REVIEWS: April 2007 Archives
Here's another great review of Valet's Blood is Clean, this time from The Willamette Week/LocalCut.com written by the always right-on awesome Michael Byrne!
"VALET Blood Is Clean (Kranky)
[AMBIENT HAUNT]
We should expect nothing less than a devastating masterpiece from such a talented, prolific figure as Honey Owens, a.k.a. Valet. And Blood Is Clean—which was re-released internationally last week by Chicago’s renowned post-everything label, Kranky—is just that. It’s a devastating masterpiece of pulsating psychedelic chill, slippery haunting drone and solemn tribal percussion. Consider an empty, crumbling, mountainside Tibetan monastery. If it had a red-draped backroom lounge, Blood Is Clean is the sound that would seep from it.
Likewise, the record’s title track is certain to seep into listeners’ dreams, creepy swirls and all. It’s the most aggressive of the album’s nine tracks, punctuated by the line “My blood is clean/ But the devil lives inside me.” It’s at this phrase that the record moves from a ghostly ambient drift of layered vocal drones and bent-to-oblivion guitar lines into something truly and deeply arresting. A kick drum starts in, as does a simmering guitar line that sounds like what riding inside of an electrical cable must feel like: jagged, acidic, cold. The track alone is simply brilliant, even before considering the almost too perfectly timed train-engine wail that’s become a watermark of inner-Southeast Portland bedroom recordings (which this is).
Owens—a figurehead of Portland’s continuously ripening ambient scene (and sometime member of Jackie-O Motherfucker, Nudge and Dark Yoga)—trails “Blood Is Clean” with a wonderful, eerie few minutes of junkyard clatter (broken musical toys, found percussive objects) on “Burmajuana.” Dark, slow, loungy bass progressions then take over on “Tame All the Lions” before the record reaches a definitive (for both Owens and Valet) point with “My Volcano.” It’s a sublime appropriation of the freeform blues-folk reconsiderations that made Jackie-O’s Flags of the Sacred Harp—not to mention many Owens-involved electronic-based ambient projects—so wondrous. Its crescendo of deepening, droning organ, bent guitar notes and heavy, increasingly layered and looped strumming elicits pure chills.
But “My Volcano” is still merely the climax of a record built upon such chills. Every track here is a wonder of dark possession. It’s been almost a year since local CD-R label Yarnlazer originally released Blood Is Clean, but the record is already aging like the Gregorian chants its tracks glance upon: gracefully, or not at all."
another favorable review of valet's blood is clean, this time from a web magazine called lostatsea.net
"Valet
Blood Is Clean
Kranky
Rating: 7.2/10
Like Apple Martin, Grizzly Adams, and River Phoenix before her, Honey Owens has one of those names that precedes her persona. It is only natural to imagine the musician as a cotton candy-sweet pop starlet or a veteran lady of blues (like Koko Taylor or something). Given Owens' moniker, Valet, and a smattering of nondescript song titles ("Mystic Flood" or "Tame All The Lions"), it becomes easier to believe that her debut album could be readily described as subtle, personal, and experimental.
But the music of Blood Is Clean leaves little to such guessing games. Each numbered track is less like a song and more like a moment in Owens' creative lifespan, with sounds paralleling growing experiences and vocals vibrantly wavering as if emotional sensations. The recording process that fleshed out these eight mood-tunes was a series of single straight takes, with some of the final mixes including sporadic punch-ins for additional tracking. Owens cites Haitian voodoo music and Velvet Underground as some of her intrigues, and certainly in cuts "April" and "Blood Is Clean" one can hear the ghost of Nico's self-taught style, along with eerie makeshift tribal shakers and conga drums.
It is an overall spontaneity that makes this album distinguishable and extremely organic, as in "My Volcano" when Owens becomes lost in the repetitive and breathy chants of her freeform lyrics. During this time, Blood Is Clean's sound portrays the relationship between light and a mirror ball: a focused beam directed onto a constantly oscillating form, with jutting glints of light dancing about here and there. "My Volcano," as many of the album's other tracks, is centered upon the whirring flow of a droning chord (either from guitar or organ). For brief spans Valet is the exploration of what kind of euphony can be found when combining pedal effects, an electric guitar, a sampler, and an open mind.
Much of Blood Is Clean falls nicely in line with what people typically seek with avant garde, especially experimental, music. Tracks such as "North," the 13-minute closer, are based on productive extemporizing and finding noises. Compositions like this do not rely on pattern, rhythm, nor technicality, and many listeners need these conventions to have music appeal to them. Valet is an expression of one person's eccentric artistic palette, and sits high in the mood-sounds category.
Reviewed by Josh Zanger "
Today Valet's Blood is Clean has been officially released. Go to your local cool guy record shop and pick yourself up a copy! or order it now directly from Kranky!!!
