In December last year, Misfit Mod (aka Sarah Kelleher) won Nightshift’s Demo of the Month and the Queen Love Zero EP received a glowing review from Colin Mackinnon on this site this May. Islands and Islands is her first full length release and shows that standards have not dropped.
This is female electro-pop but, joyously, there are few similarities between it and the current crop of unsatisfying fashionistas: its understated assurance is much more attractive than Lady Gaga’s ugly and vacuous posturing and Kelleher’s voice doesn’t suffer from the same biting reediness that makes La Roux so insufferable. Fundamentally, of course, the main difference is that they’re all trying to make you dance while Misfit Mod seems happier soundtracking the morning after than the night before. Stylistically it is perhaps closest to Cat Power’s minimalism with undeniable vocal echoes of Mimi Parker from Low. It feels, like Bon Iver’s debut, to be a very intimate almost confessional album, with ‘Cars (I)’ seeming to be a mantra of self-persuasion and self-chastisement but, perhaps with the exception of Ghost Me, it’s all much warmer than Bon Iver’s ascetic introspection.
In many ways the album sinks or swims on your opinion of the vocals since the backing beats rarely provide more than the most basic of skeletal structures to work from. For me, Kelleher’s voice is beautiful – always languid but at one moment soothing and sultry, at another icily pellucid. On many tracks, the most characteristic element of the delivery is how her voice catches on and slurs around the edges of words, a tendency not helped by liberal use of reverb. Occasionally, as on ‘Tribes’ and ‘First Aid’ where there is nothing sufficiently interesting in the vocals to save the simplicity of the backing from becoming monotonous, this delivery sounds especially forced – as if searching for emotional content which isn’t there. But, more usually, it is effective in helping fashion the album’s wonderfully drowsy dreaminess.
The harsher critics among you might find it little more than coffee-table music, and it certainly is an album you could take home to meet your mother, but the ten tracks aren’t just predictable variations on a single, safe theme. From the comfortable and chocolatey ‘Sugar C.’, through the mantra-like ‘Cars(I)’, and the swooping, verdant ‘Valleys’ to the breathy and unearthly ‘Ghost Me’ it is an album of subtle variety and considerable beauty.