METALLIC FALCONS, Desert Doughnuts CD



A band whose members pose against a background that might be taken for that of a snuff movie and are clad in garb suggestive of the burkha, ETA, the feathered dress of some American Indians and the vengeful ghoul of the Japanese Ring movies is, it hardly needs saying, a band from which enigmatic and provocative music should be expected.

So it proves with this Brooklyn-based duo (one of whom is CocoRosie's Sierra Casady), who in Desert Doughnuts have made a debut album that might be filed alongside the master Scott Walker's The Drift as one of the freshest and most eccentric records of this current revolution round the sun. At times it sounds like a rocky and sheer tower of song in which Godspeed You! Black Emperor commune with Jefferson Airplane; at times ingenuous, soothing, spare and Far Eastern, a little reminiscent of Peggy Lee's Sea Shells and Stephin Merritt's Showtunes; and at times like Azure Ray rolling out their sepia-toned music-box of tricks for the soundtrack of a film adaptation of Donna Tartt's A Secret History.

It begins, however, with an ethereal tumult of Elysian voices, organ and guitar, but this dawn chorus's clamorous display of life soon retreats to unmask a desolate valley of ashes. A languid organ emits pale ambient light like a sallow sun hovering above a lone androgynous figure who sings, with Nico-like enunciation, of some wished-for 'white mountain' before finding itself in the middle of a freeway and surrounded by a fast-paced, tinny roar of guitars and drums.

If the topography established here seems to identify elevation with spiritual release from flat, barren spaces, then the two subsequent songs, 'Airships' and 'Nighttime & Morning,' envisage the attainment of such dispensation in terms which suggest what may be the almost terminal obliteration of the self: 'Come with me where rainbows die, come with me where birds fly'; and 'Night-time is for the boy who can fly ... We close our eyes until morning.' The former song is, appropriately, a fatalistic shadow-theatre waltz through melodic post-rock with the same dramatic sense of impending desserts (Desert Doughnuts?) as a Sergio Leone Western in which death is always poised at the edge of the frame, waiting to pounce and seize. The latter is a piece whose grave piano and burnt-out guitar combine in movements of sleepy, disintegrated consciousness and taut, instinctive repetition; but it is chiefly notable for its beautiful beginning, which has the voice of Antony drifting like sweet incense through ambient hiss, the effect being that of a song that draws the wanderer into an old church that he subsequently discovers to be empty of people and yet not devoid of presence.

Another guest performer, Jana Hunter, crops up on 'Pale Dog,' which revisits 'Airships''s waltzing rhythm. Here the dominant textures are provided by the chimes of a scratchy acoustic guitar, militant drums and withered-flower vocals of Hunter, who effectively conveys the impression of a crippled seer remembering a remote town's bloody history of settlement. Similarly, the atmosphere-smothered vocals on 'A Heart Of Birdsong' (featuring psychedelic guitar from Devendra Banhart) suggest an aged, weary, yet not quite spiritually defeated geisha; and indeed, as the Falcons' costumes imply, a thematic concern with those who have been, and those who continue to be, the victims of marginalisation and violence is present and correct throughout this work. On 'Disparu' (from the Latin 'dispar,' i.e. 'unequal'?), a sorrowful chill of angelic spirit voices encircles a childlike, saucer-eyed croon: 'Where are the angels? They disappeared one after the other, like the Indians.' More sanguine in the sense of hope rather than of blood is 'Snakes And Tea,' a scorched lullaby from the flickering flames of early rock 'n' roll's swooning and sentimental balladry, which sounds like a bright feminist bite into forbidden fruit.

Somewhere between the fate of being brutalised or hollowed-out in the wasteland and scaling the peaks of supra-sensuous freedom lie an incalculable number of stories, and rest assured that Desert Doughnuts has its share of these.