(2022) Rachael Dadd - Kaleidoscope    


Review:
Rachael Dadd has been making folk-centric albums since the aughts, but her latest album Kaleidoscope hardly sounds folk at all. The single “Moon Sails” glides into view on pillow-y layers of synths, which sound more like Black Moth Super Rainbow than Pentangle. Later the song builds in slashing swathes of strings and soaring blasts of horn. The orchestration is lush, even baroque, but more than that, there’s an ambient Stereolab-ish hum behind these tunes that’s anything but homespun. Consider, for instance, “Children of the Galaxy,” which opens the album in slapping percussion and muted, musical bass, spinning out gossamer threads of guitar, and whose melody nods in a pretty trance. Dadd’s voice is high and shorn of flourishes, cutting through the mesh of sounds with an abstract purity. But the song gathers in a dizzying, choral way as it reaches points of emphasis. There is nothing sparse about it.  The band that Kaleidoscope reminds me of most is Olden Yolk, who also bathe their modal melodies in a shimmering humid glow, and who also splice a space-age trippiness into simple tunes. Both make music that envelopes and engulfs the ear. Both give you a euphoric contact buzz as they dip and swerve and soar. “Join the Dots” may start with a rain of folk-picked acoustic guitar notes, its fragile tune may venture hesitantly in traditional paths, but its cry of “Does that move you?” is a bittersweet revelation, trembling with glissando violins, and the only possible answer must be, “Yes, yes, it does.” — dustedmagazine


   


Track List:
01 - Children of the Galaxy
02 - Footsteps
03 - Moon Sails
04 - Ox
05 - Ghost
06 - River Spirit
07 - Heads Down
08 - For Honey and Ray
09 - White Snow
10 - Swift
11 - Join the Dots


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk, indie-pop
Country: Bristol, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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