Laurel Halo - Dust
After a quick visit to Honest Jon’s, Laurel Halo swings again at London’s Hyperdub. It’s a slow, mainly vocal based swing. A bit like she did on her debut ‘Quarantine’. As if there were conditions attached to her return. ‘You will sing again.’ Or maybe she just wanted to get back to the essence of her sound after several years as an outsider on the dancefloor. But as always, she continues to paint outside the lines. This is what makes Laurel Halo so much fun. Hardly predictable and always just the right touch. Detroit is in her blood and living in Berlin can not compete with that. Quirky and hardly bowing to the simplicity of contemporary apocalypse or hedonistic trap. The rhythms are barely susceptible, the voice swirls past rakishly looming melodies and occasionally catches a melodic note. All under a thick layer of dust, on old tapes. Woolly and warm. ‘Jelly’ sounds like a wobbly, old, badly preserved jazz record. Everything on ‘Dust’ seems to come from a distant past. All the sounds are wonderfully old-fashioned. Rhythms are plucked from bossa nova scores and lived-in blues records. A saxophone here and there. Short interludes. With ‘Dust’ Laurel Halo sprints in an unusual direction. One in which she experiments with samples and old sounds. In which she wants to rediscover an atmosphere from decades ago, without really sounding like records from the past. ‘Dust’ needs to be listened to and explored. A record that demands your attention. A record that challenges you because you have too few spare minutes. Crawl deep into ‘Syzgy’ or ‘Do U Ever Happen’. Let go of what you thought you knew or expected. Listen again and again and again. Slowly blow the dust off ‘Dust’.