Customer Reviews

Through the Devil Softly

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I heard some of the songs prior to the official album release date and was immediately "sold". First, these songs feel like a road trip into the darkest corner of Miss. Sandoval's mind...the mood here is atmospheric & Spellbinding with a capital "S". In particular, I found the songs "For the rest of your life" and "Blanchard" captivating. Despite having lost nearly a decade, the band has refined their sound with Sandoval's voice continuing to highlight her unbridled sensuality. Do I recommend this album you ask? I do, I do, I do and can only praise this singer for the air of mystique she creates in her music. This is psychedelia fused with folk and trip hop-an experimental masterpiece.

This is not a Mazzy Star album, that's for sure but still, Hope Sandoval finds beatiful, tricky and simple ways to get you with her songs and her proyect here. The first half of the record is exactly what I was expecting from her: mellow melodies, trance periods and breathing sadness all over the place (Blanchard, Wild roses, Lady Jessica and Sam and Set the blaze are the example) Now, it is fair to point out one particular song on the first half of the record: "For the rest of your life". Here the music structure is awesome. The bass line kind of thing is waird and yet well fit for the mood of the song and the electric guitar reminds me to what bands like The Cure or even Radiohead would do. Strangely beautiful for sure. On the other hand, when you arrive to "Trouble" and "Fall aside" the real fun starts. Beautiful, beautiful songs that take me back more to what Sandoval used to do with Mazzy Star. I automatically felt in love with these two songs when I listened to them.

All this aside, I must point out above everything the exquisite voice that Ms. Hope Sandoval still has. Beautiful, stunning voice that in my humble opinion next to Natalie Merchant (10'000 maniacs) and Tori Amos defined how a real singer acrually sang a song back in the 90's.

Welcome back Hope!

Hope Sandoval's voice has floored me, since I first heard MAZZY STAR's "So Tonight That I Might See". Being a fan of Hope's voice is frustrating. For the duraton of Hope's 19 year singing career, she has only released 5 albums, this being her second solo album after a 9 year hiatis. Then again, quality over quanity has its own merits. And here we see the merits in full bloom. When you spin the CD, you notice Hope's voice has lost none of its mystical, morphia slow quality. On this album, that quality is embellished with waltzes, (3/4 time), or singing the song ribato, with gaps in the flow and orchestration of the song. Most of the songs use this device of shifting downbeat, thru the layering of various time signatures over the drums, fading in and out electric guitar echos, or marimba punctuations, so that the timing of the songs is hard to determine. Overall, this reinforces that dreamy, slowed down observation of time, that is undoubtedly Hope Sandoval's trademark sound. The overall effect is staggering. Far from sounding like dated dream-pop, from the early 80s paisley underground, this album updates the sound, matures it, and offers it with a totally mature vision. (Just to set the record straight, HOPE never really was part of a paisley underground, as much as Dave Robach was. OPEL and the DREAM SYNDICATE, 80s bands long before Hope's singing, and before MAZZY STAR, are the real Paisley Underground, new wavey sound. MAZZY STAR evolved from the mass market recognition of alternative music, after Grunge broke mainstream).

THRU THE DEVIL SOFTLY's songs range in orchestration from a full band sound, with drums, acoustic and electric guitars, bass and marimba, to broken up elements of this vision. For instance, SETS THE BLAZE starts with an acoustic guitar fingerpicked, Hope singing, with backround vocal effects, adds marimbas, tagging a coda with a string quartet. More than half of the songs are waltzes, but what's odder, is how many of the songs play with way the song is counted. THINKING LIKE THAT has a pure 3/4 timing on the drums, but includes a chorus, or "B" section, that slows down, thins out the instrument density, and almost SITS there in time, defying forward motion. Then, it picks up again. Strings come in, play for a few bars, and disappear. The effect is one of sleep walking thru a foggy park at twilight, or musical narcolepsy. This strangness increases, until by the last song, the sound of the sea is the predominant instrument, with a tinny, thin acoustic guitar, and Hope's hazy vocals, sounding like she's singing a mile out at sea, but recorded from the shoreline. Each song takes a different approach to this esthetic of SLOWCORE. Overall, compared to her last album BARVARIAN FRUIT BREAD, this album's sound is much more developed. THERE'S A WILLOW is the only song where Hope's harmonica work is showcased. Again, this is a song that has some percussion in 3/4, covered by waves of cymbals played with brushes, and other instruments playing in 6/8. Most of the songs play with that central orchestration, with only two songs sounding like a band might play them, ie, MAZZY STAR. (BLACHARD, the first song, and TROUBLE.) In fact, the ONLY thing missing from those songs, that would make them an update of those heady MAZZY STAR albums, is the absence of David Robach's electric guitar freak outs. In other ways, if your favorite MAZZY STAR songs were numbers like "FIVE STAR SERENADE", or "INTO DUST", then you'll love this album. Really, this album sounds more like MAZZY STAR, than anything around since 1996.

