Winter Family: On Beautiful Days (digital, Murailles Music, September 2024)

Chevaliers, the last LP from this French–Israeli duo (okay, they say they are from “Jerusalem and Lotharingia”, the latter of which existed in some form between 855 and 959 C.E. and straddled modern-day France and Germany… but they also say that they’ve lived in Lorraine, which ended up in the French side… and she sounds French… so I’m going with that… but I digress!) was one of my albums of 2022. It was (is!) a magical thing of mostly quiet pipe organ drone accompanying ASMR-style murmurings of multilingual poetry. I still love it.

This new record is quite different. For one thing, it’s much more song-based. It’s also quite varied. We Forgot We Can’t Fly is a kind of warm and fuzzy ambient-post-rock (played, I think, on some kind of analogue electronic organ, although you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Fenneszified guitar) with a brief spoken-word bit. Daughters of Jerusalem is a very different affair, with what strikes me as a kind of reggae skank and a vocal which, while still largely delivered in a monotone, is delivered with a song-like rhythm… at times it almost leans towards hip-hop, maybe, even? The vocals are painfully topical, being essential a hymn to the peaceful, multicultural, open-minded city of singer Ruth Rosenthal’s youth… It’s not subtle, but I find it rather moving. More surprising still is His Story, underpinned by a bass-heavy buzzing industrial synth sound. Black Sun is a rather delightful close-miked piano number. Again, the vocals are monotone, but they’re delivered like a rock lyric, with a verse/chorus structure and everything.

And so on.

Inevitably, I don’t love every song here equally. But somehow they do manage to tie these disparate styles together into something greater than the sum of its parts. And they are consistently interesting, sometimes startling (in a good way — and, yes, Rothschild does seem to quote pretty directly the synth line from, er, Gangnam Style), and very often powerful or beautiful or both.

I bought this from the band’s bandcamp page.