10"
Double trouble from Horn of Plenty this week, the first half of which is this debut from Sydney's Warm Currency, the duo of MP Hopkins and Mary MacDougall, relative veterans in the contemporary Aussie underground having served stints in Vincent Over the Sink and The Bowles. The folk-y lo-fi and occasionally atonal music they made as The Bowles offers some pretext for Returns, an eight song witching-hour collection that uses its primitive production style as an aesthetic device in its own right, creating a tape-hiss driven sense of creepy uneasy. Australians are good at this kind of thing - Albert's Basement has a catalogue of such expressions, and the magical cult spirit of the Garbage and the Flowers rings loud and true, though there's also some concessions to their commonwealth brethren of Bons/Spillage Fete, and the shadow of Flaming Tunes seems so endless now they can't help but stand within it. Horn of Plenty is developing a reputation for debased DIY folk digressions of this nature - see the Nein Rodere and Eyes of the Amaryllis albums also from this year - and Warm Currency make good company, though i'd argue they feel the most sinister of the lot with their spoken word transmissions from their unknown purgatory. Another fascinating endeavour from the HoP camp.
