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Track Listings
| 1. Winter Beats |
| 2. Hearts |
| 3. Wired |
| 4. I Kill Your Love, baby! |
| 5. Pulse |
| 6. Cancer |
| 7. Load Your Eyes |
| 8. Empty Bottles |
| 9. No Way Outro |
Product Description
Review
The Stockholm duo - Maria Lindén and Fredrik Balck - operate in unconventional manner at the coalface. Lindén writes the music, Balck the lyrics: but Linden sings them. They seem to agonise over how to keep everything blurred, foggy, pleasingly warped. Genre influences that in 20 years have gone from startling to predictable abound: MBV, Cocteaus, a dash of Mary Chain - you don't need us to recite the list. It's all treated synth-beds, echoing guitars and spurts of crashing volume. It whispers or it shouts. What then, if anything, will win Hearts a place in your heart?
Perhaps the fact that they try so hard. Despite the time-honoured formulae, there's rarely a spell where the duo aren't endeavouring to make magic. They don't always get there, but you admire the stern-faced dedication. I Kill Love, Baby! is intimate, hungry. Cancer (those titles!) begins with a hum of churchy guitars and key stabs, the ennui-laden voice pitched midway between Hope Sandoval and Elizabeth Fraser. Big drums come in: you brace yourself for a blast of Cults' Spector-esque derivations but it never quite happens. The tease is rather attractive. Winter Beats is the wasted skeleton of an upbeat MGMT hit covered in deep, paralysing snow (that's a good thing), while the title-track, segueing directly out of its looping bleeps, surges in with a lick of Vangelis before almost breaking into a bustle of Neu!. Again, it never quite does, and again there's something alluring about that blank-canvas vacancy.
No moulds are broken here, but the occasional breeze drummed up by the couple's galloping minds is in many ways cool.
--Chris Roberts
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
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Customer Reviews
turned in a good set with 'Hearts', a nine track collection of
distinctive synth-pop which, an increasingly cluttered genre
notwithstanding, has enough of its own to say to deserve our attention.
There is a jumbled intensity in their vision. Mist-shrouded landscapes;
dense subterranean beats; half-heard ghostly vocals. Ms Linden's voice
is often buried so deep in the mix that the words are obscured but this
adds a satisfying sense of mystery and adventure to the proceedings.
The quasi-psychedelic noodlings of 'Wired' is a particularly good example.
Elsewhere, 'I Kill Love, Baby' demonstrates a greater capacity for restraint.
Initially barely breathing, the piece has an affecting hymn-like quality but
builds, layer-upon-layer, until Ms Linden's vocal entry gives the arrangement
clearer focus and definition. Although little more than a two-chord trick the
results are surprisingly uplifting. 'Pulse' and 'Cancer', too,continues the
journey into dream-epic territory with their near-orchestral textures.
(The latter is arguably the album's finest moment. A very beautiful moment).
Final track, 'No Way Outro' , turns its face towards the sun bringing the
project to a rousing close with a curious but powerful folsky optimism.
As another summer reaches its last burning embers 'Hearts' will find a
place in the frosts and fogs of another year's end. Autumnal music indeed.
Recommended.
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