HRSTA
Ghosts Will Come and Kiss Our Eyes
Constellation
Ghosts Will Come and Kiss Our Eyes is an entirely appropriate name for HRSTA’s latest album. It’s a disc full of soft drones, quietly encroaching instruments and vague vocal invitations. Roughly half the songs are instrumentals, haunted and free-flowing. The opener “Entre Le Mer Et L’Eau Douce” sounds like circus music from the turn of last century carried eternally on the wind through a desert. There’s little more than the clacking of accordion keys and thin hums of steel guitar to resemble wisps of a song. Similarly, “Tomorrow Winter Comes” is a gorgeous cohesion of steel guitar lines that gently oscillate into each other’s frequencies. “Kotori” brings some thunder and mountainousness to the soundscape with guitar distortion and rock-steady drums.
On the vocal half of the disc, Brooke Crouser sounds like a natural successor to Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. Her voice is both smooth and somnambulist, with words rolling lazily off her tongue that are nearly undecipherable. The group takes on The Bee Gees’ hit “Holiday” to wrap up the album and when Crouser intones “oh such a holiday” over the stark arrangement, she sounds utterly exhausted, destined never to look for relaxation again, with her band content to continue a wordless Lynch-ian wandering through barren landscapes.
Constellation Records: http://www.cstrecords.com
