Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions – Bavarian Fruit Bread
Listening to Hope Sandoval is like diving into a vast pool whose icy surface gives way to a bath-temperature mixture of blood and honey. The jarring liquid texture seems perfectly natural because, like Beth Orton or Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn, Sandoval makes the most sense at 3 a.m., when thoughts tender and macabre lull the uneasy mind into a state that passes for sleep.
As with Sandoval’s work in Mazzy Star, Bavarian Fruit Bread seeks comforting currents a human body might create in dreams. Sandoval and the Warm Inventions don’t make music that really goes anywhere: it appears, drifts, and then it’s gone. In the mystically foggy atmosphere of a track like “On The Low”, instruments emerge and submerge, the sole earthly sound a harmonica as haunted and unsettling as a train whistle coming from the direction of tracks that are no longer there.
Sandoval continues to extrapolate elegant variations on Velvet Underground ballads such as “I’ll Be Your Mirror”. (The glockenspiel on “Suzanne” is a giveaway.) However, she finally closes the Nico-like distance that sometimes made her previous exercises in romantic withdrawal uninviting. Her twang on the cello-guided “Feeling Of Gaze” and her lush, teasing hesitation on “Around My Smile” generate unexpected but welcome heat, while the Warm Inventions surround and envelop her rather than keeping to the rear.
Still, beyond expressions of heartbreak and yearning, Bavarian Fruit Bread offers existentialism: This music just is. In its quietly intense, gently brooding, immersively bittersweet beauty, that’s all it needs to be — especially in the small hours, when any other noise would stain the night.