severe depression over the loss of both her parents.
But the music. Reminds me, in bits and pieces, of Royal Trux, CocoRosie, Portishead, and Tricky. That last comparison is probably most obvious; Martina Topley-Bird, who also added an exquisite charm to Tricky's otherwise dark, shadowy
Pre-Millennium Tension, is a glowing highlight throughout
Blood, Looms, and Blooms, her voice ringing out and shimmering like sequins against a black gown. Meanwhile, vocalists Luca Santucci and Terry Hall provide perfect partners—firm, smooth counterpoints to Topley-Bird's intoxicating tremble. And I now want to search out everything they've ever recorded elsewhere. The music. Is dark, indeed, but also playful. Sexy, but also silly. Thick and enveloping and entrancing.
Stuffy audiophiles who like their music tidy and
right will be frustrated by this album because, while the recording offers an extraordinary palette of textures and sound, along with a soundstage that goes miles deep (I could hear sounds coming from far beyond my apartment's walls—from down on Newark Avenue, and approaching me from either side, like the dudes outside the 24-hour deli asking me for change), the majority of the sounds are electronically produced, only tempered now and then by cello or clarinet or the human voice (live applause at the end of "Young Ones" will jar you from a dream state). Hungry, searching music lovers, on the other hand, will adore it for everything that it is. A mash of modern pop and classic soul and, of course, newer, future sounds. (I even heard a Stevie Wonder melody wrapped up in one of the many layers, and I can only imagine all that I missed.)
Leila's
Blood, Looms, and Blooms has sprinted, leapt, flown to the top of my list of favorite new albums.
I'll return to it many times, I'm sure.
