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Enticing and bass driven throughout London trio The Violets’s ‘The Lost Pages’ dances delicately and contentedly between harder sounding dark art punk and pop melodies. At times the vocals creep into a subtlety of The Cure frontman Rob Smith’s sensuous ease of flow and an entrapment of Nico on The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’.
There is an obvious and deliberate intent to isolate the vocals at the head of each track and with such power and exuberance behind the delivery it is easy to see why. Poet metaphors and stylistic imagery pour from Alexis McCloed’s vocals as she sings powerfully on the charismatic ‘Foreo’: “With a method act dealing/She absconds like the ceiling/Burns a path to the sky/Frozen for feeling/Like a tear for deceiving turns dry.”
‘Co-Plax’ sounds somewhere between a downbeat track from The Gossip with slightly less of The Klaxons bravado and opener ‘Shade To Be’ offers a feeling of an American style of Punk. David Bowie seems an obvious muse for the band during ‘Half Light’ taken straight from the Ziggy Stardust era while ‘Nature of Obsession’ carefully soothes the album to a close.
‘The Lost Pages’ sounds almost lost in time, but this acts as the most powerful influencing factor for the band. The underground sound delivers a fine example of something around the same enigma as early Siouxsie & the Banshees.
There is a sense of feeling filthy after listening to this album as if you’ve cheated on someone or something. The distortion and heavy bass is at times malignant but violently transfixing and shows that The Violets have a bit more to offer then your typical punk fantasist.