As for the lyrics, as usual, they are anybody's guess, and have the same half-lit, miasmic quality that you see on the cover photograph. The cover shows an arm, part of a chair, leaving the audience to infer the whole from the parts. Hope's vocal quality, drawing out words, singing vowels like voiceless angels humming into echo chambers, does make lyrical observations nearly impossible. But that's part of the album's esthetic, its charm. The sense of words fade in and out, the dynamics of individual instruments fade in and out. You hear a banjo, and claves, then they fade away, and you hear an organ, and Hope's keening voice, only to hear that fade into bass drum and percussion. If you are into music you can dance to, then the only dance you could do here, is a "danse macabre". However, reducing her music to some branch of goth, based on this slow, dark sound, (or the album's title) defies any rationale. When Hope sings "Is that the Devil in your Eyes, or just Some Kind of Symphony?", it best sums up whatever Goth elements MAY be here. Hope Sandoval has achieved a great piece of music here, that's the bottom line. So, what is it? In the end, this still seems to be a branch of Freak Folk, produced by the queen of the genre. THEN AGAIN...It might be Belly Button Gazing music. It might be Paisly Underground. It might be Slo Core. It might just be a daydream waltz, floating off to the foggy sea.

I don't listen to Hope Sandoval when I'm happy. No, Hope's cds are playing when it's a lonesome autumn night, stars are in the sky, I'm thinking of that girl I used to know, and the bottle of Pinot is getting near empty. Why sleep when those memories are gonna keep you up anyway? So I hit repeat, and sink into the soft caress of The Warm Inventions one more time...

That's the funny thing about sad music: it's almost homeopathic in the way that through reflecting your emotions, it makes everything seem ok. Well, if not ok, at least better. Sadness often comes with its close cousin, loneliness, and oh-so-down music offers the reassurance that, a.), you're not alone in this, and b.), look at the beauty that can come from it.

Like Tom Waits' "Early Years", Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" or The Velvet Underground's 3rd album, Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions' latest, "Through the Devil Softly", is what you play when you need an album that will put its arm around your shoulder and hold you close. Like those albums, the performances here are incredibly intimate; this is not music that jumps out of your speakers; rather, it's music that casts a spell through its softness, its fragility, its restraint, and the way it flows through your body like liquid morphine. It's a sound where you actually hear fingers sliding on strings, where the vocals seem to be whispered straight into your ear, and where a single drum hit echoes like a gunshot in the forest...

Playing Hope's latest, my first impression was that it sounded a lot like her last one, "Bavarian Fruit Bread", also with The Warm Inventions. Now if there were dozens of vocalists out there doing this sound, that might bother me, but there aren't. In fact, there's just one, Hope Sandoval, who -- love her or hate her -- has carved out an absolutely distinctive style, as unique as any Norah or Bjork or Amy, all feline dragged-out slurs and slides and breathy blues. The other thing I knew, based on past experience, was that these songs would start to blossom over 5 or 10 listens, and sure enough they have.

The album opens with a clear "single", "Blanchard", which features more of a full band sound: Strummed acoustic guitars, rolling piano chords, a touch of Velvety bent-string twang, and a subdued rhythm section establish a tres Mazzy Star vibe -- all bluesy-junkie-acid-folk -- over which Hope purrs and whispers her reverb-drenched vocals: "And I'm not ... gonna say ... I forget... cuz I remember ... every day ... every day... " The vocals, though, seem deliberately blurry, hazy, just one step beyond comprehension unless you really, really listen. Which may be the point.

