/A\ is a new trio that were commissioned by Les Transphoniques St-Imier festival before the pandemic and although the envisioned show didn't take place the three musicians still came together and made this album. /A\ are Franz Treichler from the Young Gods with Emilie Zoe and Nicholas Pittet who has played drums with the late great Lee Scratch Perry among others.
The album starts with the slow dark brooding Hotel Stellar about a dingy hotel at a nameless seaside resort, it sounds like something band is going to happen in the way it might happen in a Cypress Grove/Lydia Lunch tune as Emilie Zoe's dark mysterious vocals whisper in your ear before eventually Franz Treichler comes in to reply and plead with his side of the story.
Grain Sand And Mud has the feel of an elegy for the soldiers who left there body parts in the Grain Sand And Mud of the battlefield, with a simple martial bass line as Emilie claims she knows nothing about death and the sense of dread and foreboding is kept at bay by shards of guitars cutting through the electronics and spare drumming.
We Travel The Light is dense and claustrophobic dank menacing synths and guitars with pleas and questions in the vocals that come up against sounds that break apart and seem to be stabs of interference and distortion as they figure out what you do now other than sitting back and listening to the wall of sounds travelling across your brain.
Fire In My Fingers has machine gun sounds like your fingers are on the trigger as the almost trip hop backing evolves and the gauzy vocals intone the Fire In My Fingers while sounding a bit like Spc Eco.
The B-side opens with Count To Ten with a slow acoustic guitar and organ before Emilie's whispered vocals come in on a song that has a Mazzy Star feel to it.
The Leaves is darker and danker synth and electronica with an insistent snare drum working against the distorting sounds and Franz and Emilie's vocals making this a very disturbing autumnal song as The Leaves fall opening vistas lost in the summer as they bury themselves in the woods.
Our Love Is Growing both for this record and hopefully for each other as the dark industrial searching outro instrumental slowly unfurls over 8 and a bit minutes of dark guitars spare drumming and atmospheric synths and electronics with the odd barely their whispers of the song title a couple of times on this most un-seductive of love songs.
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