Nalle - Wilder Shores of Love

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4...according to our Brian on Thu 19 Aug, 2010.

Driving the boys in t' office wild with excitement this week is the new album by Nalle. Fronted by a woman (Hanna Tuulikki) who sounds like a cross between that bird out of The Knife, Stephanie Hladowski, the little girl from Mum, that old bag Diamanda Galas and both of the lasses from CocoRosie with their voices arcwelded together to create one trilling symphony of otherworldly menace & tinnitus baiting mischief. Apparently she's a bit like a little pixie - I can't imagine anything but a pixie singing in such an alarmingly high fashion. I'm getting my head round it all now, the music is truly free folk & crazed improv but somehow retains a distinct listenability. Plus there's something utterly compulsive & engaging about much of this unusual record including some really fascinating layered vocal segments that should appeal to folks who dug Medulla by Bjork. I've not much more to say about this except it's a really bloody interesting release with some seriously progressive ideas. Ace.

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180-gram vinyl limited to 500 copies in heavyweight textured sleeves, CD limited to 1000. "For me, the songs on The Wilder Shores Of Love began to imprint themselves on my consciousness as ideas played on a resonator guitar by Hanna in the middle of her kitchen. We had bathed in The Siren's Wave, immersed ourselves in making an album which broadened the language of Nalle, following their remarkable debut By Chance Upon Waking, but "more of the same" was never going to be a satisfactory path to a third album. The question arose: what to do with these songs? They didn't quite seem to fit with what Nalle had been doing. Well, let's try recording them and see where it goes... and so it began one Saturday afternoon, just me and Hanna trying out some ideas. Unto You and Into A Whole were the two songs to be recorded first and that's where the old valve Revox tape machine got involved in the sessions, the same type used to record the first Rolling Stones album, oh fact-fiends! The use of this on Hanna's voice soon became known as "The Gene Vincent effect" and it's heard on Into A Whole and Sunne's Return. The idea of the solo album worked in close up with those two songs, but when the perspective zoomed out, there was a different context showing the way forward and it included these songs in - yes - a new Nalle album, one which pushed the stylistic barriers out, just as Siren had done in following Waking. Chris Hladowski had new strings and things to beguile us - the electric saz rocks out on Lily like no other - while Aby Vulliamy's voice now ranked upsides with her viola in expressive nuance on Bring The Traveller Back To Land. Whilst Songthrush fused the cadence of birdsong with elements of free jazz, the title track to the album and Sunne's Return introduced a piano to the timbre of the band - not just any old piano. This baby grand had been in Aby's family for many years and had travelled from Norfolk, bringing its own distinct tone and characteristics. The Wilder Shores Of Love had been part of the Nalle live set for a while, closing with a jig section, but it took on a whole new beautiful melancholy when underpinned by that piano. These Wilder Shores Of Love became the wider horizons of Nalle, each song now given its setting in lyric form within the intricate and exquisite sleeve art". John Cavanagh, April 2010

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