An initial glance at the tracklist for would have you question whether you were, in fact, about to press play on a lost Sparks album. ‘The Girl On The Dior Counter Is Crying’, ‘Showgirl With Desire’ and ‘Pillow Spray’ are just a few song titles that demonstrate a Mael brothers-like propensity to write wryly about inanimate objects and melodramatic scenes. That, and a sibling connection, is where any similarity between Sparks and this potent collaboration between Dream Skills and Burn Into Sleep ends. The absurdist maximalism of the Maels couldn’t be further from the unsettling sparseness conjured from the partnership between brothers Don (Dream Skills) and David McLean, with Lauren McLean (both of whom make up the Burn Into Sleep portion of this project) completing the trio. Instead, these contained and concise eight tracks embrace the unknown with the three-piece reacting instinctively to the songs as they unfolded in the studio, ultimately yielding excellent results.
The subtle power of the details nestled within these tracks – a luminous ripple of guitar cutting through the tension of ‘The Girl On The Dior Counter Is Crying’, a rage of tenor sax mimicking an injured animal on ‘Undefined By Pain’ and the pulsing synth that persists with an air of alarm throughout ‘Bronx Zoo’ – deftly elevate these atmospheric mood-pieces. David McLean’s snarling tenor sax, in particular, counters the menace of drum machines and sustained synth notes, and with its smoky noir-tinged timbre, elicits a seduction to I Carried You in a very Lost Highway manner. The charged chemistry between Burn Into Sleep and Dream Skills is captured in their finely-tuned improvised playing (the brothers would react to Lauren’s spoken word pieces) across the LP. With I Carried You, the trio, each given plenty of space to showcase their individual strengths cohesively, have produced a completely beguiling body of work that’s simultaneously scary and sexy, one that you feel as though you’re eavesdropping on someone’s darkest thoughts but cannot turn away.
Floating within these (enjoyably) oppressive tracks is Lauren McLean, a prominent poet within Manchester’s experimental music community and since 2014, the counterpart to David McLean in this interchangeable project. Steady in her delivery, the clarity of McLean’s diction across these ambient arrangements is immediately captivating. “What kind of person am I?” she posits on the chilling opening song before further questioning herself, “To say I’d visit you the day before you died.” The chilling air emanating from McLean’s magnetic performance casts a wonderful folk-horror shadow on these unsettling tracks. In moments where you find yourself drifting off, she’ll casually drop disturbing imagery such as a bloodied mouth or dead bodies and heighten those macabre visuals with the smell of gunpowder. It’s these shocks, both themeatically and tonal switch-ups, that compel you to venture further into these songs.
Captivating in its searing sonic minimalism, I Carried You For Years & The Deers Are Still Hungry is a surprisingly layered body of work that rewards those willing to delve deep into its discomfort.
