CD: kNIFE and fORK - The Higher You Get the Rarer the Vegetation

If the name is both banal and irritating – seemingly you are expected to spell it kNIFE and fORK – this album is a triumph on its own terms. Despite it being at times overly self-conscious, there are occasional flashes of dark genius.

The band are a duo, Laurie Hall and Eric Drew Feldman, who last made an album eight years ago. They have attracted raves from PJ Harvey and Frank Black, although as Feldman has worked with both artists, and they are probably mates, how seriously should we take their plaudits? Still, it gives you some idea of the aesthetic parameters, as does the fact that the album's title comes from a Salvador Dali quote. 

Feldman also played with the late Captain Beefheart. Half of the record was recorded at the Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco where Beefheart recorded, and the shade of Mr Van Vleit's dark, crunchy, avant-blues hovers over this disc, notably on “Nicotine” and “Pocket Rocket". More original and fetching than the post-Beefheartisms are the first four songs, which are cunning and beautifully arranged Southern Gothic miniatures. There’s something haunting and dream-like about them, by which I mean the type of dream you have where you are somewhere familiar but suddenly some detail makes it clear something is terribly wrong. You think you may have heard these songs before but you haven't, and Laurie Hall’s pleasantly malleable voice works perfectly portraying an Everywoman who has taken the lift to the bottom floor and discovered some monsters.

Rather than Frank Black, I found myself reminded more of Jack White's fringier projects, like the Danger Mouse produced Rome album, with its intense love of retro texture put in the service of new songs. But if Rome was a little precious, this lands on the right side of the line between artifice and heartfelt. Its intensity gets slightly hard work towards the end; a couple of spare ballads might have given the listener more time to breathe in the suffocating gloom, and the last track goes off the plank into melodrama. But within this inventive album there are several rock solid gems, such as the addictively rocky opener “Tightrope”, the stuff-a-wild-bikini poptastic “I Count the Days”, and the superbly moody “Tailspin".

Watch video of "Tightrope"