Still Corners
★★★★ The Last Exit WRECKING LIGHT. CD/DL/LP
Fifth album of sultry desert twang from EnglishAmerican duo.
Based in Woodstock NY, British singer Tessa Murray and American instrumentalist and producer Greg Hughes are beginning to perfect their desert spook. A step on from the sun-drenched but dark heart of Mazzy Star and Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game (Static begins almost identically), they are as American as sidewalks. Murray’s voice is a beautiful, dreamy magnet for Hughes’s backdrops, which without losing their twang take all sorts of tangents: from the whistling on Crying, to the point where the instrumental Till We Meet Again starts gently and then peaks with the all-guns-blazing swirl of Dexys Midnight Runners’ The Teams That Meet In Caffs. Murray always seems to be on the edge of imperious heartbreak, and when she ends A Kiss Before Dying with a curt “it’s all over now”, it sounds like the end of everything.