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Review: 'DOG IN THE SNOW'
'Vanishing Lands'   

-  Label: 'Bella Union'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '15th November 2019'

Our Rating:
When you learn that one of this album’s core themes is environmental ruination, you know you won't be needing your dancing shoes.

It is the work of Helen Ganya Brown, aka Dog In The Snow, who recalls a three-week period during which: “I found myself in a dreamland and discovered it was being destroyed". Eight of the ten songs were written in this fevered state of mind. Fall Empire opens and closes with a warning: “If we did dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster”.

Brown was born to a Thai mother and Scottish father, raised in Singapore from the age of five to eighteen, then returned to the UK; she currently lives in Brighton.

The intense, introspective mood and dark electronica is also influenced by "brooding, immersive, filmic universes" together with outsider fiction; her chosen alias comes from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. In short, this is a record that can safely be described as Lynchian.

This is Brown's second full length release but her debut for Bella Union. It opens with a track called Light and closes with Dark. Somewhat perversely, she identifies the latter as “the most optimistic song on the album. The hooded black figures in the video to this track seem to tell a different story.

These deathly individuals (with shades of Bergman's 'The Seventh Seal') also appear in Roses and on the album cover to denote refugees desperate to escape their ruined homeland.

Like I said, this is not a dance record.



Hear 'Vanishing Lands at Bandcamp
  author: Martin Raybould

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DOG IN THE SNOW - Vanishing Lands