"Wild Roses" drops you deeper into the album's vibe -- just a finger-picked guitar line with Hope's voice following it, running from it, following it again... "to leave, or to come back..." A lonesome Neil Young harmonica will join in later, but when the entire band kicks in on the chorus, it will just grab your soul and refuse to give it back...

An echoing, fuzzy bassline in a loping 3/4 rhythm establishes "For the Rest of Your Life", with some vibraphone (or maybe xylaphone) keeping a subdued feel until some fuzz guitar crashes in like a foot through your ceiling. Hope plays the siren here, taunting a lover like Patricia Arquette in that empty house in David Lynch's "Lost Highway" ("you'll _never_ have_me...") Dark, dark, dark...

"Sets The Blaze" is a stunner, with a very creative arrangement that's typical of the way Sandoval & The Warm Inventions polish a song till it shines like a gem, not a single note played unless it's absolutely necessary. So much of their sound is about space, about refusing to clutter things up, and this song is a perfect example. Delicate finger-picked guitar lines and tentative plunked keys set the mood, with a shimmer of cello that emerges like a mirage. No drums. Hope's vocals dance around the other lines, and every now and then the vocals double up with a harmony that seems like a reflection shimmering on the water ... the lyrics remain impressionistic, full of mystery, suggesting much without getting pinned down. Hope's voice, sensual and breathy, hits you like a dream, with fragments of imagery that resist explanation.

"Blue Bird", like "Sets The Blaze", also references the devil -- which seems to me the code word for madness and breakdown here, or perhaps temptation and desire -- and like that song it's sheer perfection. This is the one you can put on repeat and just listen to over and over again, sinking into its mysteries... just listen to that opening. A strummed chord, a line of vocals, the chord again, another line, then ... a beautifully placed pause leaves you dangling, waiting for that chord to make things right... they tease out this intro, with each line, each chord, seeming like it's being dragged into existence, and then Hope asks, "is that the devil in your eyes?", and the band kicks in, and it will leave you floored, an absolutely breathtaking moment. "Should I just laugh/ and pretend you were never there?" The song builds to a languid climax with a falsetto-backed chorus that would make Air die with envy. A beautiful breakdown at 3:30 leaves that chord hanging again, with one more question from Hope, and then it builds all over again, sucking you back in. "Never ... let me go" sings Hope, and you wish the song would do just that.

It's kind of mind-boggling to realise I've been listening to Hope's voice for about 20 years now. Some people might say she hasn't changed all that much, but I would argue that it's pretty amazing how fully formed she was as a vocalist already on Mazzy Star's debut, "She Hangs Brightly". The fact that she has only recorded 5 albums in a 2-decade span testifies to the love and care and real feeling that goes into each one, and "Through The Devil Softly" is no exception.

Hope has defied industry (and fan) expectations throughout her career, refusing to speed up her release schedule to fit marketing needs, refusing to play louder and pander to the audience live, refusing to play the coquette or market the band on her (very striking) looks... in an age where "punk rock" wins Grammies and "independent" means next to nothing, you can still look to Hope as an artist uncompromised, with creativity and integrity intact. In a better world, she'd be as popular as Norah Jones, but for those of us who know, she's our secret pleasure, our purring chanteuse & intoxicating muse. So slip the headphones on, open that bottle, and slide into the amber netherworld of The Warm Inventions...

So beautiful. Haunting, mysterious, heartbreaking, dreamy. Hope Sandoval is astonishing. "Lady Jessica and Sam" "Sets The Blaze" and "Blue Bird" are three of the most amazing songs I've ever had the pleasure to experience.

My first thought, when I heard Hope Sandoval had an album out that didn't involve Mazzy Star, was simply, "I wonder whether it will sound any different?" Don't get me wrong. I love Mazzy Star; it is one of my favorite bands of all time. But Sandoval is one of those singer-songwriters who is so indentifiable with a certain sound, a certain atmosphere, that you wonder if she can do anything different - and if she can, is willing.

The atmosphere I refer to is best described as follows. Tuesday evening in November. Rain. Red light. Red wine. Close quarters. Smell of marijuana smoke. You're not alone, but you're lonely. Your heart is broken, but you're so drunk you can't feel the pain, and with the absence of pain comes a kind of melancholy clarity. It's as if you're performing exploratory surgery on your own emotions. And as you drain glass after glass, your reeling head takes you into the places normally reserved for bull-sessions fueled by liberal doses of LSD. You ponder existence and non-existence and wrongs done to you by your past lovers in past lives. You see ghosts and have conversations with devils. You write poetry in a journal and smile because you know tomorrow tears will spatter the ink. But in the mean time, well, there's a guitar, a fire, and somebody is passing you a cigarette...

