Photo: Sarah Townsend Photography
Info: When Aural Air shared with me her debut A-side 'Edinburgh' / 'The Heir of Indignation' in August of last year I was instantly beguiled, this was a different vocal, a neat and most worthy guitar-playing style, thoughtful lyrics and sudden mood shifts. Last week Laura Rai (see what she has done there?) from Kildare released her debut EP under her moniker Aural Air, The Torpor of Minds, on Little L Records, and I am so glad she has included both of the aforementioned tracks on this collection of songs as more people need to hear how great they sound.
There's an American grunge-lite softness to opening track 'Serpent Speak', it's such a nice rendering of wonky timing and cast-away vocals, with Aural Air emerging from a slumber at 1:56, "Come on..." she whispers and we kick in, and this is what I thought I might be hearing last year, it's 2007, and it's St. Vincent's debut album Marry Me, but we're a bit more forceful in 2017 with regard to Aural Air's music.
That feeling is compounded on second track 'The Vanishing Dove', the song titles are as poetic as the flow of the music. Rai's voice flits gracefully between soft-rock and soul-jazz, today and yesterday at once, and again that controlled power whittles away in an instant like an extinguished candle at track's end. 'Medeina's Dove' comes next, here the off-kilter rhythm and beat is almost disorientating, almost, but it serves to add a wicked theatrical darkness we haven't come across yet.
So we reach 'The Heir of Indignation', and well over a year later it is still perfection to my ears, the mystique of the vocal and the casual yet stifflingly cool guitar progression which arrives half-way through such a pleasure, here she's more Anna Calvi than Annie Clarke. It's also a moment to pause and admire the lyrical talent; "In the shadows, in the meadows, in the corners of your mind, when you suddenly felt sullenly and soon remember why, that they're watching and they're waiting in their vain hypocrisy, for the terrors that give birth to my stubborn apathy."
The Torpor of Minds closes with 'Edinburgh' another delightful moment to lose yourself in, alongside 'The Heir of Indignation', this song flitted into my head for months after hearing it for the first time, those breaks between eruptive emotion and fading falling stars hurtling to the ground are at work again. A rawness and vulnerability streak across Aural Air's debut EP, but it's not the rawness of starting out or finding your way, it's a sense of working your way through the sounds of the music with a careful, delicate and loving treading. Her star may or may not rise to where it deserves to be in 2018, but it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
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