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Album Reviews
Album Review: Reigns – The House On The Causeway (Monotreme Records)
By Paul Vig | Published on Monday 9 March 2009
‘The House On The Causeway’ is electronic musicians Reigns’ third studio LP, and is the musical equivalent of a snowstorm in northern Russia. At times violent and at others frigidly cold and still, ‘Causeway’ is, ultimately, a beautiful scope of experimental electronic-folk seen through a broken kaleidoscope of monotone colour. Album opener ‘(Frontplane)’ sets the record’s landscape perfectly – echoing pianos, heavy, low synths and an uncanny sense of dread and trepidation. There are rare – and not entirely unwelcome – rays of sunshine though in tracks like ‘Mirrors At Night’ and the haunted but dazzling ‘Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen’. Like the (criminally) underrated Knife album ‘Silent Shout’, ‘The House On The Causeway’ is dark and narrative-esque, themed throughout with stories about winter, classical industrial landscapes and, of course, that haunted house on the causeway. If M83 makes the kind of electronic music that uplifts you to a place that is at once bright and exhilarating, Reigns pulls you down into the gutters and the marshy earth, but despite that, is as equally exquisite and surreal. TW
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