Flak Magazine: Fiel Garvie's Leave Me Out of This, 11.25.03

Fiel Garvie wants you to know that love is weird. With few concrete images and even fewer specific scenarios, the UK band has dedicated its sophomore full-length (and first US release) to a kind of subliminal urging, a hushed imperative, with which we simply must concur: Love is weird. Sigh it from the rooftops.

And the band attempts this feat not so much with words as with sounds, which, when you stop and recognize them as ethereal and twee, tempt you to find your musical reassurances somewhere other than East Anglia, a cheerless and austere part of England. How can anything bright or aberrant emerge from this bleak land of mudflats, saltmarshes and fens (with apologies to Brian Eno and... uh, Cradle of Filth)?

In spite of Norfolk roots, an apparently boundless infatuation with '80s dreampop/early '90s shoegaze and a name that sounds like a warrior character from some Celtic fantasy novel, Fiel Garvie has managed to dream up a most lovely (and decidedly strange) record.

All warnings are in place. For every alerted My Bloody Valentine or This Mortal Coil/Cocteau Twins aficionado, an SUV-load of music fans historically averse to 4AD-inspired dronerock will be piling into their oversized vehicles, gunning their engines, and squealing their tires — in effect, responding to Leave Me Out of This with "Get me the fuck outta here!" Even for those of us who reveled in that era (approximately 1983-1991), the current indiepop music scene's infatuation with all things My Bloody Mary Chain Twins is a little saturated, if not downright obsessive. Picking over the battlefield for loving treasures is one thing; lingering over mutilated corpses, though, might ultimately necessitate some form of medical intervention.

But love is weird, remember? And this love, this sound, is just different enough to isolate Fiel Garvie from the other carrion birds. Much of the band's distinction lies in the feathery sibilance of singer Anne Reekie's voice, a dusky whisper so utterly feminine it's almost alien. As with Björk, this brand of femininity is so very far away from traditional concepts, like "weakness" or "passivity," as to render such polarizing stereotypes lazily superficial. (Quiet girl outshines riot grrrl?)

Forget the exquisite glossy packaging, with its silver stars and eldritch lights, and forget the generally obtuse lyrics with their references to "fairy dust." There are some resilient, tensile songs on Leave Me Out of This, albeit a tad front-loaded (sequentially speaking). The strongest segment occurs immediately after Reekie's tone-setting yet shallow opener (also mirrored in the closer "Flake," the other song for which Reekie receives sole writing credits): "I Didn't Say" glides in on a gaudy carnival organ, a lustrous bass groove and glittering picked guitar strings. A gentle contrast to the insistent drums, Reekie's vocals swim across this pillow of sound, the faintest grit buried in a pearl-worthy throat. The melody is pure Psychocandy, but only if you imagine the Reid brothers as, well, slightly less pissed-off sisters. "Got a Reason" continues in a similar vein, with wide-eyed expectancy and heart(h)-warmed guitar licks. Budding and blooming like time-lapsed love in all its tender mystery, "Doortime" is an evolving ball of tapped cymbals, synth-orchestral swells, single-string guitar hooks, tumbling toms and breathless vocals, until it finally erupts in full Spector gadgetry.

But in pure pop terms, "Caught On" is the pinnacle. A ringing guitar intro reminiscent of Unforgettable Fire-era U2 is quickly superseded by a simply gorgeous vocal melody, the chorus somehow forgivable however close it skirts that of the Cranberries' "Dreams." The song condenses all the album's strengths, both sonic and lyrical: oddly phrased and accented vocals (Anne); flushed backing vocals (Emma); subtle mellow touches via keys, guitars or vibes (Adam); patient yet solid beats (Greg); liquid bass (Jude); generous blissed-out hooks plucked from some alternate world; tales of love, of falling, of magick; and always and forever, of "things get[ting] weirder."

If there's a slight dip after this, it only speaks to the strength of those four songs. "Reeling as You Come Around Again" settles into a perfectly likable midtempo groove, with a splash of ambient color, while "Talking a Hole in My Head" dares to crank both the BPMs and the decibels a notch or two, even flirting with discordance for a few bars, hardly an unwelcome mood-switch considering the otherwise languid uniformity of the record.

As with other recent plunderers of the past (hello, Interpol and the Strokes), it's nearly impossible to talk about this band's music without referring to the various trails that lead here; footprints left by shoes once avidly gazed at or long since discarded. In one sense, it's almost completely derivative (and I haven't even mentioned Mazzy Star or the Cranes yet), but in another, Fiel Garvie presents a contradiction. Reekie's voice, allied with that mercurial thread which runs through those artists whose singular vision shines this keenly, has resulted in music that's as archetypal as it is original.

Love is weird. So is Fiel Garvie. Good thing? Bad Thing? Depends on your perspective.

— David Antrobus (digitalis@shaw.ca)