Coloma, Love's Recurring Dream
Anyone with a soft spot for moody, sentimental, orchestral pop will be thrilled with Coloma's forthcoming album on Italic, Love's Recurring Dream. Coloma's earlier work for Ware and Klein was wonderful stuff, a mixture of Martin L. Gore's morose arrangements and Cologne techno's swollen pulses. (Though English, the duo is based in the German city.) And the new album is even better and more self-assured. The instrumentation is richer, incorporating piano, electric guitars, drum kit, vibraphones, horns and more, all woven up into a shimmery fabric trimmed with subtle synthesizer tones and judicious touches of dubby atmosphere. I'm still just getting to know the album, which I suspect will be a process that unfolds over a long succession of Sunday mornings (the album's clear natural habitat). Someone close to the band has singled out "Standstill" as a favorite, but for my money the album's finest moment is "Should I Be Untrue," a wonderful, meditative, almost mantra-like song that stacks clarinets and voices in a heaping, multi-layered cake with "REGRET" scrawled in shaky fingerprints across the icing.
Here's the full album, streaming at Fairtilizer. (Use the forward & back buttons to advance through the tracks.)