If one were to play the Cocteau Twins’ atmospheric, shimmering sonic framework at half speed and imagine the refreshingly youthful voice of Altered Images’ Clare Grogan as a shade more morbid, one would arrive somewhere near the sound world of inrain. The duo consists of Rudy Tambala and Alison Shaw, who with their bands A.R. Kane and Cranes not only abstracted pop at the end of the 1980s, but also embodied the very idea of dream pop.
More than three decades after the original studio recording, the revised release Rise now lets all genre boundaries dissolve into one another. Reverberant guitars drift around Shaw’s ethereal, childlike voice, which seems tentatively to court them in return. Even when accompanied by playful synths that burrow into the ear like the insistent ringtone of an old Nokia handset, it is Shaw’s veil of longing that dominates. Elsewhere, it is the bass that carries the song, while a subtle rattling merges with tender to disquieting vocal and instrumental fragments into a long interlude that resolves in an abrupt moment of classicism.
Three of the four songs were recorded as early as 1991, yet the additional track »Biology« from 2012 also folds into the minimalist structure of this nearly fifteen-minute collage of underground musical culture – perhaps because of, rather than despite, its futurist sound, marked by emphatic vocal pauses and staccato-like vocal lines. Rise thus becomes a sonic document that looks back even as it keeps dreaming forward.
Rise
