Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore – Tragic Magic

The first full album that unites sometime tourmates and occasional collaborators Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore sounds exactly how you’d imagine if you’ve heard even a flicker of their previous solo work. Both of them deal purely in the weightless and sublime; Barwick through washed-out synth and vocal work, Lattimore through crystalline harp playing, and they also both make exclusively great records, and it’s business as usual here.

It might not be full of surprises, but god they do what they do well. Right from the outset with Perpetual Adoration the tone is of slowly unfurling wonder, Barwick’s voice and Lattimore’s harp circling each other in a dazzling show of chemistry that the pair repeat again and again. It’s never more evident than on Haze with no Haze; harps skitter about while titanic synths threaten to crush them into dust, and yet somehow it all only seems to become more precisely moving the grander it gets.

It does at times reveal itself as a fairly quickly recorded collaboration, for good and bad. On the one hand there’s moments like the peak of Stardust where tinny drum machine and surging chords combine into something straightforwardly rousing in a way neither artist would attempt in their more considered solo work, and it’s magnificent, like entering heaven in a Dolph Lundgren film. On the other hand, The Four Sleeping Princesses never feels like it evolves above the germ of an idea, the pair drifting towards nothing in particular, but even that is pretty in a way few can manage.

Listen to: Haze with no Haze, Perpetual Adoration, Melted Moon