Through The Devil Softly

We Say...

Review by Matthew Fritch

Hope Sandoval has had a brilliant career as an anti-frontwoman, a lead singer all too happy to get lost in a swaying tempo and heavy-lidded sonic haze. It's as if the pining megaballad "Fade Into You," her 1994 alt-rock radio hit with Mazzy Star, represented a self-fulfilling prophecy for the relationship between the sleepy murmur of Sandoval's vocal delivery and the equally somnolent music behind her. In the beginning, Sandoval was overshadowed, creatively speaking, by Mazzy Star guitarist, songwriter and svengali David Roback. A prime mover in Los Angeles' mid-'80s Paisley Underground scene (which also included the Bangles, the Dream Syndicate and the Three O'Clock), Roback had a reputation as a rigid perfectionist and musical puppet master to girlfriend/vocalist Kendra Smith in narcotic dream-pop outfit Opal; Smith's resignation from the group led to Roback's recruitment of the East L.A.-born Sandoval for the similarly minded Mazzy Star in 1989. With that band on indefinite recording hiatus since 1996, Sandoval went to work with My Bloody Valentine's Colm O'Ciosoig — who, like Sandoval, knows a thing or two about working with a reclusive control freak — on 2001's chamber-folky Bavarian Fruit Bread.

The duo's second collaboration again touches on British folk and the sort of indie-rock high-plains moaning patented by Mojave 3 and Red House Painters, but Through The Devil Softly is a more sultry and slithering affair. "Baby Sam" gazes at Pink Moon moodiness, "Trouble" is a reverb-soaked David Lynch moment, and the finger-cymbal hypnotism of "Fall Aside" finds Sandoval achieving a Stevie Nicks-like witchiness. Throughout the album, there are hints of a young Marianne Faithfull in Sandoval's 4-a.m. bedroom croakiness, yet a subtle country twang finds its way into the velvety foreground. As Through The Devil Softly winds its way to ever darker and foggier conclusions — final track "Satellite" sounds like a long-distance phone call coming over frayed wires — it becomes more and more difficult to decipher whether Hope Sandoval is a desert-noir flower or an English dream-pop rose.