Unloved
Drawing on the deceptive innocence of '60s girl group pop and the drama of classic film scores, Unloved showcases Jade Vincent's knowing vocals and the wizardry of composers Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes. The trio laid the foundations of its stylish approach with 2016's Guilty of Love, honed it with award-winning work on the BBC's wittily thrilling television series Killing Eve, and gave it Technicolor polish and variety on 2019's Heartbreak. Unloved expanded their timeless mystique with a handful of well-chosen collaborators on 2022's two-disc The Pink Album and on 2023's Polychrome: The Pink Album Postlude, which found them blurring the boundaries between music's past, present, and future in ever more hallucinatory and transporting ways.
Vincent, a Phoenix native, moved to Los Angeles in the early '90s. While singing in the city's jazz clubs, she met Ciancia, a Coloradoan who relocated to L.A. in 1991 to study music and quickly became a part of the underground scene with the band Weapon of Choice. The pair began a creative partnership, first forming the Jade Vincent Experiment, a ten-piece big band that released the 1998 album Moy, and then Vincent & Mr. Green, which released a self-titled effort on Ipecac Records in 2004. During this time, Ciancia became an established session keyboardist and composer for film and television. In 2010, he and Everlast co-wrote and produced the Emmy-nominated theme song for the TNT television series Saving Grace; his later projects include The Hunger Games, Nashville, and True Detective, which he worked on with his mentor, T-Bone Burnett. Vincent and Ciancia continued to work on their own music, which blended her dusky voice with eclectic arrangements spanning jazz, electronic, hip-hop and country.
Their project came into focus with the addition of acclaimed producer, composer, and DJ David Holmes, whom Ciancia met when he played keyboard overdubs on Holmes' Haywire score. After hitting it off, Ciancia invited Holmes to DJ at the Rotary Room, a music salon in Los Feliz that he and Vincent ran where professional musicians could relax and play music informally. This led to the trio writing and recording together as Unloved, with Ciancia and Holmes crafting tracks inspired by the Shangri-Las, Lee Hazlewood, and Ennio Morricone for Vincent to flesh out with moody character sketches and vocals. The group's first project was the music for The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator, a 2012 web series created for Microsoft by director Edgar Wright. Unloved's debut EP, Guilty of Love, appeared in October 2015, while their first full-length, also called Guilty of Love, was released the following March. Recorded at L.A.'s Vox Studios, it featured contributions from Rotary Room friends such as Wayne Kramer and Jonathan Wilson. Also in 2016, Ciancia and Holmes won an Ivor Novello Award for Best TV Soundtrack for their work on the BBC America series London Spy.
In 2018, Unloved provided original songs as well as Guilty of Love tracks to Killing Eve, a taut, sardonic TV series about the cat-and-mouse game between an MI5 security officer and an assassin produced by the BBC. Holmes and Ciancia also scored the show and won the 2019 BAFTA TV Craft Award for Original Music. In February 2019, Unloved returned with their second album Heartbreak, a set of songs that expanded the trio's musical and emotional vocabulary with hints of trip-hop, exotica, dark humor, and genuine pathos. Later in the year, Ciancia and Vincent worked with Burnett on The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space, a concept album about society's growing difficulty with discerning fact from fiction. In 2020, Unloved released the single "Strange Effect," a collaboration with singer/writer Raven Violet that was used as the theme song for the 2021 Hulu series Nine Perfect Strangers. During this time, Holmes and Ciancia pursued other projects, with the former scoring the films Ordinary Love and No Sudden Move and the latter providing the music for the Netflix series Made for Love. For September 2022's The Pink Album, Ciancia, Holmes, and Vincent worked with Violet, Jarvis Cocker, Jon Spencer, and Étienne Daho, crafting a double album's worth of songs exploring love in all its forms. A month later, the reunited production team Black Science Orchestra -- which featured Holmes' old friend and collaborator Ashley Beedle -- worked with Unloved on the EP Number in My Phone - Black Science Orchestra Remixes. Vincent, Ciancia, and Holmes returned in February 2023 with Polychrome: The Pink Album Postlude, a psychedelia- and Tropicalia-tinged EP of songs recorded during The Pink Album sessions, and a reworking of "Far from Here," which originally appeared on the Guilty of Love EP.
© Heather Phares & Thom Jurek /TiVo
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