Melissa Guion’s second offering for Kranky retains the glassy gauze of her debut, 2016’s Precious Systems, but shaded starker and darker, framed by mechanical rhythms and humid industrial moods. She speaks of Sour Cherry Bell as something of a reckoning with her tools of creation: “I was curious to see how far I could go with them, even if that meant reaching the ends of their capacity to do what I wanted. But I never exhausted them and they never exhausted me.” Utilizing her trusted combination of instrumentation, Guion tracked the record between her New Orleans home and rehearsal space, capturing chemistries both intimate and expansive. The songs sway between twilit shoegaze, downer ballads, and gothic pop, mapping a delicate palette of electric melancholies, though in retrospect she cites as her primary muse the notion of power: “lost and found, corporeal and cerebral, harnessed and exploited, of one and many, in this reality and the next.” Sour Cherry Bell reverberates beyond the here and now into scenes unseen, worlds unheard.
LP $19.00
09/18/2020
CD $14.00
09/18/2020
***BACK IN STOCK!!! MELISSA GUION is MJ GUIDER. She lives and works in New Orleans and previously released the Green Plastic extended play cassette in early 2014 on the Constellation Tatsu label. Employing heavy washes of bass and a deft touch in mixing, she uses stark contrasts to construct a semi-surreal aural space. What results are songs that exist in a wholly contained sound environment, minimal yet lush, spare yet saturated, and most importantly, entirely compelling. Having recently expanded to a trio, the group will be making select live appearances following Precious Systems release.
LP $19.00
07/15/2016
CD $14.00
07/15/2016