I contacted Bonnie Baxter of Shadowbox and asked her if she had any mp3s. I needed to hear the songs out off streaming context. And she provided one.
Which I added to two other songs that for some reason have seem to taken over my life.
1. Call Earth by Noun
2. Autumn Trees by Eraser
3. Blue Brain by Shadowbox
The three songs have three things in common.
1. All three songs are lead by women
2. All three songs are the pure essense of alternative rock
3. None of these three singers have great voices but they all have great voices for what they sing.
Listening to “Blue Brain” on my earplugs was very strange: the mix is amazing, the sounds zoom from ear to another and it is like a drug induced fantasy of sound. Beautiful, yes. But not in the way you think of beauty: beauty in its otherness (not unlike Bonnie herself come to think of it). The song throbs in your middle ear.
The more I listen to Erasers the more they sound like a baby Portishead -not so much subdued as quietly disorienting, as though a strong dub producer could explode the song so it has ecstasy seekers thinking they are having an acid flashback.
Possibly the best song on Holy Hell: certainly in the top 3 (to be honest I keep forgetting “Holy Hell” -a great rocker) “Call Earth” pulls you into a vortex of loss, it sinks you into a vision so sad the loss is a form of catharcism.