Brainwashed.com reviewed it: (so did aquarius records...)
from brainwashed:
Valet, "Blood is Clean"
Written by Lucas Schleicher
Monday, 16 April 2007
I remember hearing a supposed "recording from hell" on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio program years ago and upon hearing the latest project from Honey Owens (Jackie-O Motherfucker, Nudge), I was immediately reminded of those apparently satanic vibrations. Blood is Clean isn't particularly vicious, tormented, or evil in character, but Owens' ghostly voice and hazy songs on this record are uniquely haunting.
The sixth of April is associated with a number of events throughout history: the earliest recorded solar eclipse in 648 BC is attributed to this day, Petrarch's first vision of Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon also occurred on April the sixth, it was the day that the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, and it happens to be the day that Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole. "April 6" is Valet's introduction to the world and it's probably helpful to think of each of these events as analogues of a sort to this record. Honey Owens is at her best on her Kranky debut, ushering alien and mystical sounds out of her mind and into the air, converting submerged rhythms into occult ritual, and turning out songs bathed in unquiet isolation and immutable violence. The supernatural are at work, conforming Owens' hands to a position reserved for an afterlife blues and shaping her lips into coded messages for the dead and the devils.
"April 6" opens with her spectral voice moaning wordless sounds into the air and is closely followed by ceremonial drums and tumbling winds. The sound of errata blow about in this storm of sound slowly closes the track, leaving an uneasy feeling in my belly and arousing suspicions about what might follow. Owens could've led the record down a predictably bombastic path at this point, rendering "April 6" nothing more than a prolonged tease in anticipation of some outward explosion. Instead, "Blood is Clean" converts all the stock piled tension into an internal hemorrhage, a whirlpool of fuzzed out guitars and rumbling bass. Her lyrics bring to mind no immediate ideas, but rather vague hallucinations of symbols and emotions that seem equally inviting and disconcerting. The guitar solo on "Blood is Clean" is perhaps one of the most phenomenal things I've heard all year. It tumbles out of the mix and practically destroys the rest of the song and pictures of war-torn landscapes or fire-scarred cities slowly evolve out of the music. It's a moment of musical and sonic brilliance, setting the tone for the rest of the record and completely erasing whatever preconceptions I might have had concerning Owens' music.
The whole of the album isn't quite as structured as "Blood is Clean;" songs like "Burmajuana" and "Tame All the Lions" sound less like songs and more like slowly evolving pictures that never quite acquire enough definition to become recognizable. Even when Owens sings, her voice is so removed and cold that it's hard to imagine it as an intentional part of the recording. It mixes well with the music, but instead of providing any order to the songs, it increases their apparitional qualities and further distances them from reality. They're elegant songs that evolve patiently, even if they don't immediately bring to mind traditional song structures. That is, perhaps, the stroke of artistry that sets Blood is Clean apart from the pack. So often artists will pretend to play with the idea of the song, stretching it beyond its classical limits either by destruction or some lesser form of decay. Owens' own approach maintains the artistry of song-craft and simultaneously expands its horizons.
By fluctuating between abstract and concrete music she creates a bizarre tension that's both enjoyable to the mind and entertaining in general. "My Volcano" combines these two approaches almost perfectly, mimicking the sometimes wandering nature of the otherwise well-defined and structured blues and inserting the more free-form nature of modern guitar performance into that style. It's my favorite piece on the album and perhaps the best thing Owens has ever written. "North" closes the album with a blur of washed out sound, a sound that brought to mind blizzards and the harsh landscape of the planet's polar regions. In a way it's a cleansing piece of music, washing away whatever relations to the world the rest of the album established by way of metaphor. In another way it calls to mind the strange and supernatural spirit of gothic America, immersing me, along with the rest of the album, in a frame of mind partially familiar, nightmarish, and wholly intriguing.
from aquarius records:
VALET Blood Is Clean (Kranky) cd 14.98
One of our favorite blasts of murky, moody cd-r bliss finally re-issued as a REAL cd by the fine folks at Kranky. And what a fine fit it is too.
Originally released on her own brilliantly named Yarn Lazer label, Valet is the work of one ex-San Franciscan called Honey Owens, who also does time now and again in Jackie O Motherfucker. We've mentioned it the past a few times, but there definitely seems to be a preponderance of vocal based music surfacing lately, Grouper, Bastard Wing, Pump Kinn, Lichens, and now Valet, who all use the voice as a major component of their sound. For Blood Is Clean, Owens twists and stretches her voice into broad sonic strokes and dreamy drones. But it's not just vocals, she also weaves darkly delicate little sound worlds, of muted tribal percussion, dark cavernous rumbles, lots of buzz and creak, alien transmissions, clattery minimal percussion, crumbling guitar grit, murky swirls of reverb and delay, the perfect sonic backdrop for all manner of processed and unprocessed vocals, ranging from sultry chanteuse like croon, to chopped and delayed Boredomsy "boop boop"s to breathy ambiance. Really beautiful and understated.
Packaged in a simple and striking cardstock sleeve, an expanded version of the original cd-r artwork...