Is it any wonder that this album is beautiful? Naturally it’s not. For many a year she’s provided fresh air to Neil Halstead’s dusty musings in Mojave 3, happy to hang around fairly unassumingly, keeping tabs on all that unfolds around her, nudging things along where necessary. And about a decade on it’s barely worth mentioning that she fronted lauded-by-some shoegazers Slowdive along with Halstead. Her first solo outing doesn’t evoke even a nostalgic pinch of deja-vu for that era of her being. No, here she remains firmly grounded amongst dirt tracks, summer shade and bales of dry country hay.
Though it might seem it in places, like on the drifting-to-and-fro-on-a-breeze ‘Shoulder The Blame’ and the scattered building of ‘Hope’, this is not merely a Mojave 3 companion piece, minus 2. She sounds so lonely and lucid on songs like ‘Beautiful Feeling’ and ‘Thru The Dawn’ that she takes utter ownership and makes it all about her.
Her voice is so haunting, so reaching, so decisive and so capable, even when dealing exclusively in fragility as it does for much of the time. It would be improper if we didn’t mention Rachel Goswell in the same breath as Kristen Hersch, seeing as on this evidence they share more than just a label. The Throwing Muse may well have an altogether wider emotional lexicon than Rachel, but she more than corners the range she’s been given here. Business as usual then really, the only difference being that she’s back in a sharper focus.