And Those Who Were Seen Dancing

In 2013 Tess Parks was an up-and-coming young Canadian artist making her debut on 359 Music, the latest venture from U.K. label Svengali Alan McGee. While her fuzzed-out solo debut, Blood Hot, didnt quite vault her to star status, it led to an intriguing pair-up with psych rock explorer Anton Newcombe (Brian Jonestown Massacre), with whom she went on to make two collaborative albums. By engaging with a different, yet musically adjacent project, she was able to side-step the usual sophomore expectations and continue developing her art with some veteran help. Arriving nine years after its predecessor, Parks solo follow-up, And Those Who Were Seen Dancing, falls somewhere between the cool grit of her debut and the billowing psych drones of her work with Newcombe. Recorded over a two year period between Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, its a rather sprawling collection of midtempo grooves and densely packed layers of guitars, synths, and organs. Led by the hypnotic "WOW" and its sister song "Suzy & Sallys Eternal Return" (both revolve around eerily similar rhythm and chord patterns), the immediate effect is one of languid, but insistent forward motion. Under vocals that are equal parts airy and growling, the songs seem to chug along in repetitive swirls of spacey effects and warm distortion with no terminus in sight. At first blush, the whole set seems to blow by in a continuous fug of similarity, though repeated listens reveal a bit more nuance. The flowery "Happy Birthday Forever" and spoken word "Brexit at Tiffanys" conjure some late-60s vibes via an early-90s aesthetic and the slow pulsing grandeur of "I See Angels" feels like a throwback to Spiritualizeds hazy space rock. Still, the overall impression of Parks second solo album is less a collection of tightly crafted songs than of a willowy chunk of music captured during its slow passage on the timeline. How appealing this is depends on ones proclivities, but there is enough ear candy here to hold the attention, at least for a little while. ~ Timothy Monger