Sian Alice Group’s first full length 59.59, on NY label The Social Registry, is a valiant effort to reassert the importance of the album as a whole work of art. Named for the album’s running time, and set out across four sides of wax, this young band has crafted a complete work that requests a full listen, rather than one bought in bits off iTunes. Recorded at the band’s central London studio/practice space, and produced and engineered by the band’s drummer Rupert Clervaux, provided the band a self sufficiency that allowed the songs on 59.59 to be organically assembled through many sessions of improv and experimentation. Clervaux’s recording and production style emphasizes a very naked and clean appreciation for each of the musical elements, and that adds a sort of wide-eyed purity to the music, even when it takes it’s druggy and dark turns into musical oblivion.
The Sian Alice Group officially began in 2007 when long time friends Sian Ahern (vocals), Ben Crook (guitar), and Rupert Clervaux (drums), finally began playing and recording together. Rupert and Ben had been in and around music for some time, and with their experience and chemistry were able to coax a shy Sian Ahern into giving lead vocals a try. The results were stunning and immediate, as she added haunting, yet unaffected lyrical dimensions to the band’s psychedelic blues and folk inflected leanings.
The three musicians share a long standing passion for music in all it’s varieties and genres, and they have created a sort of “anti-rock”, rock band capable of traveling wide expanses of sonic terrain with “cinematic” vividness. Towards this end, the band added violinist/keyboardist Sasha Vine to fill out their more pastoral sides, while stretching and strengthening their own multi-instrumental leanings. The band has also collaborated with other Social Registry artists including members of Gang Gang Dance, and more recently playing with NY super-guitarist Mike Bones, whose playing finds sympathy with the bands heavier romps through narcotic inducing rock.
Each of the four sides on 59.59 play nicely as a unit, and to really get the gist of the varied spaces this album explores requires a full listen from beginning to end. For instance, the albums opener, “As the Morning Light”, is a simmering sort of early morning meditation made from strings and cymbals, with Ahern’s voice rising to the horizon like the first light of day. However, the wearied peace of this first number is broken when the second song, “Way Down To Heaven”, sets the album’s tone for stark and haunted blues, with Sian Ahern singing in hypnotic acceptance and gospel zeal, “I’m on my way to heaven now!” Way down to heaven! 59:59 offers other gnostic delights, including musical interludes named for the time on the album which they appear, like “Interlude 19’39″”, where very beautiful and psychedelic bubbles seem to fall upward into the sky, or the free music freak-out of “When…” where at times an agitated and disembodied voice warbles from behind a fog of golden static.
59:59 is album rock in the best sense! The band has made the most of it’s independence by creating a musical environment in which they could play and record on a daily basis, thus allowing the songs to come about on their own time and giving the album it’s organic and experimental feel. And to it’s credit, Brooklyn label The Social Registry continues to support an awesome roster of killer bands, by giving it’s artists the room and trust to explore their musical passions! Got a taste for exploring the outer fringes of rock, we recommend Psychic Ills record Mirror Eye, Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna, or All the Way by Growing! We are also looking forward to I.U.D. the duo of Gang Gang Dance’s Lizzi Bougatsos and Sadie Laska of Growing and Extreme Violence. Their debut, The Proper Sex, set for a March 24th release, promises sonic destruction at the hands of “hyper-feminist vampires”, and if Lizzi’s work in Gang Gang Dance is any evidence it should be a poly-rhythmic and beguiling affair!
