TALsounds – Shift

TALsounds has long specialised in songs that work as much like a spectral fog than through traditional song structure, her operatic voice and synth mastery creating a combination of scale and delicacy rarely executed so well. On early records there was a sharpness to these malaises, a homemade quality that rooted it to the physical, but here on Shift, abstraction takes hold entirely. It's a record of drifts, a floating plaster away from 45 minutes in a lazy river. 

This makes the record sound meandering, and it is true that it doesn’t have the accessible peaks of other records in her discography, but what it lacks in momentum it makes up for in sheer, consuming beauty. Time and again the sheer gossamer grace of her voice is an ideal bed for her perfectly judged synth work, like the gentle synth arpeggios that corkscrew through the centre of Eye Lines, or the Julee Cruise-like echoing bass that rolls through Climbing. It manages this focus of space and tone whilst never slipping into predictability, songs like Searching, with its flashes of eerie atonality, giving enough variety to the landscapes she’s creating.

Shift is a beautiful record, one that coaxes you into letting it overtake you, whilst never pushing itself for a second, simply drawing you in with its sheer mesmeric shape. 

Listen to: Eye Lines, Climbing, Searching