That at any rate is what Hope Sandoval did for me when she was with Mazzy Star. So when I saw that she had a new, or at any rate a different, band behind her for this outing, I was eager to lay my claws on it. But would it sound any different? The answer is yes - slightly.

To be sure, a lot of the elements that made Mazzy Mazzy are here: Sandoval's plaintive, haunting voice and clever, poetic lyrics; soft, gentle, emotionally effecting songs; occasional forays into trippy, half-spooky melodies that somehow remind me of dream-sequences in 1970s horror films; a general atmosphere of thoughtful sadness. The main differences are subtle and have to do more with instrumental choices. The strumming guitars and shivery cymbals often found in Mazzy songs are pretty much absent here, and this album has a somewhat less produced, even more intimate feeling - as if she and the Warm Inventions were playing in a candle-lit alcove about three feet from your table. Probably the most notable change is the hardest one to describe: Mazzy albums have a slightly dirty, "fuzzy" edge to them, the result perhaps of effects pedals and clever production; this album has a "clean" feeling, giving a more sharper, more acoustic sound. But really, you have to be a decent size Hope Sandoval/Mazzy nerd to pick up on that. (Ahem.)

It's tempting to write a song-by-song review, but in dealing with this type of music it generally defeats the purpose, which is to create a unifying mood in which each song serves as a kind of rung which gets you to the destination I mentioned at the top of this review. So I will limit myself to saying that there are no losers on the album, some very good ones ("Sets the Blaze" "Blanchard", "Blue Bird", "Trouble", "There's A Willow"), and one or two, like "For The Rest Of Your Life" that, are brillianty put together. It's true that there are no breakout songs of the "Fade Into You" type, but one can hardly expect that sort of lightning to strike on the regular and anyway, I'm not that greedy. So in closing I'll just say that if you liked Mazzy, you'll definitely be happy you bought this album. I am. And now I leave you with some Warm advice:

"Never let your hand shake when you're firm on your blade,
Never keep a keepsake of the spills that you made."

I first stumbled across the name of Hope Sandoval during a jaunt around the U.S. in '94. In one of those little moments of regret, I had passed a record store in L.A. where Mazzy Star was promoting their new album. I seem to recall it cost $10 to go in or something (though that may be the haze of time...) so I kept walking. Oh, if only...

Anyhow, I opted to see some Morphine shows, one in Austin and one in Seattle, rather than Mazzy Star (they seemed to be traveling the same circuit that year) but Mazzy Star's music is one of those beacons of memory from that time. It still takes me right back there.

Dabbled in her solo output over the years but missed that dreamy, psychedelic inducing state of mind of her music as Mazzy Star. Have been dabbling in this one as well but am growing more and more convinced of its brilliance.

Mazzy Star this isn't. And that, it turns out, is a very good thing. Oh, there is a dreamy state to the music, inevitable, of course, because of her voice. But the instrumentation is much more acoustic, walking a fine line between country and classical, with the occasional appearance of strings. It might be argued that there is a subtle psychedelic edge but that may just be based more on expectation and history than the music itself.

Because of this, her voice actually shines and is not so morphed into the music as some of her earlier output.

Don't expect Mazzy Star (though if you don't know Mazzy Star, their music is required listening).

Just allow this music to play and you too will find yourself into the comfortable lull, hypnotic in its effect, of her voice. As much as "The Warm Inventions" is the band, it is Hope Sandoval in the end that carries the appeal.

By the way, she appears on the new Massive Attack album as well.

Good Grief. I haven't listened to a new CD so many times in a row since KID A. If you still love Mazzy Star, don't even think twice. This album is just gorgeous.

A lot of songs to love on this CD. I bought it for my wife, but I really enjoy listening to it as well. If you like Hope Sandoval, then you will love this. Looking forward to new Mazzy Star stuff.

Another very good album from Hope. Consistant and mellow, yet not boring. I can easily listen to the whole cd without any skipping.