'Night Sun', VUM's new album
The new VUM’s album is an invitation to a mysterious voyage in the jungle and other exotic places. The brief tribal chant of the opening track ‘Octogonal Church’ dies in the exotic and dense atmosphere of ‘The Jungle’, haunted by sparse surf-guitar riffs and Jennifer Pearl’s monochord tone, which sounds like an incantation below menacing helicopter-like noises that could make you think you are in the middle of wasteland during the apocalypse. The rest of the album is populated by a 'Savage', 'A Strange God' and 'Mad Desires' and we are not sure if we are so safe, but it sounds fascinating and way too intriguing to leave.
‘Night Sun’ is the sophomore and second release of the duo made of wife and husband Jennifer Pearl (ex-Lion Fever, Lost Kids) and Christopher Badger (founding member of Grand Elegance).
An uneasy atmosphere runs through the album, as if we were watching a dangerous adventure movie and making up the images, it’s a sweaty ambiance filled with synth drones and enigmatic percussion only cooled down by Pearl’s cold and powerful vocals, between the confident delivery of a Patti Smith or a PJ Harvey.
The exotic drumming and hybrid sounds of ‘Savage’, a highlight of the album, transport us in an even more foreign place through its melody, like a re-imagined tropical dance, with slow repetitive and throbbing loops that could have the power to evoke your weirdest fantasies from a middle-Eastern-narcotic den to an oppressive slave house.
If there is a lot of mystery and exoticism in ‘Night Sun’, it is a cinematic image-generator album, like the title-track and its impenetrable ambiance of synth roaring and crying at the same time, or ‘Strange God’ which brings us even deeper into the psychedelic and strange jungle.
The hypnotic trance-like power of certain songs like ‘Echo Mountain’, ‘Strange God’, or ‘Holler Rain’, throbbing, spell-casting while ascending into morose incantations and reassuring reverb guitars or pounding synth, will haunt you for a while.
They have recently been featured in the Henry Rollins show on KCRW, Rollins declaring that ‘The album sounds pretty cool; on LP it should fill the room nicely,' so what other introduction do they need?
