Alice Texas - Gold

All Music Guide

Alice Texas creates such an intense, slow-building burn on its self-released debut album that the band's music sounds almost combustible. There is a shimmering quality to most of the playing, and the music, even when supporting dark thoughts or breaking into fractured noise, as it does frequently, is as beautiful as it is piercing. Almost every song is in part a heartbreak ballad -- or at least begins as one -- if you can, in fact, call them ballads at all. Although the music is often stark and forlorn, yearning and lulling, the songs are more like long, slow drags on your addiction of choice, incredibly sexy but also carcinogenic, dangerous but with a mesmerizing, suspended quality. Passionate desperation of such high quality only comes along once every -- well, once every PJ Harvey album. The likeness is no accident. Jim Sclavunos -- who handles most drumming and keyboard duties on the album, as well as some producing -- played with such Harvey forebears as Nick Cave the Bad Seeds a...nd Sonic Youth. Such a lineage is well-deserved, too. Vocalist and songwriter Alice Schneider has a bluesy voice that is seductive but also agitated, capable of tackling the most tender of acoustic sentiments ("Guardian Angel") while giving an extra haunted dimension to the dreamlike conjurings of the title track. And like the Bad Seeds, Alice Texas turns its urban-bred -- in this case, New York City -- gloom into penetrating Southern gothic landscapes with some of the glassy, inebriated vibes of Ennio Morricone's film music ("Dream Time") and a bit of Western twang (courtesy of Schneider's stint living in Kansas and, on "Lullaby," a creeping bassline from former Go-Between Robert Vickers). Surprisingly, though, Gold is ultimately hopeful and romantic, more about redemption from the depths than about irredeemable resignation. And the band can positively pop at times, particularly on the melodically buoyant "Big Black Motorcycle," which affects the attitude of the Shangri-Las while, somehow fittingly, namechecking both William Faulkner and the Archies. The album may not exactly be sugar, but it is pure gold. [Available directly from the artist by emailing Schneider at /alicetexasexcite.com.] - Stanton Swihart, All Music Guide Read more Less