Anilore
Lia Fail
Yan Shen
Anilore presents Lia Fail, their third album (fourth if you include Lull, their EP from 2017) as a “reverb-hazed canvas of images, scenes and memories,” and they’re pretty right about that. A few seconds into the title track I am driving to Gainesville, Florida, in the dark, A Future History of the Frigid Polar Night by Polar droning, barely, from the car’s CD player. I’m almost sleeping.
Polar was Kristy Moss and Ed Ballinger and some other people, a 1990s art project that got weird before the albums even came out (Lies Set by the Polar Mob, A Future History of the Frigid Polar Night, both 1998), a band I’ve always missed. The last thing I’ll say about Polar is that Anilore is letting them off the hook, finally, after 25 years.
The trio hails from New Paltz, NY, a 15-minute drive to the house my family rented in the ’60s, beautifully idyllic and a perfectly appropriate part of the world from which to write shoegaze music. Lia Fail is eight gorgeous songs, plush vocal and instrumental layers and even some percussion, cinematic drama, warbles — each song a single, though only three tracks were tagged for that: “Firefly,” “Entangled,” and “Motion In Maze.”
I’m going to need another 10 years of road trips to get the lyrics down, and that’s okay with me.
