Lovesliescrushing — Girl Echo Suns Veil

‘Girl Echo Suns Veil’ although subtitled ‘Rarities and Ephemera 1990-2000’ is a selection of 16 pieces culled from three 4-track recording sessions, one per year from 1990 to 1993, with the exception of one additional track from 2000. It follows guitarist Scott Cortez as he moves from North East America (Michigan) to the South West (Arizona), picking up vocalist Melissa Arpin along the way, as he experimented with a fusion of Glenn Branca’s walls of guitar resonance with the then more recent distorted indie pop of My Bloody Valentine.

This compilation showcases Cortez’ soporific sound that lets the FX not just fill in the gaps between simple, repetitive jangly refrains but completely flood the mix setting the sparest of melodies adrift in smooth currents of distorted guitar. This often creates a kind of drowned, occasionally orchestral, sound as amply demonstrated by the opener, ‘Babys Breath’, or later on ‘Lips to Kiss’, where Cortez’ tone clusters provide shimmering backdrops to Arpin’s sugary wisps of song fragments that reluctantly and elusively hover and disappear like fragile leaves briefly carried and consumed by a flowing river. Theirs is a world where fast, percussive manoeuvres are made impossible by an inert atmosphere like that of a snow dome whose graceful falling shapes can never hurry.

The heavily processed and often backwards looped guitar work often sounds like the work of more than one individual - on more than one occasion it reminds of what can be heard of a distant outdoor stage from the campsite of a particularly windy festival. In the main, the seemingly singular approach, deliberately or otherwise lacking in much in the way of dynamics, rhythm or low end frequencies, gets increasingly predictable as the disc wears on, feeling like it was more novel to form - seeing microtunes gain macro properties through processing - than it is to consume.