Long Way From Home

Album review

For their third album as Lovespirals, Anji Bee and Ryan Lum again create a lush series of songs that synthesize disparate influences into a warm, enveloping listen. For all that the duo's roots have been seen as goth, their previous albums touched on a variety of approaches with aplomb, and at this point it's just as accurate -- and ultimately limiting -- to say that Long Way from Home is blues, or country, or rock & roll. It's a blend that has a low-key presentation, an easygoing pace, and an ear for all kinds of unexpected details that change the feeling of a song in an instant without disrupting it. The traditional standard "Motherless Child," where the album title comes from, shows this clearly where the harrowing lament of the lyric becomes a cool flow, Bee's vocals paying homage to famous interpreters of the song like Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday without trying to actually replicate them. Meantime, a song like "Caught in the Groove" has a gentle, echoed percussion flow that sounds like late-'80s Cocteau Twins, with twangy guitars and piano that suggest majestic early-'70s country, and Bee's coolly sweet vocals calling to mind crooners from an even earlier time. This resplendent variety, which defines the sound of much of the album, helps the band further cement its own protean sound, increasingly recognizable on its own merits rather than just as the sum of its many parts. Some individual moments feel very thrilling -- the wheezing guitar/harmonica background to "Treading the Water," the sudden low-key funk on "Lovelight" -- without overwhelming the overall flow, a fine balancing act.
© Ned Raggett /TiVo