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Unloved

Polychrome (The Pink Album Postlude)

    Following the release of The Pink Album last Autumn, Unloved return with Polychrome (The Pink Album Postlude). The record starts with a murmur of percussion and a metallic grind, as if the in-house band on a space station were warming up for the last show of the night. As phased vocals zoom through the heart of the track, Polychrome builds and builds to create a swooning hypnosis that’s part Tropicalia, part BBC Radiophonic Workshop and part psilocybin swoosh. Disorientating, strange, compelling, Polychrome is the opener and title track of Unloved’s first album of 2023.

    Over the last few years, Unloved have developed their own uniquely cine literate sound that draws a straight line from the moody, doom obsessed girl group records of the early 1960s to the sonic experiments of electronic pioneers like Delia Derbyshire and Silver Apples via the darkest corners of David Lynch films and the crisp, mono beauty of the French New Wave. Polychrome sees the band take a deeper dive into their world, with eight new tracks recorded at the same time at the band’s recently released third long player, The Pink Album, along with a welcome reappearance of Far From Here, a glorious widescreen tower of sound originally recorded and released as part of the band’s first EP, 2015’s Guilty of Love. 


    TRACK LISTING

    Polychrome
    Thrill Me.
    I Did It.
    Thank You For Being That Friend, You Know, The One You Never Want To Say Goodbye To.
    I Just Stop
    It's Hard To Hold You Close When The World Keeps Turning.
    Only For You.
    Far From Here
    Rain On My Parade 

    "The Pink Album", is dawn and dusk, the epic and the intimate. This 22-track double album, its title inspired by the artwork of Julian House, features collaborations with Jarvis Cocker, Étienne Daho, Raven Violet and Jon Spencer. It has its modulations: shocking at times but signifying also tenderness, intimacy, the carnal. It knows the shades of love, its nuances, and how it can be delicious - and frightening. Marvellous - and aching. Rather than be the silver lining to the cloud, "The Pink Album" mines deeper, to a precious ore, dark and glittering.

    Unloved: Jade Vincent, Keefus Ciancia, David Holmes. In Los Angeles, Ciancia - producer, keyboardist & creator of soundtracks - met David Holmes, the innovative, inquisitive and ingenious Belfast DJ who recast himself as master of song and image for film and television. Ciancia invited Holmes to the Rotary Room in Los Feliz, where the extraordinary Jade Vincent was singing.

    Tuesday nights in the Rotary Room in Los Feliz: a place of thrilling sonic alchemy, where musicians could experiment and collaborate at Ciancia and Vincent’s long-running salon. Holmes was asked to DJ and then to curate another night – and then another.

    Nights bled into later nights. Conversation spun into collaboration. These three artists, kindred spirits, sonic familiars, spoke the same language, one whose lexicon included Jack Nitzsche, Morricone, Nino Rota, the electronic sounds of Raymond Scott, the vocabulary of vocal instrumentalists and fearless raconteurs, Edda Dell’Orso, Ruth White, Françoise Hardy, Connie Francis, Brigitte Fontaine, Jacques Brel, Elvis and Lee Hazlewood. Finding sound and programmed beats, Keefus and David excavated and innovated, experimented and re-interpreted, creating a landscape for Jade’s melodies and lyrics, for sublime songs of lament and confession. The legendary Hollywood Vox Studios was where the Unloved trio formally came together as a band, in a studio almost original to its 1936 incarnation.

    Unloved’s immersive power and playful menace has fitted the slippery thriller series Killing Eve like a velvet glove, the thread to the needle. The music and sound of Unloved plays an integral role as their music is the soundtrack, the score, one of the core characters unseen.

    And now, in 2022, it’s the magnificent, metaphysical "The Pink Album". Be seduced by the whispered, languorous, bluesy, not so sweet nothings of “Love Experiment” and the lippy insouciance of “Turn Of The Screw”. Thrill to the infinite variety: “Mother’s Been A Bad Girl” is brazen, and “I Don’t Like You Anymore” gloriously sultry. “Foolin’”, where languid, world-weary jazz sounds are skewed by a phantasmagoric organ from a funfair hallucinated, and there’s the sparkling fury and celestial chorus of “Rainbrose”, as though some flower-festooned goddess is emerging.

