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Amber Arcades - Fading Lines

  • Published in Albums

 

Lazing around during the daytime in any sunny weather the UK summer manages this year should by rights be accompanied by this album. Its title track alone is blissed out enough to either keep you sated in your hammock or, with the infectious guitar line that runs through it, tempt you up to have a bit of a groove about.

Movement is though largely not advocated by the contents of Fading Lines, the self-funded debut from Annelotte de Graaf, where prime elements of shoegaze, drone and the motorik end of krautrock are combined into a whole that never once suffers from being an initial recorded outing.

Utilising the services of half of Quilt (Shane Butler and Keven Lareau) along with Real Estate’s Jackson Pollis with the experienced Ben Greenberg at the controls will no doubt have been of much use in terms of managing expectations within the studio but the nuts and bolts of the ten tracks here were pulled together by de Graaf in her hometown of Utrecht before she opted to sink her life savings into the trip to New York that resulted in the finished article.  

As life-changing decisions go that has surely proved to be a wise one, given the pride you can imagine being felt at the completion of the recording sessions and the rolling off the presses of the fully rounded and finished off album. There are constantly new elements of the Amber Arcades sound being revealed on play after play of the album – the insistent rhythm pulsing through ‘Turning Light’, echoes of the titular guitar part washing just into earshot further down the ranks and many more.

Fading Lines works particularly well on repeat, the softer vocals of ‘White Fuzz’ setting things up well for the driving energy that starts the album off again on ‘Come With Me’, a fitting title for the journey you’re about to begin. As debuts go you’ll be hard pressed to find a better one in this vein in 2016.

Fading Lines is available from amazon & iTunes.

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