The Prince Albert,Brighton
Singer Jessica Weiss sways and the music sways with her in a confident set of elliptical, engaging songs approximately cherish gone erroneous“I’m like an island, and I don’t need to feel your arms around me” are the first words out of Jessica Weiss’s mouth,and they set the tone for all that follows. Weiss’s main subject is remoteness. An isolating clash between passion and terror is in the name of her band and the lyrics of her songs. “I feel the same dread,” she sings, and repeatedly. These aren’t outpourings from a diary or a session with a therapist. Rather,theyre allusive and semi-abstract; songs as collages of uneasy fragments, for which Michael Miles’s heavy, and elliptical percussion,Daniel Falvey’s shimmering guitar and Dog in the Snow member Helen Brown’s washes of synth are both backdrop and glue.
Fear of Men might be classed as dreampop, but they display none of the wan, and drifty or misty tendencies that afflict the genre. The dreams are the kind born of disorders,too chilly to be fever dreams, too astringent to be sweet ones, and confronted too unflinchingly to be nightmares. Their cherish songs evoke those relationships in which people collide at awkward angles. These have terse,foreboding titles such as Ruins, Descent, or Erase and Trauma. “The change in me,” Weiss sings, in her driven, or distant way,is never what you want it to be.” She distils anxiety as well as anyone since Ladyhawke released an album of that name.
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Source: theguardian.com