Soft Speaker – ‘Priestess of Carnality’ (2021)
If you’ve been rolling with Soft Speaker over the last few years, you’ll be delighted with their new outing ‘Priestess of Carnality’, an album that brings new changes to the band, along with a new vision for their music, with Paul Foreman saying to me, “The future is uncertain, as Blair Douglas (bassist) has moved to St. Louis, yet I believe that this album is our best body of work to date,” which I hands down would agree with.
I forever hesitate saying that an album is accessible, though in this case ‘Priestess of Carnality’ it is, riding those newly fashioned neo-psychedelic and dream-pop waves, a record that borders on the hypnotic, ebbing ever so close to a prog release, though restrained and still maintaining those pop music sensibilities. Far more than before, the vocals are shimmering, ever present, cohesive and forward looking, seemingly part of the music rather than an attribute laid over the instrumentation. And the instrumentation, it’s clear, welcoming, well considered and resounding, soaking into your listening space until it siphons all of the oxygen from the room, leaving you to float in the warm ether Soft Speaker so easily and effortlessly reside in.
One thing Soft Speaker is so good at is producing records that sound lost to the ages, as if these songs were recently discovered on the shelves of some abandoned recording studio, where it all sounds eerily familiar, yet new within the same breath, leaving crystal clear guitars to rain down on you, balanced by bewilderingly askew lyrics that give pause for delightful consideration. Soft Speaker have always charted their own course and this outing is no exception … one worthy of wading into for indulgent annunciations of zeal and wayward pragmatic adventures.
*** Fun Facts: As to the album’s title, “Carnality” indicates a preoccupation with or the indulgence in, the flesh or the body and its passions and appetites; sometimes referred to as being given to crude bodily pleasures and appetites.
Jenell Kesler
Soft Speaker – Priestess of Carnality (Edelweiss Grammofon 2021)
