White Hinterland - Kairos on CD

Description

Kairos is an Ancient Greek word that describes a particularly fortuitous moment in time. It’s also the title of Casey Dienel’s third release as White Hinterland, the album where this Massachusetts-born, classically-educated singer-songwriter comes into her own. Her 2008 album Phylactery Factory – following 2006’s debut Wind Up Canary, recorded under her own name while she was studying at New England Conservatory Of Music, and a rather overly-precious curio she’d now rather forget – was a painstakingly-etched, winningly offbeat set that suggested Dienel was, like Joanna Newsom, another Freaked Folkie in love with old-time orchestration and tangled songcraft. She thwarted such attempts at pigeonholing with the same year’s Luniculaire, an EP sung entirely in French, and including a delirious cover of J’ai 26 Ans, originally recorded by Brigitte Fontaine for Comme a la Radio, her 1971 collaboration with avant-jazz weirdniks the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Dienel throws a further curveball with Kairos, doing away with piano, guitar, strings – the acoustic instruments that previously made up her palette – in favour of synths and sequencers, a brave move that entirely pays off. Scoring her songs with electronica, Dienel is making no vain play for the dancefloor – rather, Kairos offers hypnotic digital chamber-pop, the minimal orchestration brilliantly foregrounding her playful and joyous vocals. This contrast, between the machine music and her most-human vocals, is particularly delicious on the sublime Begin Again, as sub-bass smudges and percussive clicks and whirrs play off Dienel’s swooning, lilting voice, pirouetting through effortless pop hooks. On Amsterdam, industrial clanking builds a mood of grey melancholy, Dienel’s multi-tracked yowls and yelps puncturing the gloom. No Logic, meanwhile, strings together loops of percussion and scratchy guitar to cook up a loping trance-pop somewhere between Eno and Byrne’s Bush of Ghosts and Konono #1’s Congotronics. It’s impressively ambitious, experimental stuff, a brave leap on the part of a young artist. It’s an album that, in translating her Freak Folk into digital 0s and 1s, finds for Dienel a true, unique voice. It’s her golden hour, and you should bask in it. --Stevie Chick Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window Product Description Kairos, the second album from White Hinterland, is a stripped-down, atmospheric record with up-front, bright vocals. For vocalist Casey Dienel and producer/multi-instrumentalist Shawn Creeden, it's an effective combination, and ultimately a bold one, for the fact that most like-minded acts bury the vocals. Musically, Kairos makes much out of the slow, drip-drip beat of trip-hop and a light touch of some Aphex Twin-like skittery percussion. Vocally, it's a showcase sort of an album: Dienel's singing is full and commanding. The band's move from the East Coast to Portland, Ore., had Dienel and Creeden working without a piano, which ultimately became a creative leap as White Hinterland turned to an array of looping sounds. On "Moon Jam," Dienel sings of the disorientation of self-doubt, following "I cannot control myself" with "I am afraid of so many things." It's a theme that weaves in perfectly with the music's lean ambience of slinky beats, deep bass and slow, insistent grooves. Kairos' 10 songs span 41 minutes, with a consistency that suggests a somewhat conservative approach to recording. But it's a control that makes the album's unexpected moments that much stronger: The bouncy shift midway through "Bow and Arrow," the sing-songy lilt of "Amsterdam" and the R&B flourish that Dienel adds when she sings "forever and ever" on the album's closing track, "Magnolias."