Black and White Vinyl
Valentina Magaletti, Sarah Register and Matthew Simms reunite as Better Corners for a second presentation of their characteristically ominvorous, post-everything inventions and explorations. 'Post-everything', a term I've borrowed from the label to describe what the trio are up to, is essentially shorthand acknowledgement for the adventurous spirit and hard-to-define aesthetic that guides Continuous Miracles. We're all over the map here, touching on no wave, krautrock, ambient, avant rock, modular electronics and even shoegaze without staying for too long in any one particular realm so as to become defined by it. Register's vocals share more than a passing resemblance to those of Kim Gordon (with whom she has also collaborated in the past), channeling the late night confessional menace of 'Beauty Lies in the Eye', Halloween' et al, offering an accessible anchor point in songs that are often sprawling and centreless, never more so than on the mammoth 'Career Test', a 16-minute plus descent into dreamworld krautrock futurism. In many respects, this could be a classic outing on Kranky, caught somewhere between the desolate cowboy ambience of Pan American, the minimal refinement of Stars of the Lid and strange hypnotic klang of early Deerhunter. As such, Continuous Miracles is very much a collection forged in the spirit of collaborative innovation, probing at the edges of their collective interests and pushing outwards into new lands. The label also calls Better Corners an 'avant supergroup'. For once there might be some truth in such a classification.
