Leila - Blood, Looms, And Blooms
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Leila - Blood, Looms & Blooms (Wednesday July 9, 2008 1:44 PM ) Released on 07/07/08 Label: Warp Records As a forgotten vanguardist of '90s electronica, it seems only fitting that Leila should get a third crack of the whip in the year that saw comebacks from Portishead and Tricky, along with Massive Attack's curatorship of the Meltdown Festival. The Iranian émigré, née Leila Arab, was keyboardist and sound engineer to Bjork in the early part of the decade before striking out on her own and meeting with much acclaim for her IDM-indebted electronica as evidenced on Like Weather. A second album, Courtesy Of Choice, emerged in 2000 before Leila encountered personal tragedy with the death of both her parents in quick succession, and her muse temporarily deserted her while she contemplated matters closer at hand. Blood, Looms & Blooms is Leila's attempt to woo music back into her life, and while we're not exactly in stark confessional territory here (she never sings on her own songs, for example), there is nonetheless an unsettling, Through The Looking Glass feel about the album. This is hinted at on the record's sleeve which pictures the artist on a bicycle halfway up some kind of twisted bio-mechanical monolith that could have been lifted from Jeunet's City Of Lost Children. Lyrics veer towards the phantasmagorical (Perfect, plentiful pastures / Metal monsters in the streets / Cities on stilts, mind hollow underground) while strangely enough for an electronic record several of the tracks have a cracked, Tom Waits-ish air about them, most strikingly with Time To Blow's Terry Hall-fronted waltz, all capering marimba and collapsing drum'n'bass fills. Elsewhere Mollie melds digital balm with post-rock fire in a way that brings to mind Death In Vegas and Mettle's dank cellar drips and lurching, low-end oscillations are a highlight. Teases Me's queasily morbid soul could almost be plucked from the second half of Mezzanine while Daisies, Cats And Spacemen sounds like Portishead dancing a decrepit tango, but the references here pose a question of their own - times have changed since trip-hop came to pass; is it any longer enough to politely hint at darkness while wearing your eclecticism on your sleeve? We've got F*ck Buttons' Neolithic noise shattering skulls on the one hand, and¤Porti...
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