Albums

Tells - Hope Your Wounds Heal

Thomas 01/05/2006

Rating: 3/5

Track Five of this ambitious, if patchy record sums it up well, opening with a free jazz blackout that sounds like a school orchestra playing a Mars Volta song, before ticking away moodily for a few minutes as Caroline Ross coos unintelligibly like a trainee Liz Fraser. Much of the opening half, whilst never indulgent, is high on abstract noodling and low on atmosphere or indeed, anything to really chew on.

The album finally comes good in its final third, the title track a bad dream that floats menacingly on a bubbling, pulsing keyboard sample, topped with unsettling lyrics (the icy "your blood will flow in place of love") while 'Their Chimes Are Our Undoing' is - finally - a track that genuinely makes you sit up and take notice.

Guest Ryoko Tomaya urgently whispers in Japanese until suddenly Ross' voice, drums and chiming guitar spark the song into life, Ross' vocals multitracked into dizzying choral effect before it all ends as you'd hope, backwards. Fabulous.

An interesting record, strange, pretty if sometimes unfocused, it certainly hints that a rifle through Tells' record collection would be a fun afternoon