Join our mailing list
Empress - Tea For Two 7"
Empress are one of the most fragile, heart wrenching bands to have emerged from Leeds well, ever. They made a series of fine LPs and 7"s on 555 a few years back (which often got them compared to Low) but following an album on Stephen Pastel's Geographic imprint the band has laid low. What is certain now though is that their new songs or the equal and quite possibly the better of anything they've done before.
Songs
- People Do Worse
- Drink The Town Dry
- Tea For Two
- Tutto Solo
Reviews
An excellent return. Their music is simply wonderful. A quiet pastoral drift with bits of guitar, piano, electronics and lovely lady vocals.
Like the ever-lovely Low, Leeds duo Empress make music that is ultra-slow and not so much ultra-quiet as infra-loud, in that the lack of apparent volume mearly cranks up the tension in your ears, making each slowly plucked acoustic guitar not and breath of Nicola Hodgkinson's wispy vocals as important as a stadium riff. Raindrop-light piano and unobtrusively shuffing beats add more featherweight texture: the title track of this four-song 'Tea For Two' EP is so subtle that you can only conclude that it must have recorded itself whilst they had popped out for a cuppa. AB
Delicately frail 4-track offering from Empress that oozes tear stained lullabies and deep melancholia like it was going out of fashion. 'Tea for Two' has the same kind of icy fragility that's more associated with the likes of Mum, clockwork toy electronics recalling early Plone quietly unfurl growing in stature from a whisper to a murmur all the time Nicola Hodkinson's softening vocals caressing the surface. 'Tutto Solo' is both haunting and tragic sounding so much so that you'll find it difficult to resist giving it a re-assuring cuddle. Rustic chords and a listless piano with the merest of clicks and shuffles flutter elegantly catching cold in the winters gaze. So sparsely arranged is 'People do worse' that you'll literally be heart breaking on the spot, shyly beautiful but painfully sorrowful as the near still melodies almost pick at your emotions. Concluding with 'Drink the town dry' that courts with child like melodies lovingly lost in their own beguiling magic, it's enough to make a grown man weep and I should know. All in all think of a docile Broadcast being remixed by Boards of Canada and Low in the background fooling with the resulting tapes.