Circuit Des Yeux’s Haley Fohr gets airborne: Albums,
Chicago musician’s powerful exploration of personal and global collapse. By Victoria Segal.
Circuit Des Yeux
★★★★ -io
MATADOR. CD/DL/LP
“IS THIS the end?” asks Haley Fohr on -io,
“is this how it feels?” Listening to the songs on her sixth album as Circuit Des Yeux, it seems entirely possible. From the griefblasted valedictions of Vanishing, martial groove undercut by the poignancy of its lyrics (“Goodbye dog/Goodbye thought… goodbye to a mother’s call at dinner time”), to Sculpting The Exodus, Nico’s Evening Of Light crossed with a mass extinction event (“is the signal fading?”), all these songs have a dying fall. No wonder, then, the artwork shows the musician caught mid-air after leaping from a Chicago studio, a plunge she made after training – somewhat incongruously – with The Mandalorian’s stunt expert.
Such real-world proof of Fohr’s commitment becomes redundant in the implacable face of -io. Named after an imagined city in a permanent state of collapse and written after a period of mourning for a friend, it might explore mankind’s giant leap into oblivion, but – aside from occasional vocal untethering – its control is steely. The undimmed impact of Fohr’s voice – a tarry, cold-pressed blend of Nico and Anohni – is an unsurprisingly vital component of its uncanny, negative-space chill, but it’s underpinned by the sheer intergalactic drama of her arrangements.
Rough with bedroom-recording static when she started out in her late teens – her first record, Symphone, was released in 2008 – Fohr’s music has become increasingly monumental. Falling Blonde and Geyser, for example, from 2017’s Reaching For Indigo, both felt gravity’s pull – but here, Fohr has turned the drag of the universe into endtimes son et lumière. Timpani, cornet, tuba and flute are among the instruments adding to the synthesized doom, a beautifully orchestrated caving-in.
Yet this isn’t just Armageddon theatre – there’s also humanscale pain here. The Chase, resonating with Kim Gordon’s whispered nightmares, hints at a fragile physical self: “Help her run/As far as she can/2 legs under 1 sun.” On the frosted drones of Walking Toward Winter, human connection freezes and shatters. “You know there’s an avalanche that lives inside of me,” sings Fohr, “and it’s ready to flow.” Meanwhile, on the closing Oracle Song a sweet Earth Angel-style melody suddenly lifts from the ruins, a disturbing meditation on innocence and loss: “You’re surrounded by the same men who buried me when I was 17.” The apocalypse, like that avalanche, is closer than you think.
-io doesn’t try to ingratiate or console. Instead, Fohr ambitiously attempts to strip back protective coatings and cocoons, to show what happens when distractions peel away and the inevitable pushes through. The signal might be fading, but through the rubble and dust, -io’s transmissions come through loud and clear.
THERE’S NOTHING barking about blaming a year-and-a-half’s woes on the lockdown, but it drives the comfortingly coastal Billy Bragg’s 10th solo LP inwards. An intimate, thematic country-blues-rock set recorded in Eastbourne with producer-arrangers Magic Number Romeo Stodart and Dave Izumi, here Bragg is empowered to face his own domestic failures in Should Have Seen It Coming (“I looked the other way”) and ecclesiastical Hammond hymnal Pass It On (“those we remember are never gone”), hugged into private grief via “a dusty sheaf of letters from people now dead.” Lonesome Ocean’s pub piano unleashes a “raging storm” inside the bard, his guiding light delicately congregational in mellotron hymn I Will Be Your Shield, dedicated to a loved one, while family, health and “shattered norms” reveal “the gap between the man I am and the man I wanna be.” Bragg ends having a cheeky Cockney knees-up with aspidistras, autodidacts and “angry old men”, co-written with son Jack.