“I can’t keep anything still, I can’t keep anything down, I am so madly sick of love now”. By the time that Water – the startling debut album from the London-based duo Rainer – has reached the song ‘Laws’, Rebekah Raa has tired of it all. Her world-weary voice searches for meaning as it negotiates a path across a quicksand of synthetic sound. Yet no sooner does the ensuing ‘Marry’ creep into view and she is once more invested with fresh hope. Water is a switchback ride of complex emotion, a lyrical exploration of those feelings of interpersonal love oft associated with the vagaries of human relationships.
The music mimics this journey. One minute it can be awash with unbridled optimism and joy – as on the record’s powerful title track, a conduit from which the entire album seems to flow – the next it falls dramatically from grace into a deep well of despair. On ‘Nocturn’, Raa vacillates between loving her paramour to death and just wanting to dance the night away as the song begins to gather an ever greater momentum, hurtling towards its denouement as if she and her musical partner Nick Nell’s very lives depend upon it.
Like Lana Del Rey and the New Zealand chanteuse Lorde before her, Rebekah Raa possesses a doom-laden larynx that can convey all manner of emotion as it slides easily between choral thunder (as on ‘Trouble’) and breathy lightning (on the slinky, sinewy ‘Skin’). And in Nell’s sublime wash of electronics – an often sparse, occasionally sumptuous texture that absorbs a wide range of influences from early 80’s synth pop to Martin Denny-era tropicalia – Raa’s voice has found the perfect vehicle to transport it from one stunning moment in time to the next.
[Rating:4]
Water is released on 18th May 2015 through Kissability/Algebra See Rainer live: 21st May – The Stillery, Camden LONDON (Free Entry)
