Robert Ascroft – Echo Still Remains

Review: Robert Ascroft is best known as a Hollywood photographer, a capturer of celebrity essence who finds something new to look at in the most familiar faces of our age. It’s a bit of a stretch, but you could think of Echo Still Remains as a series of audible snapshots, that places much lauded singers against novel, faintly noirish backdrops. Here he works with eight distinctive artists — not so well known as the movie stars he photographs, but well-established in their niches — and surrounds them with swirling nocturnal sonics. Ascroft has a definite affinity for chilly, frictionless soprano voices. Britta Phillips whispers and insinuates in “Where Did You Go,” her voice gliding effortlessly across a moody turbulence of drums, piano, guitar and bass. You’ll get a whiff, here and elsewhere, of Julee Cruise’s disembodied eeriness. If Echo were a movie, it might very well be a David Lynch film. Similarly, the Chromatics’ Ruth Radelet sings “Faded Photograph” with dream-state serenity as synths arpeggiate and tone-washes swell. The best of these wan, romantic crooners, however, is Ora Cogan, her tone pristine but clouded with indefinite haze. She takes the lead in “Dorian Gray,” the cut with the wildest, most shoegaze-y guitar, albeit tamped down to a distant roar. These tracks are all good, but Ascroft is most interesting when he diverges from this cooing-amidst- turbulence aesthetic. When garage-punk icon Kid Congo Powers turns up, for “Devil at the Door,” the temperature rises significantly, as primal drum beats thump and Powers holds snarling, rock idol court. And then there’s the death-droning, goth-haunted bluesman Guy Blakeslee from the Entrance Band, plunging into the abyss in “Weightless.” Nothing airy or urbane or detached about that. Ascroft likes a couple of his collaborators so well that he uses them twice. Christopher Owens, once of Girls, puts his emotion-roughened tenor to work on driving, haunted “On the Run,” and the more pensive “Shouldve Stayed in Bed,” imbuing these cuts with immediacy and fluid phrasing. Zumi Rosow from the Black Lips belts and growls and flutters in big dramatic torch song “No One Loves You” and swaggers against a “Walk on the Wild Side”-style bass slides in “Empty Pages.” Not much information was provided about exactly how these collaborations worked, how much input the guest collaborators had and how much Ascroft himself directed them. The artists do manage to put their own stamp on their songs, varying the textures and tempos and moods, but remaining within Ascroft’s very cool, sophisticated, noir film-like framework. — dusted

Track List: 01 - Faded Photograph 02 - Empty Pages 03 - Where Did You Go 04 - Should've Stayed in Bed 05 - Dorian Gray 06 - Devil Opens the Door 07 - Weightless 08 - Vagabond 09 - No One Loves You 10 - On the Run

Media Report: Genre: dream-pop, indie-rock Origin: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)

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