Search - Azure Ray :: Burn & Shiver

Less is more on Azure Ray's second album

M. Jason | Northern California | 05/11/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"While everyone is listening to Moby, one of the artists that he (Richard Melville Hall) puts on the stereo is Athens, Georgia experimental/chill/twee duo Azure Ray. They co-wrote and performed track 4, Great Escape, on Moby's 18, invited into a coterie along with Sinead O'Connor, Angie Stone, and MC Lyte -- Moby's other collaborators for his first LP in three years.    A month ago Azure Ray (multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Orenda Fink and keyboards player/vocalist Maria Taylor, both also in Now It's Overhead and previously in Little Red Rocket and Bright Eyes) released for the US their second full-length, Burn And Shiver, on Athens indie label Warm Electronic Recordings. It follows their November EP, out since January on Saddle Creek, and their debut, self-titled full length, released January 2001 on Warm. Azure Ray make heavy-duty introspective dream music, boldly minimalist and anti-pop, quiet nearly to the point of disappearing into silence. In moments the new album's melodies and emotional colors touch the transcendency of Glasgow's Adventures In Stereo, who, like Azure Ray, make magic of multi-tracked, reverberant female vocals and elemental, repetitive themes. Floating over synthetic bells, hints of percussion, strings, and acoustic guitar, Fink's and Taylor's lyrics hang in the air almost indecently personal (It's funny how you can forget there's a world outside yourself/ Where the one who loves you keeps on living/ Without you there). The album's an open diary on a bed illuminated by a shaft of light from the hall... you walk up to it quietly, hesitate, then pick it up. It's OK... she left it there... you know she trusts you and wants you to read it. Azure Ray's minimalist and highly personal aesthetic, focused by producer Eric Bachmann (previously in Archers Of Loaf, now in his solo act, Crooked Fingers), reminds me a bit of the Cluster & Eno LP from way back in 1977. First exposure to that album left me wondering, in its time, whether the artists were just [messing] with me -- whether they arrogantly expected to get away with less studio and production time by proffering such extreme simplicity as 'art.' An open mind and a few more listens eventually paid off well back then, and does now. The Cluster & Eno record remains timelessly beautiful in its minimalism and will forever. I predict the same to prove true of Burn And Shiver. (Review originally appeared on Rockbites.org)"