The New Eves: The New Eve Is Rising review – imagine if the Velvet Underground scored Midsommar …

The Guardian

3 days ago

Over the past year or so, you would have been hard pushed to read any of the New Eves' interviews without feeling at least a little intrigued by what the Brighton quartet are reportedly up to. Said features usually discuss their onstage theatricality – there is talk of improvised dance and indeed 'experimental ballet', and of fake blood and their all-white homemade costumes, equal parts cottagecore and Midsommar. There are indications that the music the band make is merely part of a broader artistic practice that also involves painting, writing, photography and 'traditional female crafts', among them knitting.
Then there's mention of their curious instrumentation, in which violin, cello and flute have as much role to play as guitar, bass and drums. And there's a frequent suggestion that the band are sonically sui generis: 'We weren't consciously inspired by any other musicians … it was like we created a new universe of paradise without even realising that's what we were doing'; 'The Velvet Underground are the only band I can compare us to – there's a similar spirit there, but the New Eves aren't about genre'.
Claiming you are, as Duke Ellington liked to say, 'beyond category' is part of any new band's standard attention-grabbing arsenal. And in this case, in one sense at least, it isn't true. Any alternative rock band who deploy strings to scrape and drone are almost inevitably going to attract some kind of comparison to the John Cale-era Velvet Underground. But, intentional or not, there are also plenty of other reference points you might reasonably mention to describe the music on the New Eves' debut album The New Eve Is Rising.
Something of the Raincoats' rickety post-punk explorations seem to haunt its sound, albeit relocated from Notting Hill to a more pastoral setting. So does the lo-fi avant-garage rock of the early-80s Fall, which is audible amid the simple riffs and relentless drumming of Highway Man. There is occasionally a bleating quality about the vocals that automatically summons the ghost of Tyrannosaurus Rex-era Marc Bolan. Equally, at their most full throated, they recall the powerful but ascetic harmonies of folk family the Watersons. When the vocals tend to spoken word declamation – as on opener The New Eve – you might think not only of Patti Smith but those moments in Crass's oeuvre when the microphone was ceded to Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre.
And yet, if there are plenty of artists other than the Velvet Underground whom you could compare the New Eves to – from trad folk to distaff anarcho-punk to hippy whimsy – the band's central point still stands. Whatever ingredients went into the recipe, the result doesn't ultimately sound like much else, and there is often something rather thrilling about being in its presence. The weird blend of glam drums, sawing strings and folky vocal roar on Cow Song, for example. Volcano's slow surge from gentle fluting bucolia to a potent sense of menace. The moment on Rivers Run Red when the scrabble of strings and guitars dramatically finds an urgent percussive shape.
It's given an extra frisson by the fact that, whatever the circumstances of its recording, The New Eve Is Rising sounds as if it's being played live, by a band who prize immediacy over virtuosity, with all the teetering potential for disaster that suggests. There's a certain white-knuckle intensity to the moment when Circles shifts its rhythm, and given that the change is counted in with such vociferousness, perhaps it hasn't always come off in the past.
Said disaster never strikes, although you do occasionally wonder if something may have been lost in translation from live show to studio, despite their best efforts. The spoken-word manifesto of The New Eve probably feels more viscerally powerful delivered in front of your eyes than it does coming out of your speakers. But the moments when the album doesn't quite work are tempered by the sense that this is a band still in a state of flux and progress, working out where they might go next – the 'rising' in the title seems the operative word – rather than a perfectly finished product with all of the doubts about how to move on which that would entail. That the New Eves are overflowing with ideas is obvious from their interviews and their debut album alike. The latter presents them in rough hewn and occasionally chaotic style: it feels exciting, as does their future.
Cate Le Bon – Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?An equivocal title for an equivocal song – the dreaminess of whose sound is undercut by a strange, sickly quality. It's both addictive and slightly disturbing.