    Go from the jaunty keyboards and hey! hey! hey! of “WTC” to the melancholic poise of “Ever”, the jittery electropop of “Girl Can’t Help It”, to the spacious Morricone-tinged “Lucky”. Be reminded that the past is a snare, the future doesn’t care. All we have is Now. There is psychedelic world-warping sound, but also times when reality is acutely, achingly, present. “Number In My Phone” is a beautiful, wistful paean to those no longer here. Jade’s remarkable voice - whispering, icy, lush, wounded, smoky - unifies the album with its striking diversity.

    Unvarnished, unabashed, unbridled, uncensored: rising from the ashes, this is raw emotion transmogrified. This is experimental free-flow form, from instrumental arrangement to voice. It’s Man, Woman, Human, Love and Death.

    TRACK LISTING

    01. Rainbrose
    02. Waiting For Tomorrow
    03. Now
    04. Girl Can't Help It
    05. I Don’t Like You Anymore
    06. Foolin'
    07. Mother’s Been A Bad Girl
    08. Boowaah
    09. Lucky
    10. WTC
    11. Sorry, Baby
    12. Number In My Phone
    13. Call Me When You Have A Clue
    14. No Substance
    15. Love Experiment
    16. Turn Of The Screw
    17. To The Day I Die
    18. Walk On, Yeah
    19. Accountable
    20. There’s No Way
    21. Ever
    22. Thinkin' About Her

    Jarv Is

    Must I Evolve? - Inc. David Holmes & Keefus Ciancia’s Unloved Rework

      From Jarvis re the mix: “David Holmes & Keefus Ciancia invited Catherine Rebeiro, Ennio Morricone, The Vampires of Dartmoor, Jean-Claude Vannier, La Düsseldorf, Alan Vega, Sergio Leone, Dario Argento & Jaromil Jireš to our Rave in the Cave.”

      TRACK LISTING

      Must I Evolve (Original Version)
      Must I Evolve (David Holmes & Keefus Ciancia’s Unloved Rework)

      Unloved

      Heartbreak Instrumentals

        Unloved release a very special companion piece to their critically acclaimed 2nd LP ‘Heartbreak’ for Record Store Day 2019. These instrumental versions reveal the full depth of the album’s productions and give a fresh perspective on the cinematic beauty of the music, as used in the soundtrack for hit BBC Spy drama ‘Killing Eve’. Perfectly complemented by pulp romance cover inspired artwork by Julian House, director of the band’s ‘Heartbreak’ and ‘Guilty Of Love’ music videos, this limited release is not to be missed. Limited to 500, includes download.

        “Sometimes it’s hard to say how you feel,” says Jade Vincent. “These songs are vulnerable stories for me to tell — they’re things I couldn’t say out loud. But I found that I could sing them. And then I closed my eyes when they would listen.”

        Listening to Vincent’s songs were her partner, the producer/composer Keefus Ciancia, and the DJ and producer/composer David Holmes. Together, Vincent, Ciancia and Holmes make up Unloved, the musical project that evolved out of a late-night Hollywood bar in 2015, released a stunning debut album the following spring, and this year crafted the soundtrack to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s acclaimed new series Killing Eve.

        Now Unloved bring us their second full length record Heartbreak, a record emboldened by its predecessor to be more emotionally exposed, more musically, lyrically, and vocally audacious. In the words of Holmes: “We just get together, had a load of ideas, and Jade went off and wrote and wrote. She got deep and deep. She has an amazing story. They are amazing songs. She excelled herself.”

        To enter the world of Unloved is to surrender oneself to a great musical immersion, one that seems to occupy the space somewhere between past and present, where thoughts soften and ideas mingle with twisted mancini-esque orchestrations, where music binds the dawn and dark.

        STAFF COMMENTS

        Barry says: Killing Eve, and it's tense atmospheres but dark humour flecked throughout wouldn't have been the same without Unloved's perfect soundtrack. Heartbreak may seem mildly chaotic at first, but brilliantly evocative orchestration and swooning, loungey vibes soon make you foret the chaos before flinging you once again into the fire. A beautifully produced and perfectly balanced filmic masterpiece. And who would have expected any less from this talented bunch?

        TRACK LISTING

        1 Heartbreak
        2 Remember
        3 Love
        4 (Sigh)
        5 Bill
        6 Devils Angels
        7 Lee
        8 Danger
        9 Fail We May Sail We Must
        10 Love Lost
        11 Crash Boom Bang
        12 Boy And Girl
        13 If


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