 | | The Bottomfeeders (pic: Andrea Ostholt) |
Trundling merrily into your rapidly warping, welcoming unconscious, songs wrap themselves around your wits like tendrils conjoined with insistent, Teutonic, bass-dominated rhythms. Smouldering cello, brass (dressed as a horse, no less) and bowed-saw emphasise quirks of fatal drama, setting scenes where front-dame Natalie pirouettes through bewitching pagan pantomimes. I’m Waiting For Loretta is a mangled spot-lit monologue, while The End fuses the ramblin’ round spirit of The Carter Family and Woody Guthrie with the air of a gambolling madrigal marking mourning in a Mediterranean hamlet. With a gale-force presence and panoramic voice spanning Dietrich to PJ Harvey, with a cursory curtsey to the curious, clipped quivers of Kate Bush along the way, The Bottomfeeders are a rare breed - staying clear of self-conscious cutesiness whilst being choice contenders to soundtrack a film, should there ever be one, detailing the internal workings of Tim Burton’s mind.  | | Tremelo Heart (pic: Andrea Ostholt) |
Opening with Solo Conversations, a majestically woozy waltz that would make the holiest hermit emerge into daylight seeking a fair maiden’s hand, Tremolo Heart’s subtly tumultuous swansongs skim surfaces of shimmering pop swirls with jagged, serrated ebbs of bittersweet balladry. Lingering in long-lost mornings after the aches before Janet Wolstenholme and Catherine Marsden’s voices reside in palatial splendour with graceful harmony haunted by dark humour and heartfelt flights of fancy, none more so than the affecting, fragile Peahen, where the voices compliment each other perfectly and utterly compellingly. Spiralling off on delightful tangents, Marsden’s Solaris and Wolstenholme’s Piece Of Mind demonstrate an idiosyncratically carefree attitude to classic tunesmithery, knowing that frayed edges thread into character. Conversations With Goatboy, with Marsden’s "Play it from the ******* heart" battle-cry shakes people – including Marsden herself who ends up serenading the floor – from late-night languor and percolates through the early morning mist in particular. | 
