Kelora - Sleepers Kelora

With Kelora's self-released Gloomerald, the duo created a soundworld swimming in subterranean folk music swathed in murky electronics. On Sleepers, their first for label True Panther, there's a sharper focus on songwriting and a folk-doom sound that borrows equally from Bridget St. John as it does from a kind of digitized Wicker Man aesthetic.

Sleepers indeed often sounds like an uneasy, poignant dream half-remembered in the first minutes of wakefulness. Electronic processing warps and bends the instrumentation but is nonetheless a passenger to the more traditional musical composition. And it suits Kelora. Acoustic drums, and close-mic'd vocals from lead singer Kitty Hall create the skeleton of Sleepers. Hall's vocal is laconically sad, loping along with the dirges rendered by the duo, a drowning angelic vocal submerged in a vast sea of gloom.

The songs emerge glistening in a dark light on Sleepers. Willow Song, for example, a waltz dripping with doom, feels like a murder ballad for a dream. In A Million Streams doesn't sound a million miles from Deserter's Songs-era Mercury Rev, albeit recorded in a dank home studio (and I mean that in the best possible way) though it provides a slightly airy-er moment in the album. The synthesizer elements, evidenced on a track like Tourmaline remain atmospheric, melodic and balancing to the doomed, wistful romance Hall's vocal performances. It’s hard to escape, on the most yearning and melancholic moments, the spectre of Mazzy Star and slowcore.

A startling, brilliant development in the duo's sound. - MK / Monorail