Perhaps still winning the theoretical prize for the artist name least evocative of their musical style, New York’s Helen Ballentine returns with a second album, not of deafening death metal, but minimalist, slow, soft, ethereal, reflective, sensually breathy, ambient and gentle folk numbers in an LP that “does not capture experience – it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable”. In other words, this is a series of thoughts and sensations around which a circle is tentatively drawn. Written over several years and inspired by long periods of extreme solitude, this really is a long, slow bath of a release, fragile and at times, but also rather beautiful in a delicate, Enya sort of way, variously with touches of piano, percussion, soft synths, acoustic guitar, and multi-layered vocals. Highlights include Dragon (“Inside a glass case / I arrange my things / Blue car, CD from a movie / Is it armour or memory?”; Changes (“I remember / The winter, too / You were still / A stranger, too/ Something darker/ Turns / Now a memory / Changes me”); the song that most aligns form and subject, Exhale: “What if I just stop here? / On the verge of / Like an exhale it will come / If this song is like breathing”); and closer The Emptying: “I fall to my knees / As I watch her watch herself on the screen / I'm moved to tears, I can see me/ And like her, I am emptying/ What surrounds us leads beyond the scene … Because the burden lives within us all.” Out on Dirty Hit Records.
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